Brief Thoughts on Saddam
The United States having embarked on this Iraqi adventure, I am happy that Saddam Hussein has been captured. I remain unconvinced that his ouster could not have been achieved by less destructive means, but since it wasn't done in some other manner, it's nice that he is finally in custody.
It is nice, too, that he was taken alive, thereby forcing me to put aside, for now, some of my darkest thoughts about the men currently running this country. Thoughts that bloomed with the spectacularly violent manner in which the sons of Saddam met their demise.
I think it is important that we (the people of the world) get a chance to question him, through the United States. Whether anybody believes what he says or not, we need to hear what he has to say, if he will talk, about WMDs and Iraq-9/11 connections. I hope that we can take Mr. Rumsfeld at his word that we won't torture him (and that we won't send him to Syria, so that they can torture him for us).
I hope that Saddam's capture will in fact reduce the armed resistance in Iraq, though I am not optimistic that this will be the case. There seems to be no definitive intelligence to indicate that the resistance has been fomented and carried primarily by the "dead-enders." Unless the post-capture bombings yesterday were a last gasp, the early indications are that the resistance will continue.
Presuming he will be found guilty of whatever he will be charged with in whatever tribunal he is tried, there are a number of alternate proposals for how to dispose of him. Hanging and shooting seem to be the most popular, with gruesome variations and combinations of the two of them floating around. I would like to seem him imprisoned, a la Rudolph Hess, with excellent medical care, until he dies a long-awaited, solitary, distant death. That wish on my part arises from my life-long and total opposition to capital punishment, here tested to the extreme.
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