Rule of Law in Iraq

I was hoping to avoid comment on the issue of Saddam's execution, as it occured over the holidays when I was absent from this blog, but the bizarre executions of Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, two of Saddam's aides and relatives, brings me to comment.

The Iraqi government apparently released footage today showing the execution by hanging, resulting in the decapitation of Barzan. I cannot say I am an expert on human anatomy, nor on execution, but I find this a rather unusual and ghastly event.

It is, in a larger sense, a sort of microcosm surrounding the whole trial and execution of Saddam and the top leaders in his regime. Granted, they were bloodthirsty and brutal rulers whose rise to power resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands and the torture or rape of a goodly number more. But both Saddam and his aides were tried and executed for the killing of some 148 Shias
in 1982. The Iraqi courts have even gone to far as to drop all charges against Saddam posthumously for his role in the 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds, which resulted in ethnic cleansing, gassing of civilian populations and arguable genocide. Furthermore, the details of Saddam's execution (that the Iraqi government sought to suppress) show that it resembled something more of a lynching, with Saddam being the one showing fortitude while he is taunted and the names of Shia firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr and his father are chanted by the entirely Shia audience. These latest executions seem to also have at best a tinge of incompetence, at worst a feeling of Shia revenge in a style of Mesopotamian justice that seems little far removed from Hammurabi and the Assyrian Empire.

Saddam and his top circle are clearly guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It must also be said that at the very least some semblance of an impartial court was attempted in their trial. However, quite frankly at the end of the day these figures have not been held accountable for their most heinous misdeeds, and their killings promise something more of martyrdom and sectarian violence. One wonders if a greater punishment would have been to leave Saddam, abandoned by his wife and with his sons dead, sitting in a cell, far from the centres of power and the palaces he once enjoyed. The trial and execution also seem like a duck of responsibility on the part of the Americans, who (regardless of political affiliation) say that this justice "is the business of the Iraqis", and yet also say in almost the same breath that the Iraqis are doing a good job of murdering each other in civil war.

All in all, these executions show to me that perhaps Saddam was not so unusual after all. It seems to be Mesopotamian tradition to dispatch of one's enemies in as gruesome a method as possible. So much for the hope of a new dawn in Iraqi political tradition.