Now it's over, I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want, or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do

Saddam Hussein is dead, and to be perfectly honest, we're just as fucked in Iraq as we were last week. It's tradition to make New Year's predictions, so here are mine: At least 120,000 US troops in Iraq by the end of next year, with at least 900 deaths during that period, and any slowing of the Iraqi death rate due to the combination of a.) ethnic cleansing being much more complete, and thus fewer people in need of killing, and b.) fewer Iraqis left around to kill after hundreds of thousands either flee the country or are already dead. Happy fucking New Year!

There is a great deal of debate about whether or not his evil justifies hanging him. Call me European, but I think much of the discussion on the "pro" side is somewhere between deranged and psychotic. Let's just state, for the record, that he was a hideous criminal who deserved to be tried for all his crimes. For more on why the administration doesn't want too much about the Hussein's Anfal campaign to massacre Kurds coming out any time soon, you can google for rumsfeld and hussein, or check out this article from The American Prospect:

George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, where he embraced Hussein and, together with Bush Senior, secretly supplied the dictator with whatever he asked for in his fight against the Kurds and other opponents. A National Security Directive of Nov. 26, 1983, aided the counterinsurgency campaign, called Anfal, with money and materials (anthrax, botulinum toxin) with which Iraq was able to develop and use chemical weapons, resulting in the systematic slaughter of 100,000 people. When stories of the atrocities reached the press and the world reacted in horror, the U.S. Department of State launched an "Iran, too" gambit, claiming that both sides used poison gas. "It was a horrible mistake," observed Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm. "My fellow CIA analysts and I were warning at the time that Saddam Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."

Hussein should have been tried before the International Criminal Court, the body set up to deal with war crimes, but in doing so we would have had to let him live the rest of his life in prison. For that price, a dictator who lives out the rest of his days as a sad symbol of fallen power, we could have gained back some sliver of the international credibility we've spent the past five years pissing away as rapidly as possible. Instead, we got to experience the animal satisfaction of seeing a defanged former dictator die (the snuff video is available online if you really want to look for it), after a mockery of a trial in a mockery of a democratic state. In the meanwhile, just so we're clear, try to realize that literally every time Bush talks about "fair trials", or anyone in the government talks about spreading democracy and the rule of law, the rest of the world laughs at us while continuing to point out the hypocrites we are as a nation. We'd better hope we remain the world's most powerful nation for a long time coming, because the gross violations we've committed against international law might not stand up against Hussein's, but they remain crimes against international law just the same, and in a fair world they'd actually get their day in court. It's sad that we've utterly forgotten about this, but principles are not merely slogans that you can sweep under the rug when times are tough and bad guys lurk in the shadows; respect for law and due process is the fundamental building block of a democracy, and we have done nothing to promote any of those for the past five years.

I've got a ton of things to say about the death penalty in general, but more than anything else, I worry about what it does to society (yes, more than what it does to the criminal, who in all honesty doesn't have much by way of good options if this topic is relevant). It conditions us to believe that killing a bad guy is acceptable, even though history has shown nearly endlessly that we as a society are unable to tell exactly who the "bad guys" are. Moreover, it also conditions us to think that the death of a perpetrator is somehow required to get "closure", one of the worst psychological crutches ever invented. Speaking as someone who was shot and nearly killed, I can reassure you that closure has nothing to do with the criminal. Whether he lives or dies in no way determines the quality of my life, and anyone who believes otherwise is only letting someone else hold their life hostage long after the crime is over. We live in a culture that frequently allows us to duck our responsibilities (I was drunk/have an addiction/am traumatized/etc.), and this is a case where it actively results in blood being shed. To achieve closure after a crime, live your life and honor any and all victims by acting in a way that would make them proud; don't just call for more frickin violence.

This may strike some as an uncivil post, especially around the New Year, but honestly, fuck it. Civility has its place, but life and death issues will forever trump that, and anyone who pretends otherwise (for some reason, I want to suggest George Will and David Broder), can go to hell. It was pointed out that Gerald Ford's great achievement was healing the nation after Nixon, in about a million tributes to him this past week. David Kurtz at TPMCafe points out the obvious flaw here:

It had not occurred to me (although it probably should have) until listening to Gergen and Smith that for many people Ford's signature service to the country was calming the waters so that the rabble quieted down and went home. It is in that sense that the pardon of Nixon helped "heal" the country (clearing the way three decades later for Smith to reminisce about the Ford children playing in Statuary Hall on Saturdays in a quaint Washington of a different era). All these years later, you can still discern a liberal from a conservative by whether she perceives the protesters or all the President's men as a greater threat to democracy.

Civility should never take priority over doing the right thing; in this case, it was to keep the executive branch from grossly violating its legal limits. If people we're getting angry they should have been! When people are dying in a war for which we are still searching for a strategy and a goal, we should be angry. All calm does is make life easier for those in power to use power without facing a back reaction. That is not some kind of new societal good; it is not their right; it is not our obligation. Civility leads to the current farcical state of affairs where those who have been wrong about the war for the past three years are considered to be more respectable members of the commentariat, so long as they use nicer words and ignore the mounting body count. Many people got Iraq right from the beginning, but three years ago we were called unpatriotic, and now we are called shrill. In the end, it is better to be right and unpopular than to be wrong and respected, Sunday morning news shows be damned. About a thousand of America's finest, and upwards of 100,000 Iraqis are going to die next year, in part because polite people have civil discussions about the war while the madmen leading the administration continue on their messianic quest to remake the Middle East without bothering to check now and again with reality. The time for politeness has long, long since passed.

Happy New Year's, everyone. My first resolution: I'm not going to kill anyone in 2007. You should try this too.