Much as I enjoyed Hobbits last night, and despite my enormous tiredness, I lost a little part of my mind last night and it sounds like a silly thing to say but let me explain…
BBC News 24 were showing the preparations for the execution of Saddam Hussein. I am a well known supporter of capital punishment for serious crimes involving direct loss of life (Ian Huntley, Myra Hindley, Fred West etc) but for the first time in my life I couldn’t get the image of a man who was about to be killed out of my head.
Generally you don’t witness condemned people on TV. Apart from terrorist victims in bombings or hijacks there is usually little coverage of that sort of thing and when there is it is usually all of unfamiliar faces but Saddam has been in our lives, on our TVs and the net for the past 16 years (well, at least for those who are old enough to remember the first Gulf War). BBC 24 showed images of Iraq BTR and BMP attack vehicles, SCUD launchers and aging ex Soviet SAM trucks moving down the main Basra road during 1990 and I took a momentary step back in time to a tech lesson in the first year of secondary school. I saw a guy, standing defiant, knowing he was going to lose his life within the next few minutes.
Should he have been executed.? Well given the alternatives, yes. Otherwise he would have been stuffed in prison for the next twenty years, watching TV, reading books and enjoying a life in captivity, but still ultimately a life. He ordered the massacre of thousands of people and invaded a sovereign nation without care (something that ironically Tony Blair and George W Bush have managed to recreate with about the same level of success). So hang he did at 6am local time this morning. Saying nothing more than “Allah Akbar” (God is great) and refusing any last request.
The tyrant is dead, but I feel guilty. The ultimate retribution for an evil man.?
Or the only possible feeling for someone who is only human after all.
I lost a part of my mind.