It seems that like

It seems that like so many events in President Bush’s long adventure in Iraq, the execution of Saddam Hussein looked best on day one and successively worse on every day after.

John Burns of the New York Times puts it best when he writes that …

None of the Iraqi officials were able to explain why Mr. Maliki had been unwilling to allow the execution to wait. Nor would any explain why those who conducted it had allowed it to deteriorate into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video recordings, 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.

After I wrote about Saddam’s impending execution on Friday, a few readers wrote in to ask why the manner of Saddam’s execution should have been such a big deal to me. TPM Reader AA, for instance, wrote …

I’ve been with you through pretty much all of your scathing criticism of Bush’s sorry record in Iraq, but I was really taken aback by your reaction to Saddam’s execution. I don’t quite get what animated it all—are you a general opponent of capital punishment? I really can’t find a reason to see Saddam’s death as anything but a good thing. If anybody deserved a hanging, he was it. For all the terrible errors made in this whole endeavor, I think Bush is entitled to point to this execution and say that well, there was at least one good thing the war brought about. (He was an Evil Dictator, haven’t you heard?) So why does the execution serve as such a sorry moment for you?

With more sarcasm, TPM Reader AB wrote …

Well, I for one am going to lose just loads of sleep thinking about how undignified Saddam’s execution was. Jeez, guys danced around him and chanted. And they wore hoods!

Gracious, he really deserved something better than that!!

Pomp and circumstance baby, pomp and circumstance.

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.

Vengeance isn’t justice. Vengeance is part of justice. But only a part. I understand the need for vengeance. I appreciate and I’ve felt it — for wrongs to myself, to my loved ones, probably most of all to groups I identify myself with. But I’ve always thought there was something cowardly and insecure about people who get too vicariously involved in other people’s righteous desire for vengeance. And that is how I would class a lot of the folks I see today getting all jonesed up about Saddam’s hanging when they probably didn’t even know the first thing about the guy’s record until a few years ago. Perhaps it is excessive to note that a lot of the same folks now endorse flattening the same people Saddam was butchering fifteen or twenty-five years ago.

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 and organized at every stage to maximize sectarian divisions in Iraq. Burns, again, has the depressing account of the drumhead process that rushed Saddam to the gallows …

… a narrative assembled from accounts by various American officials, and by Iraqis present at some of the crucial meetings between the two sides, shows that it was the Americans who counseled caution in the way the Iraqis carried out the hanging. The issues uppermost in the Americans’ minds, these officials said, were a provision in Iraq’s new Constitution that required the three-man presidency council to approve hangings, and a stipulation in a longstanding Iraqi law that no executions can be carried out during the Id al-Adha holiday, which began for Iraqi Sunnis on Saturday and Shiites on Sunday.

A senior Iraqi official said the Americans staked out their ground at a meeting on Thursday, 48 hours after an appeals court had upheld the death sentence passed on Mr. Hussein and two associates. They were convicted in November of crimes against humanity for the persecution of the Shiite townspeople of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in 1982. Mr. Hussein, as president, signed a decree to hang 148 men and teenage boys.

Told that Mr. Maliki wanted to carry out the death sentence on Mr. Hussein almost immediately, and not wait further into the 30-day deadline set by the appeals court, American officers at the Thursday meeting said that they would accept any decision but needed assurance that due process had been followed before relinquishing physical custody of Mr. Hussein.

“The Americans said that we have no issue in handing him over, but we need everything to be in accordance with the law,” the Iraqi official said. “We do not want to break the law.”

The American pressure sent Mr. Maliki and his aides into a frantic quest for legal workarounds, the Iraqi official said. The Americans told them they needed a decree from President Jalal Talabani, signed jointly by his two vice presidents, upholding the death sentence, and a letter from the chief judge of the Iraqi High Tribunal, the court that tried Mr. Hussein, certifying the verdict. But Mr. Talabani, a Kurd, made it known that he objected to the death penalty on principle.

The Maliki government spent much of Friday working on legal mechanisms to meet the American demands. From Mr. Talabani, they obtained a letter saying that while he would not sign a decree approving the hanging, he had no objections. The Iraqi official said Mr. Talabani first asked the tribunal’s judges for an opinion on whether the constitutional requirement for presidential approval applied to a death sentence handed down by the tribunal, a special court operating outside Iraq’s main judicial system. The judges said the requirement was void.

Mr. Maliki had one major obstacle: the Hussein-era law proscribing executions during the Id holiday. This remained unresolved until late Friday, the Iraqi official said. He said he attended a late-night dinner at the prime minister’s office at which American officers and Mr. Maliki’s officials debated the issue.

One participant described the meeting this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.’ ”

To this, the Iraqis added what has often been their trump card in tricky political situations: they telephoned officials of the marjaiya, the supreme religious body in Iraqi Shiism, composed of ayatollahs in the holy city of Najaf. The ayatollahs approved. Mr. Maliki, at a few minutes before midnight on Friday, then signed a letter to the justice minister, “to carry out the hanging until death.”

It’s a sorry picture. US Army officers trying to force some adherence to the rule of law in the execution of the former head of state. The current head of government — Maliki — demanding an immediate execution, then finding a series of ‘workarounds’ to sidestep to apparently clear laws blocking an immediate execution. And then getting final go-ahead from a group of clerics. Is that what 3,000 Americans died for?

Clearly, there’s a lot more to be discovered about what went into this process. I’m still waiting to hear more about the apparent religious signifiance of Saddam’s execution on the first day of Eid — which some suggest would play very differently with Sunnis and Shi’a. And what about this rush to get this done?

Toward the end of the piece in the Times, Burns writes …

explanation [for the timing] may have lain in something that Bassam al-Husseini, a Maliki aide closely involved in arrangements for the hanging, said to the BBC later. Mr. Husseini, who has American citizenship, described the hanging as “an Id gift to the Iraqi people.”

But I’m not sure I buy this. At least not as a sufficient explanation. Read that passage above and you can’t miss that intense sense of urgency that this happen now. I have nothing more to go on but what my gut tells me. But I think there was some pressing need to make this a fait accompli — to secure Maliki’s position in the face of US meddling? to galvanize sectarian strife and deal a death blow to whatever thin chance of reconciliation existed in the country? to narrow US options in the ‘new way forward’? I certainly do not know. According to Juan Cole, Al Hayat is reporting that Saddam’s execution may be followed by a renewed push by Maliki to reach out to former Baathists. One way or another, I don’t think we’ve heard the real story on the nature of the urgency behind this.

Late Update: On the subject of faits accompli, CNN’s report on this has this ambiguous passage. After the US alleged pressed for a two week delay in the execution “Al-Maliki and his aides rejected that, the Iraqi official said, citing security concerns and rumors of possible violence swirling around the capital.” What does that mean exactly? It’s awfully ambiguous. But what types of potential violence would necessitate speeding up Saddam’s execution? I know it’s a stretch but it’s hard to make sense of this statement other than by presuming that they meant otential violence that could make his execution impossible.