Saddam deserves death: Arab News

Editor's note: Arab News, the Middle East paper with gravitas, is published from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. While formulating opinion on MIddle East, it is a must that you listen to Arab News..I wish Indian Marxists had the time to read this editorial from Arab News

Arab News Editorial: Deserved Punishment
Iraq's prime minister has pretty much summed it up: Saddam Hussein got “what he deserved.”
Nuri Al-Maliki, forced into years of exile during Saddam’s rule, is of course highly partisan, but he was speaking for the majority in Iraq and across the world who feel the same. The death sentence given to Saddam and some of his cohorts was, most people believe, fully deserved. To have been sentenced to anything less severe would have been not only a travesty — which much of the trial has been — but also completely unjust to the thousands whose lives were either cut short or ruined because of the merciless dictator and his dictatorship.
Fortunately, in the end, justice did prevail though it was long and arduous in coming. Saddam’s trial stretched over nine months in 39 sessions and many of them were farcical as Saddam’s antics turned one proceeding after another into a farce.
The proceedings were also marred by the murder of three defense lawyers and the resignation of the court’s first chief judge.
But the Iraqi judiciary made it to the finish line. Saddam will receive a punishment commensurate with the crimes he committed.
Iraq must now brace itself for the verdict’s fallout. The announcement of the death sentence is expected to set off further bloodshed in Iraq, thus yesterday’s curfew, the complete ban on movement and the cancellation of all military leave. Any court ruling has its opponents as well as its supporters. Many Iraqis are predicting a full-scale civil war — as if there isn’t one already — in the wake of Saddam’s death sentence.
On the other hand, majority Shiites, persecuted under Saddam but who now dominate the government, would have been enraged had he escaped the death sentence. The hope is that the verdict will act as closure to a very sad chapter in Iraqi and Arab life.
Still, the troubles that may lie ahead for Iraq have not stopped justice from prevailing. Saddam could have stood trial for many charges other than for the brutal crackdown he and his henchmen were guilty of in Dujail after an attempt on his life there in 1982.
During nearly a quarter century of brutal rule, when tens of thousands of Shiites and ethnic Kurds were killed, Saddam should have been tried for a reign of terror. Such a thing would have also merited a death sentence.
So, too, Saddam could have faced justice for Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait or for his 1980 attack on Iran, which killed over a million people and weakened the Muslim world. For sure, he would have received the death penalty for any of these since all were brazen crimes against humanity.
Because of his crimes, Saddam will soon pay the ultimate price. He used to settle accounts at gunpoint; now he will be duly punished after being held accountable for his crimes. He will finally meet the same fate he inflicted upon so many people.
But he will meet that fate for the crimes he committed, unlike his victims whose only crime was that they happened to live under a repressive regime.