Secular Baathists desperately needed a charismatic leader or idea, and the US provided both by allowing the execution of Saddam. Beside not invading Iraq in the first place, the US had several options. One, bring Saddam to the US as a POW and detain him for years, questioning him on many interesting issues. To fear retaliation for holding Saddam is ridiculous because his execution would give Baathists an equally good reason to inflict damage on American citizens worldwide. America could hold Saddam at Guantanamo. Two, jail him in Iraq and keep him in such conditions that he died soon or became disabled. Three, let the Iranians catch him. Four, give him to the Kuwaitis; let the cowards handle their enemy. Five, poison or otherwise kill him inconspicuously. Six, let him disappear or keep him secretly, possibly in Israel.

Instead, the US let the secular scoundrel Saddam, despised by Muslims everywhere, become a religious martyr. His farewell letter to the Iraqi people will make it into history: a call for humility and an unrelenting struggle against heretic invaders.

Saddam’s trial was predictably a sham. Genocide? America had already caused more civilian deaths in Iraq by ruining the police state. The American-sponsored civil war in Afghanistan killed many more people than did Saddam. Gassing the Kurds? That was Iran’s doing; Iraq had no cyanogen chloride. The massacre of the shiites at Dujail? Here is the true story.

Dujail was a hotbed of shiite insurgence in Iraq. During the war with Iran, the shiites in Dujail and elsewhere supported Iran - an act of state treason. Still, Saddam came to Dujail in 1982 to win its inhabitants peacefully. He was fired upon. The would-be assassin was not a lone gun: the ensuing fight between Saddam’s guards and the inhabitants lasted hours. The population was heavily armed. In reprisal, Saddam’s forces killed only about 150 men, a low number by any wartime norms and insignificant by Muslim standards. Some of the victims were thirteen, boys by Western notions but grown-up soldiers in Iraq. Iran, too, conscripted teenagers extensively during the war. The people of Dujail - wartime enemy collaborators - were interned in camps. Some were arrested. That is not a crime against humanity. The time would come when the US would see Saddam’s killing of shiites as a favor. Now the sunnis will correctly see that the Iraqi shiite courts were biased against Saddam, and the Americans oddly cooperated with the pro-Iranian shiites.

It is hard to enforce justice in a place where you can’t tell right from left.