There are plenty of things that happened during SWOCC’s month-long Christmas hiatus, as well as things happening right now, for me to write about. Bush’s new plan to send a paltry (get serious or get out of the way, George) 20,000 troops to Iraq is one of them. But in following my muse I keep returning to Saddam Hussein; his corpse is nearly a month cold by now, but his trial and grotesque execution are worth re-examining, not only for their immediate repercussions but also for their underscoring the unfortunate truth that humanity’s worst needs better treatment.

The trial that resulted in Saddam’s death sentence was inherently tainted; how could it not be? In a country that had been systematically terrorized for two decades, how could anyone be expected to deal with such a case even-handedly? Obviously most of the world had made up its mind as to Saddam’s guilt, but that’s true of any high-profile case; look at Michael Jackson. A United Nations-sanctioned trial at the International Court of Justice at The Hague would have at the very least allowed for judgment by parties that had no personal stake in the case, something that cannot be said with a straight face regarding Iraq.

A U.N. court would also have been far removed from the violent sectarianism that has been endemic in Iraq since the bombing of a holy Shiite mosque in March last year. Saddam’s defense team repeatedly complained that they lacked protection, and the facts bore it out: three members of his defense team were assassinated by Shiite radicals. Supporters will say that he received a fairer trial than he ever gave anybody, but they would be advised to reconsider their rationale; is “better than Saddam!” really much of a selling point?

After a protracted trial, Saddam was sentenced to death for executing 148 Shiites after an assassination attempt. This is heinous, no doubt; but Saddam Hussein started a bloody eight-year war with Iran, waged a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish minority within Iraq, invaded Kuwait, and after losing the fight with U.S. forces manipulated the U.N’s Oil for Food program to pocket millions while his people starved. Executing him for the 148 people in place of the hundreds of thousands killed in the Iraq-Iran war and the Anfal (Arabic for ‘the spoils’ of war) campaign against the Kurds before having fully investigated the rest of his offenses is missing the bigger picture. That the court dropped the genocide charges after his death makes sense from a legal standpoint, but is a monumental slight to the Kurds. Saddam was in the midst of being tried for Anfal when the death sentence came. According to Iraqi law, an execution cannot occur on (religious) holidays, a rule bypassed by way of a loophole to the chagrin of U.S. officials and Iraqi Sunnis. Saddam was hanged on December 30, the first day (for Sunnis, of course; Shiites start the next day) of Muslim holiday Eid ul-Adha, which celebrates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael for God; do I smell symbolism?

We all know how the execution went: Saddam’s executioners were all manner of boorish louts, who told him to go to Hell and chanted the name of firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, hanged him as he was saying a prayer, and caught the whole thing on video from a cell phone and spread it around the internet. Doubtless Saddam’s religious protestations and prior insistence that the Iraqis “pardon and do not take revenge on the invading nations and their people” was an act; but when a mass murderer is virtually the only civilized person at his own execution, there is a serious problem. That the executioners “accidentally” decapitated his brother in-law when they hanged him a few weeks later just makes things that much worse.

True justice, that is a fair trial and humane punishment, is hard to come by for the despots of modern history. Mussolini was lynched; Hitler committed suicide; Stalin died of something (a brain embolism or poisoning) while still in office; Slobodan Milosevic died in prison in the middle of his trial. Fidel Castro will likely shuffle off this mortal coil sometime this year (this month? This week?) in comfort and splendor, and with our paralyzed North Korea policy, there’s as yet little chance of Lil’ Kim Jung Il attending a show trial that he isn’t presiding over.

The death penalty, when dealing with such horrific perpetrators as these, is an easy escape; why else did Hitler, the quintessential monster of the 20th century, opt to blow his brains out than to avoid the humiliating censure of his victims and foes? (Maybe to avoid Russian brutality, but Himmler and Göring would have made it to the gallows in one piece had they not also killed themselves, in Allied custody.) If there is nothing after this life (bear with me, theists), shouldn’t such barbarous figures be made to endure punishment as long as possible? Let us not forget that a man can kill an infinity, but can only be killed in finite.

As much as Saddam’s death may ease the minds of those who had to endure his cruelty, the point remains that there really was nothing to be gained from it; there’s much more to fear from suicide bombers than there is from a long-since-deposed tyrant found in a spider hole three years ago. Instead, the chaos surrounding his death gave less the impression of a stately execution than a sectarian lynching, and has only served to aggravate the already well-miffed Sunni minority. Time will tell whether the sudden beatification he’s since received from them will translate into an escalation of violence on their part, but George Bush’s enduring faith in the corrupted Iraqi government certainly isn’t going to help.

The ethnic cleansing that has gone on already in mixed Sunni/Shia areas and the possibility of genocide, regardless of when the U.S. leaves, doesn’t bode well for that other genocide, in the Darfur area of Sudan. It’s late in the article for a recap, but here you go: in 2003 the Sudanese government decided it would deal with a couple rebel groups by arming an Arab militia, the Janjaweed, and giving them license to rape, pillage, and burn to the ground villages in Eastern Sudan, where the rebels are based. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but numbers are the key to understanding: it’s been nearly four years, two million displaced, and hundreds of thousands dead since the crisis began, and all the world has to show for it is an under-funded African Union force and a new 60 day ceasefire agreement we can only hope will fare better than an accord that went ignored in Summer 2006. That’s it. What else can you expect when Sudan was holding a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council?

The Rwandan genocide has offered one of the few instances in which justice has been properly, if slowly, served; leaders of the two militias responsible have been tried and given (for the most part) life sentences, and there are more trials coming down the pike. But even this best-case scenario is cold comfort to the 800,000 killed during those 100 days in 1994. The international community, most prominently the United States and France, were in a position to avert disaster and averted their eyes instead, which is only slightly better than when we actively supported Saddam Hussein as he gassed his own people. Ten years after Rwanda we have a peace in Darfur that is tenuous at best, and ethnic conflict in Iraq enabled by the inept handling of the war. Wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, we worked to try to prevent the fires of genocide from raging so that we wouldn’t be putting them out with crocodile tears and Saddam Hussein trials twenty years after the fact? Or is that just my liberal naiveté? When it comes to the Third World, there do tend to be a lot of bleeding hearts; and arms, and legs, and…