Shame

I can't bear to look at the news today. The Times and the Post and just about everyone else front the grim scene of a primitive execution: civilian dress and cheap ski masks and a natty hemp line. I suppose I should be glad, at least, that we were spared the dehumanizing clinicism of an American-style execution, but still, to see Saddam hanged "for crimes against humanity" in no more polished, clean, or clinical a manner than an American corpse dragged through the streets of Ramadi. Well. It drives home with palpable force the commensurate inhumanity of him and of us. Stripped away at last are all pretenses that we're anything other than an equal gang of manipulators, users, and murderers. "The Defiant Despot Oppressed Iraq for More Than 30 Years," blares the Times obituary, and nowhere in it, not even in its recollection of the Iran-Iraq war, does it mention that Hussein was our ally, that we armed and supported him, especially after losing our man the Shah in Tehran.

He was just another hit man. A Suharto. A Pinochet. He outlived his usefulness, and the "defiance" always appended to his description is now the only verbal measure of the truth: his crime, for which we twice went to war with him and finally executed him, was to step beyond whatever secret limits we laid down for him. His execution and our ahistoric, blinkered remembering of the life preceeding it, is one of the most shameful episodes in a national history full of shameful episodes. The thing about Jacobin justice is that it is not just.