Saddam's Death Sentence

A lot of my friends simply assumed that the administration was behind the decision to delay the verdict in Saddam Hussein's trial until two days before the mid-term elections. I'm not so sure--it's one of those seemingly obvious connections that history sometimes shows to have been unrelated.

In any case, I reasoned, Saddam is old news. The verdict and the sentence of death were fore-ordained. The announcement would be the very definition of anti-climax, and it wouldn't swing any votes.

I still feel that way, although I expect the Republicans--especially in their state of desperation--to try making something out of the news.

What does surprise me is the reaction reported in this story by The AP:

"Saddam Hussein's death sentence was celebrated by some on Sunday as justice deserved or even divine, but denounced by others as a political ploy two days before critical U.S. midterm congressional elections. Worldwide, the range of reactions -- including a European outcry over capital punishment and doubts about the fairness of the tribunal that ordered Saddam to hang -- reflected new geopolitical fault lines drawn after America's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and depose its dictator."

I never conceived of Saddam's trial as a process of justice, but of politics (although many would see justice in the result). Any time that the winners of a war put the losers on trial, the outcome is pretty much predetermined, no? And in Iraq, with the complete absence of an independent judicial process in its history, how could we expect anything resembling fairness?

Call me cynical, but I did not expect that many people would be outraged by all this. I oppose capital punishment, even in the case of criminals-against-humanity like Saddam, but in a time when Iraqis are being murdered by the thousands, does a show-trial loom large in the consciousness?

I don't think it does, at least for most people. But the very fact that The AP--not exactly a bastion of activist journalism--chooses to post a story about criticism over the trial and the sentence reflects the decline in America's prestige and moral authority since March 2003.

This is hardly a novel observation, but it is worth noting again just how much the intellectual laziness, rigidity, partisanship and incompetence of the Bush Administration has cost the nation that was the world's dominant force even before 9/11. Given the unmatched sympathy and moral authority that the United States enjoyed immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the speed and severity of American decline would be impossible to credit if we had not witnessed it.

Is George W. Bush the worst president in American history? A better question might be whether anyone else is even close.