As the world was joyfully ushering in the New Year, the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was sadly
adjudged not to see the New Year alive. Life was a count down of days to his death, just like many others
are in the habit of counting down days and hours to the New Year. Much as Saddam Hussein was a tyrannical dictator, personally I wasn’t happy by the turn of events leading to his hasty execution and more sadly that it was scheduled just a couple of days to Eid ul-Adha Muslim festival. I’m neither an advocate for nor an opponent of the death penalty but a strong proponent for justice and peace.

Being sentenced to hang is a situation I can’t clearly imagine myself in, because I believe it’s the worst kind of psychological torture anyone may ever experience. Opponents of the death penalty claim that a prisoner’s isolation and uncertainty over their fate constitute a form of mental cruelty and that death row inmates are
liable to become mentally ill, if they are not already. Traditionally, inmates on death row are allowed to choose almost anything they would like for their last meal, are permitted to say some last words, and may be counselled by a priest or other religious figure in order to relieve the psychological stress. In some prisons of the world, it is a tradition for one of the guards to call out “Dead man walking” when a condemned prisoner is being escorted onto death row for the first time.

Was Saddam Hussein surely hanged for the wrong reasons? Cast your mind back to the US invasion of Iraq
in March, 2003. Washington’s pretext for war then was Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD),
with barely a word about bringing democracy to the downtrodden Iraqi people. But in order to persuade us
that Saddam’s WMD were a threat to the whole world, we were told a lot about how wicked he was, how he
had even “gassed his own people.” Well, there weren’t any WMD, so now the script has been changed to say that the war was about bringing democracy to Iraq. But that still requires Saddam Hussein to be a
monstrous villain (which he certainly was), and it needs some dramatic supporting stories about how he
abused his own people, like his poison gas attacks on rebel Kurds in 1988. So let’s try him for the slaughter of the Kurds in 1988, and then we’ll hang him. The trial for the gassing of the Kurds actually got started a couple of months ago. Other trials, for his savage repression of the Kurdish revolt in 1988 and the Shia revolt in 1991, were already scheduled to happen in the New Year. But none of that came to pass. All the other trials have been cancelled, and they actually hanged Saddam for the judicial murder of 144 villagers in the town of Dujail who were allegedly involved in a plot to kill him in 1982. In principle, it was not the Iraqi government but its American masters that chose to execute Saddam Hussein in a great rush as soon as the first sentence was confirmed, thus cancelling all the other trials on far graver charges that awaited him.