What does the world gain?

World headlines for the hanging of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He was executed for the mass killing of civilians in the small village of Dujail in 1982. An assassination attempt had been made as his motorcade went through town; he wanted revenge against the Shiite militia behind the attack. All accounts point to his crackdown as being particularly horrific and brutal.

Yet the next year, President Ronald Reagan sent aid Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to talk with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz about ways that the United States and Iraq could work together. As Z Magazine reported recently, the Reagan Administration went on provide billions of dollars of credit to Saddam's regime, along with US military intelligence to help it in its war against Iran. The US knew about Saddam's cruelty and despotism but didn't care until Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened US oil interests in the Persian Gulf.

This is such old news. I've been talking about the hypocrisies of the 1980s Baghdad/Washington alliance for the entire eleven year history of Nonviolence.org. But yet... Hussein was tried and convicted for this kind of old news. If Ronald Reagan didn't mind his despotism back in the 1980s, then why all the self-righteousness now? Reagan's aid Rumsfeld just stepped down from the Bush Administration as the long-serving Secretary of Defense this country has ever seen: the history and the actors who cozied up to Saddam then are still in Washington.

What has the world gained by the killing? President Bush thought the hanging so trivial that he told his aids that they shouldn't even bother to wake him up with the news. The reality is that Saddam has been a footnote since the fall of Baghdad in 2003. While his death may serve as some sort of catharsis for Iraqis, it hardly matters. Hanging him is merely political theater. It does nothing to stem the bloodletting of the civil war that now rages in Iraq.