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JUST MURDER

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Although a good argument can be made that, when it comes to severe punishments, Abu Graib style torture may trump a quick death, the death penalty is arguably the most heinous of all punishments applied to the accused who fail to prove their innocence. Murder is even more immoral when it is the endgame of a blatant and monumental injustice.

Certainly, we all agree that Saddam Hussein was nobody's best friend. He was a dictator who held power with a bloody fist. However, as we are coming to realize, he was also the source of Iraq's stability prior to our second destructive and destabilizing invasion in a little over a decade. We have also discovered that a stable Iraq minimized the turmoil in an otherwise troublesome Middle East. In Saddam's absence, we are able to see why a "brutal" dictator was necessary, then, and why our bloodied hands are unable to keep the peace in that country, now. The same people who condemned Hussein to death are now using those same bloody means to stake their claims to the dictatorial throne.

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's name belongs on the list of most brutal dictators, however like all members of our species, he deserved a fair trial by an objective court. But he did not get that. In a blatant act of vengeance hurried to keep Saddam from implicating the US and other governments in crimes committed on their behalf, the hasty judgment that sent him to the gallows was delivered by his most opportunistic enemies.

If we really believed in and valued justice and the rule of law, then we would have tried Saddam Hussein in a world court outside of Iraq. The full context of his reign and the bloodshed attributed to him would have been aired free of the vindictive hands of his Iraqi enemies, whether Shiite, Sunni, or Kurd. And his day in court would have been protected from the arrogant and self-serving clasp of capitalist oil interests and the ideologues leading our own anemic democracy. Only then might we have achieved some small degree of justice without murdering the man.

Learn more about this author, Michael Burgwin.
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