As my faithful reader would know, I am opposed to capital punishment. That opposition comes with qualifications. I am opposed to capital punishment in western civilizations where we have individual rights vs. the state. In a tyranny where the tyrant is playing the real game of power politics, things are a tad different. The tyrant uses whatever means -violence, death, torture, famine -to stay in power because when he is out of power he is going to face the same thing. It is a zero sum kind of game. In power, in exile or dead. Those are the choices. Saddam got his and now crying starts for a man who was not going to cry. He knew the game and he played it well and it ended as he knew it could. Would his death have been more acceptable if he was captured and killed by a mob after the fall of Iraq? Perhaps, but the world is rid of a bad guy. If alive, there was always the possiblity of a return to power.

 UPDATE: Of course Victor David Hansen has a view on this which is worth a read:

In Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, a "committee of sappy women" petition the governor to pardon the murderous Injun Joe. "If he had been Satan himself,” Twain snorts, “there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky waterworks."

I thought of this passage as I read with disgust the international reaction to the hanging of Saddam Hussein. People who shrugged at Hussein’s torture, mutilation, murder, and genocide are now shocked, shocked that his victims sent him off to Hell with a few humiliating barbs. What do you expect? These are the people whose fathers and brothers were slaughtered by Hussein and his minions. It strikes me as the epitome of restraint that they just hanged him rather than paying him back in cruel kind.