The Week

Wouldn’t it be nice if the media loved Republican presidents even when they were alive?

Did we need reminding of Saddam’s nature? Apparently so. The moment the cellphone video of his rowdy hanging hit the Internet, hands wrung over Iraqi incompetence, Sunni reaction, etc., etc. Ten days after his death, Saddam spoke from beyond the grave, and John F. Burns of the New York Times heard him. Recordings of high-level planning sessions during the Saddam years-like other strongmen, he had a mania for detail-were played at the trial of his remaining co-defendants, and on them Saddam matter-of-factly discusses chemical attacks on Kurds. “They’re very effective if people don’t wear masks.” “You mean they will kill thousands?” a yes-man asks. “Yes, they will kill thousands,” Saddam replies. “In the history of prosecutions against some of the last century’s grimmest men,” writes Burns, “there can rarely have been a moment that so starkly caught a despot’s unpitying nature.” And what other grim man was brought to justice by his own society? Hitler committed suicide, Mussolini and Ceausescu were lynched, the Nuremberg defendants were tried by the victors, Stalin and Mao died in their beds, as will Castro. The jeering at Saddam’s end was unseemly, one small symbol of the hatreds that are tearing Iraq apart. But an Iraqi court, openly giving the quietus to an Iraqi nightmare, was a large symbol of a better possibility, in Iraq and elsewhere. Sic semper tyrannis.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if the media loved Republican presidents even when they were alive?

Did we need reminding of Saddam’s nature? Apparently so. The moment the cellphone video of his rowdy hanging hit the Internet, hands wrung over Iraqi incompetence, Sunni reaction, etc., etc. Ten days after his death, Saddam spoke from beyond the grave, and John F. Burns of the New York Times heard him. Recordings of high-level planning sessions during the Saddam years-like other strongmen, he had a mania for detail-were played at the trial of his remaining co-defendants, and on them Saddam matter-of-factly discusses chemical attacks on Kurds. “They’re very effective if people don’t wear masks.” “You mean they will kill thousands?” a yes-man asks. “Yes, they will kill thousands,” Saddam replies. “In the history of prosecutions against some of the last century’s grimmest men,” writes Burns, “there can rarely have been a moment that so starkly caught a despot’s unpitying nature.” And what other grim man was brought to justice by his own society? Hitler committed suicide, Mussolini and Ceausescu were lynched, the Nuremberg defendants were tried by the victors, Stalin and Mao died in their beds, as will Castro. The jeering at Saddam’s end was unseemly, one small symbol of the hatreds that are tearing Iraq apart. But an Iraqi court, openly giving the quietus to an Iraqi nightmare, was a large symbol of a better possibility, in Iraq and elsewhere. Sic semper tyrannis.