Saturday, December 30, 2006

Hell to pay

So Saddam Hussein has been executed.

So, on the "positive" side, in this long, long process:

1) The folks who run Halliburton are doing very nicely, thank you

2) W finally got even with the guy who threatened his father

On the negative side,

1) almost three thousand American soldiers have been killed, and all their families and friends are left to grieve

2) according to "a team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists, 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since the coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred" (Washington Post, October 11 2006).

And we have no way of knowing how much more carnage and destruction will be visited on that nation.

I'm so ashamed of us.

7 comments:

kathy a. said...

oh, GB, yes.

and on top of all that, we have shown the world how *not* to run a trial of someone accused of genocide. the whole thing was a disgrace. particularly given the unsettled situation in iraq, his trials should have been held in an international court, and the process should have included all the crimes. it should have included what we call due process [stuff like knowing the evidence against one], and enough protection that defense lawyers didn't keep getting killed off. there has to be some kind of meaningful appeals court review, but the whole deal was rubber-stamped and the execution carried out within weeks.

Ahnie said...

There have been quite a number of distressed and ashamed posts in the American blogosphere. Gives me some hope for us as a nation. We're not *all* celebrating the man's death.

Yankee, Transferred said...

(hangs head in shame)

grandma blue said...

kathy a, right, everything that has been done along the way has been done without regard to law or even simple human decency. What an example we've set.

Anonymous said...

Ugh.

Rev Dr Mom said...

Me too, GB, me too.

kathy a. said...

there is a story today about a little boy in houston who accidentally hung himself. he had watched news footage of the execution just earlier, and they think he was acting it out, not fully understanding it was real.

i know i'm ranting, but this execution was wrong on so many levels. it will be impossible to track all of the fallout. i guess the news story kicked me in the gut precisely because the consequences of supremely bad judgment at the top trickle down in ways both predictable and not.