FUTURE BUREAUCRAT

This weekend marks the annual Hajj, and yesterday was the Muslim holiday Eid ul-Adha, which commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to Allah.

It must have been pure coincidence, therefore, that Saddam Hussein was put to death during the call to prayer yesterday morning, one of the holiest days of the year. Right? The American and Iraqi administrations could not have been so clueless as to grant Saddam the only victory he could have hoped for: to become a martyr in the new Iraqi civil war. Iraq’s Sunni community will no doubt see the date and style of his execution as an intentional provocation. The insult is not limited to Iraq’s Sunnis, either. Arab governments formerly opposed to Saddam’s regime have reacted negatively to the news. The Hamas government in Palestine condemned the trial and execution, and Saudi Arabia reacted with “dismay” at the timing of his killing.

It gets worse. In the New York Times’ account of the moments before Saddam’s death, two guards are alleged to have taunted him with chants of “Moktada, Moktada, Moktada” during a final prayer. They were referring, of course, to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose father Saddam murdered in 1999 and whose militia is responsible for much of the sectarian violence in Iraq.

The American and Iraqi administrations are well aware that Saddam’s death will have no real impact on the level of violence. The most they could have hoped for is that his killing would send a message to Iraqis: Saddam is gone, we’re in charge now, so let’s negotiate if we are going to end the violence and build a viable state.

However, the Iraqi government has now squandered whatever positive symbolic value his death may have held. They did not conduct his execution like a sovereign government with respect for the rule of law; they conducted it like it was a criminal act that they needed to hide from public view. Even the film they released was of poor quality, with a striking similarity to the insurgent-jihadi videos that appear every so often on the internet.

The image of Saddam calmly walking to his death on the morning of Eid ul-Adha with his head held high, cursing the “Persians”, defiant to the last moment, is certainly something that will stay with us for a long time. Unfortunately, years from now, the only thing it will be symbolic of is the failure of Iraq’s leaders to establish a unified country based on the universal principles of human rights.