Another One Bites the Dust

Whether you subscribe to a belief system (or sub-set thereof) that is trigger happy, enforces strict lex talionis, upholds the supreme sanctity of life, or is a little confused, it's inevitable that humans have and will continue to execute each other.

An Amnesty International report shows that a minimum of 2,148 people were executed in 2005, and suspects the actual number around at least 20,000. For perspective, 2,403 people were killed in Pearl Harbor and almost 3,000 were killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. With a global annual death rate of 8.7 per 1000 per year and a current population of 6.68 billion, that means about 110 people die each minute of the day. Heck, everybody dies eventually. About 100 billion have so far.

Today, the news is focused on just one man who died. For a moment, let's put aside the moral debate on the death penalty or the cost of this particular execution. We can't change what has happened. But we can reflect. We can think about all those people who have been executed this year. And if one person deserved it, it was Saddam Hussein.

While his capital punishment was based on a conviction for 148 executions/murders by his own command, many reports allege that Hussein killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. He was responsible for torture and other heinous crimes.

A few decades ago, a man led the slaughter of millions of innocent people. He was responsible for torture and other heinous crimes. This was a man who aggressively invaded neighboring countries. His name was Adolf Hitler.

While Hitler was a much greater threat in the eyes of history, Hussein has enough parallels to remind us of someone we "must never forget." Unfortunately the first Bush administration forgot. The Persian Gulf War was was never "completed" and if a Bush is to blame it's more Sr. than W.

As American troops brace for violence in the wake of this execution, there is bitter solace in the improved "death ratio" of WWII compared to Iraq. There's a difference between innocent people who are murdered, and people who die in war. In WWII, there were more people killed in battle than killed by a dictator's executions. In Iraq, there were more people killed by a dictator's executions than killed in battle.

But is that really solace? What a terrible mistake not to get it right the first time.

AP photo by Laurent Rebours.