The Courage of Arabs

by Jamal Khawaja

On the evening of December 29th, 2006, a few hours before Eid al-Adha was due to begin, I was surfing the internet, looking for something to give to my wife as an Eid present.  CNN was on in the background on mute; I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I had no idea what was unfolding in the world as I looked at various models of the new “Scooba” by iRobot.  When I finally got up to get a drink, I was shocked to see in bold print on CNN International “Saddam Hangs for Crimes Against Humanity.”  Wow. That was quick. 

My first impression was an uncomfortable sense of disquiet – my mind accepted that a man must reap what he sows, and if anyone had it coming, then that man was Saddam Hussein.  Nevertheless, in my heart I felt unease; I listened to the spokesperson for the Iraqi Prime Minister repeat over and over again that he was proud of his countrymen for the way they treated Hussein in his last moments.  The fact that he mentioned “international standards” and “Islamic Law” and “respect” for Saddam before and after his execution no less than four times in a five minute conversation led me to believe that he was full of something other than pride.  The video that was released on CNN did, however, seem to indicate that people were calm and collected when Hussein was led to the gallows, and Saddam’s expression was somewhat bemused, if anything. 

The camera phone video, released less than twenty four hours later, brought a much different story to light.  It’s amazing what a little unedited sound can do for a video.  Catcalls, screams, taunts, chants, and derision followed Hussein up the stairs and to his death.  He looked his captors in the eye when he confronted their derision and their attempts at humiliation. Amazingly, Hussein – the butcher of Baghdad, the face of Arab tyranny for over 20 years – went to his death like a man.  That disquiet I mentioned earlier – it ratcheted up a notch when this thought occurred to me.

One of Saddam’s questions shortly before he died was “Is this the courage of Arabs?”  It was in response to catcalls and chants of “Moqtada al-Sadr!” as the noose was being affixed to Saddam Hussein’s neck.  Hussein looked like a man, predictably, sentenced to death.  A good question to ask, I thought to myself even as the gruesome feeding frenzy continued in the video.  These people were not witnessing an execution – this was a lynching, a mob bent upon revenge.  Did I say bemused earlier?  I must have meant proud.

Here we have a man about to be hung.  Granted, he was responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not millions if you include the Iran-Iraq war.  He is one of the few people to have used chemical weapons, on his own people no less.  He was responsible for disappearing hundreds of his enemies and having them tortured to death.  His leadership led the Iraqi army to debase, rape, murder, and defame the Kurdish population in the north.  All in all, you can’t get much worse than Hussein.  With this in mind, I ask you (and I ask myself): from where comes this sense of unease, as though we committed some grievous crime in executing this tyrant?  Why do I feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with what just occurred?  Why can’t I get that question out of my mind twelve hours later as I think about what happened?

No doubt this issue will be addressed by pundits and intellectuals far smarter than I.  People will argue the morality of the death penalty.  Other people will point out that Hussein still had a few thousand other murders to be accounted for, and now we will not have that chance.  Pundits will cry out into the night that Hussein deserved what he got, and that we were more than fair; after all, he got a last meal and his death didn’t take weeks or months at the hands of a sadist, and nor was his body ripped to shreds by shrapnel.  Honestly, I could care less.  Everyone has a point, and all of them are valid.  I’ll never be able to tell a woman who was raped at the hands of Hussein’s security forces that was happened to Hussein was wrong, nor would I tell a US mother that her son died to make sure that this should not have happened.

What I will say, however, is directed to you.  What should have been an execution has turned into a spectacle.  What should have been a somber affair that would have allowed Hussein a venue to understand the gravity of his crimes instead was a circus for a bunch of men drunk on blood-lust.  What should have been justice morphed into revenge.  We did not give justice to Hussein’s victims; we gave revenge to his survivors.  We allowed those with theo-political concerns to execute a man in the name of expediency and revenge.  Why is it that we do not allow the families of victims to pull the trigger in capital offense cases here in the US?  Because we are not in the business of meting out revenge.  Maybe in the minds of the victims it is revenge, but in the larger context it is justice for our society.  The same holds true for Saddam Hussein, but at a vastly greater scale.  Hussein’s death did not belong to just the Shia or the Kurds or even to Iraq; it belonged to the people of Iran, of Kuwait, to the US mothers of the boys who have died in Iraq. It belongs to the US as a country; we, who have had to watch as 3,000 of our children have died at the hands of a gut-wrenching violence that has no end in sight.  It belongs to the 1.5 million Iraqis who died at the hands of our “smart sanctions” and the 800,000 or so who have died as a result of this latest military adventure and the ensuing violence. It belongs to the Muslim world, who have had to live with this dictator for 20 years and watch as he systematically butchered our people and raped our lands.

These dozen men or so in that room had no right to rob us of our justice (or revenge), and that is exactly what they did.  They took our anger and outrage and they made us feel disquiet – the kind of disquiet that makes you wonder at night in your bed what the difference is between us and them.  The kind of disquiet that makes you wonder if the words of a genocidal madman made mere moments before his death actually mean something – is this, after all, the courage of Arabs?  To debase and humiliate a man moments before his death?  To allow his victims to bastardize an execution that should have had relevance for most of the world?  To make us wonder at the morality of our actions and demand that we look at a man that murdered hundreds of thousands of thousands of people in pity?  To make us wonder at the courage it took to face down those taunts and jeers and to face death like a man? 

In fact, I believe that in allowing this to happen, we allowed ourselves to turn into that which we purported to struggle against. Don’t get me wrong; I hate Saddam Hussein. However, I wonder if now there is something I hate even more. 

I’ll let you figure out what that is. 

Jamal Khawaja, President, Infinitous Global Services