If Saddam Hussein can look down today (or look up, as the case may be), he must be having a good laugh at the expense of his earthly enemies. Like President Bush’s now-notorious “Mission Accomplished” rally aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 2, 2003, the execution of the deposed Iraqi strongman has not worn well.

In the days and hours leading up to the event, White House officials both embraced the execution as a milestone for the nascent Iraqi democracy and disclaimed any involvement in the planning or timing of the event itself. “That is a matter for the Iraqi people, we are observers to that process. They are a sovereign government and they will make their own decisions regarding carrying out justice,” said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.

That, of course, turned out not to be true. 

U.S. Army officers on the ground in Iraq did apparently make final attempts to ensure some modicum of decorum and respect for the rule of law in Saddam’s execution. But those efforts, hemmed in as they were by the Bush administration’s public commitment to the al-Maliki government, were not enough to overcome the larger apparatus and processes we’ve put in place in Iraq. 

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

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.

There are probably few people in the world who deserved execution more than Saddam Hussein.  But the way it was done — from the claptrap trial to the lynch-mob style execution — had the perverse effect, in the words of the New York Times’s John Burns, of “making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs.”

The videos that soon emerged of the hanging bore an uncanny and uncomfortable resemblance to the terrorist snuff films we’ve watched out of Iraq over the last three years. There was the dark, dank room. The executioners wore not uniforms of any sort, either civilian or military, but street clothes and ski masks. And as those fluent in Arab have subsequently explained, the executioners themselves were apparently taken from the population of southern Iraq, the country’s Shi’a heartland, where Saddam’s repression was most severe. And in an apt symbolic statement on what the Iraq war is about, two of the executioners who saw Saddam off started hailing Muqtada al-Sadr in Saddam’s face as they prepared to hang him. Remember that al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army is the force the “surge” of new U.S. troops is meant to crush next year.

For many in the U.S., the manner of Saddam’s death pales in comparison to the essential justice of his death itself. Plenty of people deserve to die. And Saddam Hussein ranked very high on that list. And there was more than a little poetic justice in the way Saddam met his end. But if justice were simply a matter of bad men meeting bad ends, then Iraq today would be awash in justice. Saddam may have gotten what he deserved. But the process he got it through was a sham. And the execution itself appears to have been managed like a political lynching and organized at every stage to maximize sectarian divisions in Iraq. 

When I first saw the news of Saddam’s impending execution I assumed there was more immediate American involvement than there seems to have been. The larger picture turns out to be a painfully familiar one — processes we created and players we put in place now operating beyond our control. But we’re on the line for it. Because it’s our creation.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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