A clearer picture is emerging of the impotent Americans, vengeful Shiites and seething Sunnis who comprised the cast of characters surrounding Saddam’s rushed execution:

[J]ust about everything in the 24 hours that began with Mr. Hussein’s being taken to his execution from his cell in an American military detention center in the postmidnight chill of Saturday had a surreal and even cinematic quality.

Part of it was that the Americans, who turned him into a pariah and drove him from power, proved to be his unlikely benefactors in the face of Iraq’s new Shiite rulers who seemed bent on turning the execution and its aftermath into a new nightmare for the Sunni minority privileged under Mr. Hussein.

. . .

Iraqi and American officials who have discussed the intrigue and confusion that preceded the decision late on Friday to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows have said that it was the Americans who questioned the political wisdom — and justice — of expediting the execution, in ways that required Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to override constitutional and religious precepts that might have assured Mr. Hussein a more dignified passage to his end.

The Americans’ concerns seem certain to have been heightened by what happened at the hanging, as evidenced in video recordings made just before Mr. Hussein fell through the gallows trapdoor at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday. A new video that appeared on the Internet late Saturday, apparently made by a witness with a camera cellphone, underscored the unruly, mocking atmosphere in the execution chamber.

This continued, on the video, through the actual hanging itself, with a shout of “The tyrant has fallen! May God curse him!” as Mr. Hussein hung lifeless, his neck snapped back and his glassy eyes open.

. . .

American officials in Iraq have been reluctant to say much publicly about the pell-mell nature of the hanging, apparently fearful of provoking recriminations in Washington, where the Bush administration adopted a hands-off posture, saying the timing of the execution was Iraq’s to decide.

It gets worse actually, including the part where Iraqi TV shows Saddam’s tribesmen “collecting the coffin from the courtyard in front of Mr. Maliki’s office, where it sat unceremoniously in a police pickup.” Go read the entire account by John Burns and Marc Santora.

Context …

As the ball dropped, Amanda Bermudez, 19, kissed her new husband, Angel Bermudez, 21, an Army soldier who recently returned from Iraq. They were married Dec. 2 at their home in Fort Hood, Texas, and came to New York for their honeymoon.

“My New Year’s resolution is to work on my marriage and be a good mother,” said Amanda Bermudez, who just found out she’s pregnant.

She hoped for peace in the Middle East in 2007.

“So he doesn’t have to go back,” she said, glancing lovingly at her husband.

TPM JB on our ridiculous political world …

As I watch TV news and commentary and listen on NPR, I see the face of Fred Kagan, Dan Senor, even the voice of Richard Perle, and I wonder if it is a new year at all. We have seen some of these faces before, and they all represent past failures. We have seen these before when the Bush administration was attempting to sell us a product, a box of goodies with 3 word slogans on the label and inside there was nothing( unless you count death and debt as a product). After reading the Lugar interview on Fox, it would appear that the Republican establishment, such as it is, needs to go sit down with Bush and tell him that the American Enterprise Institute was not on the ballot in November and won no elections. The few politicians that represent it’s views do not hold a majority. If it takes Bush more time to develop a strategy, perhaps it is because they cannot come up with a suitable 3 word sell phrase( as war on terror, cut and run, stay the course) with which to package the product. Once again we are being treated as mindless consumers that do not notice the product in the box is the same old tired thing that did not work the first 6 times it was tried.

How do these same jokers still get on television? This seems to illustrate one of the perverse disincentives built into tv chat show ‘balance’. As support for their nostrums falls lower and lower, the odds of their getting on the tube to talk grows apace. Because they’re the only ones available who will take their side.

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.

Iraq investigates whether hangmen engaged in unauthorized taunting of Saddam Hussein prior to his execution. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

House Republicans, newly humble, are pushing for a Minority Bill of Rights.

A bill, of course, they wouldn’t even consider when they were in the majority.

For those of you who were left confused by the subtleties of Rep. Virgil Goode’s (R-VA) earlier letter to constituents warning of Muslims immigrating to the U.S., he’s finally done you the favor of a clear summation of his beliefs.

I don’t know if the basic gist of the New York Times piece on what happened in Iraq in 2006 will get picked up. But in case anyone misses it, let’s do the short summary. According to the White House, the person to blame for Iraq is Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., the top American commander in the country. And Casey’s so bad that President Bush is probably going to can him before his current tour concludes this summer. Probably as soon as next month.

In so many words, Casey’s policy (which, reading between the lines, it’s pretty clear Casey thought was Bush’s desired policy) was maintain current troop levels and ‘standing down as the Iraqis stand up’. You may have thought that was the Bush policy. But apparently not. “Over the past 12 months,” the Times now tells us, “as optimism collided with reality, Mr. Bush increasingly found himself uneasy with General Casey’s strategy.”

In fact, the Casey policy left the White House so wrong footed that they were “constantly lagging a step or two behind events on the ground.”

So why did the president wait so long to rid himself of this meddlesome general? Well, politics is politics, remember. “Many of Mr. Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.”

At least there was no rush to get a handle on the situation. Read this article. The swirl of buckpassing, cravenness, ridiculous lies and general awfulness will turn your head.

Let me follow up on something I mentioned yesterday.

As I noted in last night’s lengthy post, I still don’t think we’ve seen a satisfactory explanation of just why Prime Minsiter Maliki was so intent on hanging Saddam as quickly as he did. According to CNN, when the Americans pressed for a short two week delay, And CNN, in a report on the website, said that when the Americans pushed for a short two week delay, “Al-Maliki and his aides rejected that … citing security concerns and rumors of possible violence swirling around the capital.”

Now, as I said last night, it’s a cryptic reference and it’s buried down in the piece. But it’s hard to think of a logical explanation for this rationale other than the thought that they feared someone was going to spring Saddam from his jail cell. I know that sounds ridiculous — especially when you consider that Saddam was held in US Army custody. But how else to make sense of this remark? What other sort of violence would make it necessary to execute Saddam quickly? Were they trying to defuse or appease some Shi’a unrest?

It’s a cryptic remark and with so many people making excuses it may not mean anything. It may just be a crock. But has anyone heard anything else like this? Any other news reports that have anything similar to what CNN reported?

Late Update: TPM Reader HS notes the following passage in today’s article in the Wall Street Journal …

Mr. Maliki wanted to leave nothing to chance. His mind raced through several scenarios, however improbable, that might have derailed the execution, says a close adviser who spoke with him. What if the Americans struck a secret deal sparing Mr. Hussein’s life in exchange for a halt to attacks against U.S. troops? What if the former dictator’s lawyers succeeded in blocking his hanging through U.S. courts? And finally, what if insurgents abducted a group of schoolchildren and threatened to kill them unless the hanging was canceled?

This stuff gets pretty weird pretty quickly. But I get the feeling that something this is what’s at the root of urgency. I think Maliki wanted to lock us in.

Of course, there’s another distinct possibility — that it’s Maliki who realizes that he’s not going to be around (or, given the country and danger of ambiguity, in government) for much longer. After all, the troop surge/escalation is to wipe out Sadr and his Mahdi Army, upon whose thugs and muscle Maliki seems to lean.

Even Later Update: Hangin’ at the same dinner parties? A couple TPM Readers alerted me to the fact that this schoolchildren hostage scenario showed up in a post Cliff May did at The Corner on New Year’s day …

Imagine that Saddam had not been executed. Imagine that he had been sentenced to life in prison.
Now imagine that a group of pro-Saddam terrorists seizes an elementary school. They say they will kill all the students and teachers if Saddam is not released within 24 hours.

Should Saddam then be released? Or should several dozen innocent children and their teachers be killed?

Is it not better that we have guaranteed that it will never be necessary to make such a choice?

Hard to imagine both these guys imagining this one independently. What’s the backstory? Did someone in the US suggest this to the reporter? Is this in the chatter in the Green Zone? And doesn’t the scenario sound a bit more like something that might happen in the US rather than Iraq? Not to say it couldn’t of course. But I bet there’s a story behind this anecdote.

Of course, this does suggest the ultimate Bush White House explanation of why Saddam’s hanging had to happen right then … for children.

GOP Primary 2008 begins!

A McCain aide takes a swipe at Rudy over that leaked campaign memo laying out Rudy’s top-secret plan for taking the White House.