December 14, 2003
"We got him"
As I'm sure most of you know already, Saddam Hussein was captured by American forces last night, and the announcement was made to the world this Sunday morning. TCS has a piece entitled "Thank God He's Alive", which underlines the psychological significance of capturing him alive. It's better this way:
We can see now how foolish we were to regret not rubbing him out that first night, when we dropped the bunker-piercing bomb on what we had been told was his hide-out. Had we pulverized him then, he might well have returned to claim a permanent place in the Iraqi imagination, like a kind of Mesopotamian Freddy Krueger. But, luckily, we missed him, and now we can see that there was a providence in our failure -- as so often there is in our ordinary lives as well.
Well said. My only remaining question is whether it would be more damaging to the Islamist psyche to execute him or simply hold him forever. The sonofabitch certainly deserves the most degrading and humiliating death we can come up with, but I can see an argument to be made that our purposes would be better served by not off-ing the sorry motherlover. My only qualm here is seeing that the people who support the Baathist/Islamist cause are dealt the most devastating blow that can be dealt. Whether or not that involves killing him isn't actually all that important to me. I say let the Iraqis do with him as they will.
