I finally watched Saddam Hussein’s execution. I didn’t want to. I wanted it to go away and to not think about the “Butcher of Baghdad” ever again. After all, this was a man who put people into shredding machines and built prisons for children and who used chemical warfare on his own people. He was an evil, evil man. Youtube wasn’t around for the countless horrors that he unleashed – more than 750,000 people killed during his reign? Imagine the rage that every one of us would now feel towards him if those videos were playing constantly? Picture them – they are the stuff of horror movies. You can hear the screams and see the blood and feel the evil. He was a horrible man. He did horrible things.

Then there is his hanging and this fear – that this “new Iraq” isn’t new at all. Watch the video and it seems like it is still operating under the same principles and using his methods. There wasn’t any greater dignity, no sense that the “light of
democracy” had invaded the country, only the grim hanging of an evil man surrounded by taunters.

I think what horrifies so many of us in this whole situation is that we are better than that and we know that 3,000 Americans have died fighting for more than that.