The Death of Tyrant

There is much to say about the death of Saddam. I could give an account about the Basij; the Iranian civilians shelled in Bandar-e Anzali (where my family is from); the murder of Ayatullah al-Sadr and Ayatullah al-Hakim; the succour Saddam received from the West, Israel and the Soviet Union; the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Iraqi Shia and Kurds; or the betrayal of Saddam by his Western allies.

However to do so offers no great insight or explanation why a man should be killed for his crimes and why so many in Europe should find it abhorrent and so many in the Middle East should rejoice.

The difference is one of perception; in Western Europe judicial executions do not take place and have not done so for many years. Very few people in Europe have witnessed a public execution. Therefore there is a false expectation about what takes place. Even many of those that support the reintroduction of the death penalty were sickened by the images of Saddam's death.

In truth, Saddam's execution was more dignified than most. The condemned is not executed for the sake of the law - he is executed for the sake of justice - so that those whom he has wronged may have a tangible sense of it. Thus he dies in front of those who revile him and for whom he is the personification of his crimes. Therefore when the condemned meets his death it is to the sound of jeers of derision, then finally to roars of applause, as his body twitches, passing from life to death.

In Europe such a scene is an anathema to justice and utterly inconceivable. For this Tony Blair will never be forgiven since this death sentence will remain an indelible mark upon New Labour Government and makes a mockery of its pretensions of an ethical foreign policy.

Blair's culpability is undeniable, for Saddam's death was as an inevitability the moment Blair failed to extract a guarantee that Saddam would be tried in the Hague as his price for Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq. Had he have done so, Saddam would not have hung.