Courtesy SCOTUS: Liberty Valance Reborn

The whole business of the Hussein takedown, trial, and execution will undoubtedly - and rightly - be dissected for years to come, embodying as it does so many controversial issues. A powerful, cruel despot, dethroned through unprecedented and fundamentally unprovoked invasion by a one-time super-power. Unfamiliar judicial approaches imposed from outside the region. Capital punishment (and in a form that evokes Tombstone, primitive frontier justice, and at the least a disdain for human rights) at a time when the whole concept is a subject of considerable debate.

The obvious abuses and war-crimes committed by the Bush administration would likely in an actual democratic trial have been considered to have some mitigating effects. Let us not forget that many of the chemicals and munitions Hussein employed in the crimes he was accused of were supplied by the well-known war-profiteers Bush, Bush, Cheney, & Rumsfeld, et al.

It seems to me that more than one famous Western movie was built around the idea of a nascent democratic community with a growing need for and sense of justice and fairplay seizing control from vigilantes who had previously taken things into their own hands. This time the story is sadly different. In the case of Saddam Hussein, one heinous dictator seems to have been taken down by a new set of increasingly lawless vigilantes who in the end quite likely will have far more negative impacts on human history than did Hussein.

Josh Marshall pulls few punches in this post at Talking Points Memo:

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"Bush administration officials" are telling CNN that Saddam Hussein will be hanged this weekend. Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam's treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation have been. Bush administration officials are the ones who leak the news about the time of the execution. One key reason we know Saddam's about to be executed is that he's about to be transferred from US to Iraqi custody, which tells you a lot. And, of course, the verdict in his trial gets timed to coincide with the US elections.

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Try to dress this up as an Iraqi trial and it doesn't come close to cutting it -- the Iraqis only take possession of him for the final act, sort of like the Church always left execution itself to the 'secular arm'. Try pretending it's a war crimes trial but it's just more of the pretend mumbojumbo that makes this out to be World War IX or whatever number it is they're up to now.

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren't grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing's a mess and that they're going to be remembered for it -- defined by it -- for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president's issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off -- so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic 'So There!'

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