Shifting Blame

Debra Saunders has an excellent column up over at Real Clear Politics that examines the reactions from some people to the execution of Saddam Hussein. The foolishness becomes apparent very quickly.

Within hours of Saddam Hussein's hanging, the drumbeat began — as cable-news sages pronounced that the Iraqi scourge's execution will not improve the situation in Iraq. Or, as Newsweek intoned, "Little is gained by Saddam's demise."

These days, the first rule of war coverage is that nothing — not even military victory — will improve Iraq's prospects.

The second rule is that everything is botched. So Hussein's trial was not fair, the appeals process was too swift and the execution was insufficiently solemn.

In the 24-hour news cycle, you can kill your own citizens with impunity, subject them to starvation and lead them into an avoidable war. But, if later you are brought to justice, coverage of your trial will be not so much about the carnage as about the "deeply-flawed" trial.

It won't much matter that the defendant admitted that he ordered the deaths of 148 Shiite men and boys in Dujail in 1982. To the American press, justice would have been better served if it had moved with the slothfulness of a California death-penalty appeal. You would think it a good thing for Iraq if Hussein had more time to foment insurgency and thumb his nose at the families of his victims.

Read the entire thing, it is scathing. But this column makes me wonder at the reactions to the death of this monster who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, although he was executed for only a fraction of those. Compare that, if you will, to the reactions that followed the death by natural causes of Augusto Pinochet. There the wailing and gnashing of teeth was that the brutal former dictator escaped justice.

Pinochet is blamed - at worst - for some 3,000 deaths. Makes you wonder about priorities, doesn't it?