Dead by Dawn?
Could happen. MSNBC citing a U.S. military source reports the Iraqi government has asked for Saddam to be turned over to their custody so his sentence of death can be executed by Sunday, before the start of Eid. (UPDATES below say by midnight tonight).
So now comes the part where a monster, reduced to a ridiculous cranky old man, will have a rope put around his neck and take his drop. For civilized people it is impossible not to feel some empathy with any man’s mortality in the cold moment of execution. In my house we have a joke. Saddam doesn’t like Fruit Loops. More for us. Now, No Fruit Loops guy is going to get it. Even more for us.
We all know the enormity of his crimes, and many of us know men and women who are dead because of him. But the only satisfaction I’ll feel with his death is to know that there is still justice that is carried to termination and not cynically subverted in this world. It is only more death on top of death after that.
I was writing those words above when my buddy Sig called, maybe around 11 p.m. last night. His contractor pals in Iraq figure it’s already happened. Sig, a San Antonio Express-News reporter in the invasion with three or four more trips to Iraq behind him, honored me by calling me first when he wanted to talk about it.
There are some people, unlikely friends, barely known, who are like brothers. You may even argue with them harshly as Sig and I do over this war, getting pissed off at each other, but you love them, and when they call at a time like this, you are glad.
This is because we were there in the beginning. Sig, my friend, who witnessed among other things the miracle of an RPG bouncing harmlessly off a man’s chest plate. Sig, who went back again and again, even though it was destroying him. Sig, who understands the little things, like the quirky weirdness of realizing only years later that you were seconds from death. Sig, with whom I sat in a DC hotel room a year and a half after the fact, just drinking and talking, all of it pouring out, for two days.
It was March 11, 2003, when I got on the bus that was taking us from the Hilton out to the camps in the Kuwaiti desert. Sig got on after. I didn’t know him then, except he introduced himself and took my name, because he was very serious about his copious notes for the definitive Iraq War embed book he was going to write. Then he moved down the aisle, taking names. He needed to know who everyone was, and where everyone was sitting. Like he was going to chart it. Being obsessive about crap like that makes Sig a very good reporter. He notes that it was a dark day, a dust storm hanging over Kuwait. I remember that. He remembers rain, which always fell like mud through the dust. I don’t. He remembers thinking he was committed now, and would be dead soon. I thought that, too.
Two of us on that bus would be dead in three weeks. David Bloom of NBC and Michael Kelly of the Atlantic Monthly. Since then, Sig and I have got to know a few more dead men. Some we saw killed, others as its fallen to us to do the job we don’t want anyone else to do, that of calling the families of the dead.
So last night, Sig and I talked a little about what it was like to be there at the beginning, and what it feels like now that Saddam is maybe even dead already. At his end of the phone in San Antonio, Sig rummaged around until he found a gilt-edged Arab tea glass from one of Saddam’s palaces out by the airport. He filled it with Wild Turkey. I went into the library for the spent .50 cal shell I picked up off the deck of the M113 after the assault on Baghdad. I filled that with some Armenian brandy from a cut-glass bottle shaped like a sword I’ve had on the shelf there for the last six years. I’ve wondered when and for what purpose I was going to break into that. Last night, it turns out. For the death of Saddam. We drank some toasts:
“Death to the motherfucker.”
“To making it home.”
“To those who didn’t make it home.”
It’s an odd thing, to be in your 40s, and yet to feel as though you’ve only just been born. Into this world of war. Saddam means a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, Saddam will always be tied to that kid in the ditch among the date palms at al-Hindiyah. A young soldier with a bullet through the side of his face, his eyes open, staring at nothing.
They were Tikritis, the Nebuchadnazzer Division of the Republican Guard, and they died for Saddam. Saddam didn’t have the decency to die for them, when he crawled out of his hole in December 2003, proclaiming himself the President of Iraq.
I wept about that kid once, long after the firefight at Hindiyah, though I know that if he lived, he would have just gone back to Tikrit to make car bombs. I don’t even need all the open mass graves full of people with bullet holes in the backs of their heads, or the videos of people being thrown off the roof. All I need is one young motherfucker too stupid to give up, because he believed in Saddam.
On the subject:
Curt at Flopping Aces with the news that it could be done before dawn tomorrow if it isn’t already. Also, a matter he and I have discussed of a collective raising of glasses when its over. I still have some of that Armenian brandy and that 50 cal shell makes a great shot brass. Curt includes some very graphic photos to remind anyone who’s forgotten what this is about.
Confederate Yankee has it at midnight tonight, per Fox.
The Anchoress, as a devout Catholic, is conflicted.
Prof Bainbridge will have his Catholicism and see Saddam dangle, too. Says there’s allowance in doctrine for Saddam’s ilk.
Thunder Run who kindly links and says nice things, adds more thoughts and questions of his own.
Midwest Jim rounds up some Saddam fans.
The Captain orders a lashing for the Times: Crime, gross myopic moronitude.
Topics: Uncategorized
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:02 am on Friday, December 29, 2006
16 Responses to “Dead by Dawn?”
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December 29th, 2006 at 3:24 am
RIGHT ON JULES,
I’M GLAD AND DISGUSTED AT THE SAME TIME. FOR ALL THE DEALTH AND DESTRUCTION HE AND HIS ILK HAVE BROUGHT ABOUT OR CAUSED-TO THEIRS AND OURS RESPECTIVELY- I SAY TO MY CONSCIENCE “IT’S RIGHT”. THERE IS ALSO THE HUMANE REASONING IN ME THAT CAN FIND MULTIPLE WAYS TO JUSTIFY HIM BEING ALLOWED TO LIVE AND JUST ROT IN PRISON. THEN THERE IS THE LITTLE VOICE IN THE BACK OF MY HEAD THAT SAYS THAT ALONG WITH THE FALL OF THAT STATUE WE ALL SAW ON TV AND OTHER HISTORIC MOMENTS I FEAR THAT THIS GUYS DEATH WILL POSSIBLY BE A MAJOR EXCUSE FOR THE BAATHIST AND SUNNI WACKOS TO DO SOMETHING CATACLYSMIC AND EXTREME. IT JUST FEELS LIKE THE AL QAEDA TYPES AND SUCH HAVE BEEN SORTA HOLDING BACK. I MEAN WITH ALL THE BIO/GERM STUFF AT THEIR DISPOSAL…..I DON’T KNOW…I PRAY NOT BUT IT SEEMS WE ARE ENTERING A NEW PHASE HERE AND I AM SURE THAT MAJOR SHIT IS ON THE HORIZON WHY GIVE THEM ANY EXCUSES NOW? WHY NOT JUST WAIT?
DREW
December 29th, 2006 at 4:45 am
I MEAN WITH ALL THE BIO/GERM STUFF AT THEIR DISPOSAL.
If they had it, you’d have seen it by now. They’re fundamentally inept — even the good ones.
December 29th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
This post brings back memories of some of the boys I went to college with who died in Vietnam. I think about how much has happened, and how little has changed, in the decades since, things they never got to experience, and I weep for them.
I believe in retribution. Saddam doesn’t deserve to live because he dishonored life. He murdered indiscriminately, for trivial reasons, as if human life doesn’t matter. The world is better without him in it. And soon that other murdering bastard, Castro, will be dead, and that will be two monsters the world will finally be rid of.
December 29th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
Too stunned when I read your post, too busy toasting friends who didn’t come home from my war, to even leave a comment earlier. I excerpted and linked on a post now titled Dead by Dawn? (Frequent updates, occasional bumps)
December 29th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Wow.. this article cant be serious. It is sad that you believe our soldiers in Iraq were ever killed because of Saddam Hussein. Have you forgotten that Saddam complied with every demand of the United Nations/States other than the ludicrous demand for Saddam and his sons to leave Iraq. I am in no way saying I like the guy or believe that he hasn’t been responsible for the crimes he is being tried for, but there is that respect for sovereignty that everyone must have. Without it how would your beloved Bush be in power right now?? He would surely be in prison awaiting his own execution.
December 29th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Joey, you are proof positive that dictatorial thugs will never lack for lying useful idiots.
December 29th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Saddam may be a dictatorial thug and yes I am supporting his sovereignty, but who has been responsible for more deaths, him or the thug regime controlling this country?
December 29th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
Joey, maybe you should ask the Kurds.
December 29th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
but who has been responsible for more deaths, him or the thug regime controlling this country?
If you’re making an intellectually honest count, Saddam.
BTW, I hear Hitler and Stalin are both planning comebacks. They’ve heard about your talent for excusing atrocity and want you on their team.
December 29th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
So… a proven dictator who not only murders his own people but crosses the sovereign borders of neighboring countries to murder their citizens (and make no mistake, none of that would have happened without his say-so) should be left in power because he is “sovereign”? You have a very strange notion of justice, joey.
December 29th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
String the bastard up.
As fast as possible.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Ever since Iraq was rescued from his homicidal regime, the terrorists killing people left and right in Iraq have had help from leftover Saddam-ite thugs who still believed it was possible to “go back.”
There will be no going back now, and justice for Saddam will make that as clear as it can get.
Ever since Iraq was liberated, there have been people hoping for freedom and progress who have been afraid to step forward and act because they still believed Iraq might “go back.”
There can be no going back now and justice for Saddam will make that obvious.
America’s enemies have hoped their foul games in the courts and in the media could prevent the defeat of psychopathic terrorists.
If those games were allowed to succeed even in delaying justice for Saddam on some pointless technicality, that would be a victory for the terrorists.
His execution will make it clear that, at least in this case, such suicidal idiocy doesn’t wash.
Some criminals really do deserve execution.
Some monsters just need killing.
Some enemy leaders should die because their continued existence is dangerous.
Even deposed and imprisoned, Saddam Hussein is all of these.
His cause has been a fading but never extinguished rallying point for a rearguard of savages.
Enough.
December 29th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
It is imminent.
As you write this morning:
“Death to the motherfucker.”
“To making it home.”
“To those who didn’t make it home.”
December 30th, 2006 at 7:46 am
“now comes the part where a monster, reduced to a ridiculous cranky old man, will have a rope put around his neck and take his drop. For civilized people it is impossible not to feel some empathy with any man’s mortality in the cold moment of execution.”
There’s a psychological term for this silly text - its called the “Stockholm Syndrome”. Regardless of any complicity by any nation in any history of Saddam Hussein, he has not been fit to co-exist with other humans for decades. If they’d been able, someone would have done the deed long ago. Its a shame so much time and misery had to occur before someone had the necessary guts to do it. And a note to all tyrants everywhere - clean up your act - your time will come.
December 31st, 2006 at 6:00 am
For civilized people it is impossible not to feel some empathy with any man’s mortality in the cold moment of execution.
Right. One is a tragedy, all his victims were just numbers.
I’m not buying it.
December 31st, 2006 at 8:22 am
I have no conflicts. The guy was an evil genocidal maniac and the manner of his execution was too good for him.
January 2nd, 2007 at 3:27 pm
It’s much crazier, I’m afraid to say.