The execution of Saddam is turning into a much bigger deal. For all the painstaking attempt to conduct a trial that represented justice, the execution made it all look like a sectarian lynching. Actually, strike that. In the end, it was a sectarian lynching. And the lynchers were the people we are now supporting in government in Baghdad. Don’t get me wrong. I loathe Saddam with every ounce of my being, and am relieved he is now gone. But my hatred of him makes me even more angry that we have enabled him to secure a final victory. The manner of his death means a deepening of the sectarian vortex into which the president is about to send more young Americans. It has rendered a regional Shia-Sunni war much more likely. It has destabilized many other Sunni governments; and given new life to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. It has made the very idea of a functioning national Iraqi government almost unthinkable. In its way, it captures the entire effort that is and was the Iraq war: well-meant, catastrophically run, and ultimately overtaken by the pathologies that make the Arab world what it is.
(Photo: Salah Malkawi/Getty.)
The Dish 