I love Charles Krauthammer, but his column yesterday on Saddam Hussein’s hanging is, in important respects, beyond the pale. Take these passages:

The trial managed to repair the image of the man the world had last seen as a bedraggled nobody pulled cowering from a filthy hole. Now coiffed and cleaned, he acted the imperious president of Iraq, drowning out the testimony of his victims in coverage seen around the world. … That was bad enough. Then came the execution, a rushed, botched, unholy mess that exposed the hopelessly sectarian nature of the Maliki government.

First, does anyone really think for a second that Saddam’s trial, imperfect as it was, “managed to repair the image” of Saddam? For someone as smart and steeped in history as Krauthammer, this is overheated and shortsighted.

All criminals, including war criminals, no matter how seedy the circumstances of their capture, get spiffed up for their trials. If we consider nothing else except the trial, Saddam’s nice haircut and soapbox soliloquies still don’t alter the fact that he was shown to have engineered a mass-murder in Dujail (albeit, a comparatively minor one given the rest of his monstrous resume’). But why would we only consider the trial? If Saddam had been killed before he had been apprehended, how would history have remembered him? Exactly as Krauthammer elsewhere describes him: “the preeminent monster on the planet.” No trial could change that.

Second, “the hopelessly sectarian nature of the Maliki government” has been patently obvious to many of us observers for a long, long time. Those who view popular elections as a talisman that somehow transfigures theocrats into democrats are evidently stunned to learn that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — a career Dawa apparatchik who ran its Jihad Office in Syria at the time Dawa terrorists, for example, bombed the U.S. embassy in Kuwait — is a died-in-the-wool Shiite fundamentalist. For the rest of us with eyes to see, this is not late-breaking news.

The hopelessly sectarian nature of Shiite Iraq has been clear since we’ve known that the single most significant figure in the country is Grand Ayatollah Sistani — who, though he compares favorably to Iranian Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, is an Islamic fundamentalist who instructs that non-Muslims are lesser beings, homosexuals and apostates should be brutally killed, etc. It’s been clear as Maliki has drawn his regime closer to Iran; it’s been clear as he’s insulated Moqtada Sadr; it was clear when he endorsed Hezbollah; it’s been clear as he’s provoked conflicts with the U.S. (having opposed our invasion in the first place); and it’s been clear as he’s done nothing to rein in the Shiite militias and death squads doing his dirty work.

These guys are the same guys they have been all along — we hardly needed a couple of Sadr thugs taunting Saddam at the gallows to figure out that they were hopelessly sectarian.