Saddam is Convicted: So What?

"But there is no event so plain and clear that a determined human being can't find ambiguity in it". Lev Grossman (Time Magazine September 11 2006)

As the week began yesterday, the press was filled with news about the conviction of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. Judging from the limited access that this blogger saw of the press coverage of the trial, it would take a naive person to be surprised that the conviction came. Still, the very eloquent pronouncement of the death penalty jolted some and I am among them.

I am unsure of what its immediate and long term political consequnces will be in Iraq or elsewhere. However, the gleeful sentiments expressed by certain Iraqi leaders and joined by Presdent Bush suggest to me that there's been so much gloom about prospects for peace in Iraq that the pronouncement of the death penalty over a pitiable old man should be cause for celebration. The timing of the judgement was especially convenient in respect to the mid-term elections in the US but it could all be the result of very random and mutually exclusive events.