Martyring a Monster

Sometime shortly before the new year, my Saddam Hussein wristwatch stopped running. A friend gave it to me back in the summer of 2003, and since then the Butcher of Baghdad's grinning visage has hung among other curiosities pinned to the bulletin board above my desk, anachronistic, ludicrous and essentially harmless.

There was a time, of course, when Saddam's image was everywhere in Iraq, and the only thing more frightening than his scowl was his smile. His face appeared on billboards and the sides of buildings in countless guises, wearing fedoras, helmets, commando berets, tribal headdresses. Turn any corner and you saw him fighting, exhorting, laughing, praying. Portraits of Saddam hung in every shop and office, and no one dared disrespect them.

I remember one afternoon in Baghdad in the late 1980s when I was in a store buying a notebook and a lizard scurried along the wall behind the counter. The shopkeeper gave chase, taking off a shoe and trying to smash the little reptile with the heel—until the lizard managed to slip behind the mandatory photograph of the dictator. The shopkeeper froze, arm raised, terrified. The lizard survived. If the shopkeeper had smashed the picture, he might not have.

When Saddam was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion, all this fear suddenly seemed almost as ridiculous as the tyrant's face on a cheap watch, which is why I rejoiced at the time, and why it's so damn sad that last weekend Saddam Hussein was turned from a monster into a martyr by the manner of his execution.

Actually, "lynching" would be a better word, despite the $128 million Washington reportedly spent trying to present the captured dictator's trial as free, dignified and fair. In the days since Saddam's necktie party, we've had to listen to spin from Washington and Baghdad that is not only implausible but condescending—and absolutely irrelevant to the problem at hand. "There seems to be a lot of concern about the last two minutes of Saddam Hussein's life and less about the first 69 [years], in which he murdered hundreds of thousands of people," said Tony Snow, the former Fox News face who now mouths the White House talking points.

In fact it is precisely because of the horrors Saddam committed that the trivialization of his death at the hands of thugs is such a shameful milestone on the road to American perdition. Washington looks ridiculous saying it was powerless to influence the actions of the executioners that it empowered. Without George W. Bush, they never would have been able to bring Saddam down, much less string him up. Everyone knows that, and anyone with a sense of pride or honor—which do stand for something in the Arab world—will know that. Which is why the last ironic question Saddam asked was so damning: "Is this manly?" he said of the taunts, half smiling, as the trap door opened. He knew he'd won.