Saddam's "Electric" Hanging

I am "shocked" at the "shock" about the "shocking" pirated video of Saddam's hanging. It's quote-shock-unquote-cubed.

First, the pirated video didn't really have much in it that was unexpected. There was a bit of nasty banter and chants of "Muqtada", letting Saddam know that it was really the al-Sadr camp that was doing him in. Perhaps he didn't quite realize to what extent that was so, and reacted more than he wanted to do; as for US, we might have realized, if we'd thought about it.

That's actually the hopeful part of this episode: We can hope that this bloodletting, this legalized lynching, will help to sate the Shiite partisans' lust a bit. As for the Sunnis, I'm sure they had no illusions. Our government's representatives, the US forces, delivered the Sunnis' former leader, unreconciled, into the hands of his greatest enemy, the militant Shiites (the Iraqi Kurds being a close second). As one would expect during wartime, the priority was to dispatch him immediately by the most handy means available, and that's just what the Iraqi government folks did. We should hardly be surprised if the Sunnis see the episode as proof of our perfidy, and of the declared hostility of the forces driving the current Iraqi government.

Besides our Pontius Pilate-like handoff, we affected the same pretense of moral superiority the Romans took towards the Jewish hierarchy in the Jesus Christ case. Not that Saddam qualifies as a martyr for anyone, and of course the simple fact of his death gives us all a guilty moment of pleasure. Our hometown executions may have the appearance of allowing the condemned some dignity as he submits to his murder, but ours give the victime no more choice nor any different motive than Saddam had: try not to give them any pleasure by showing fear.

How can any of us expect more from the Iraqi government than to do what they have done? If the point of the outrage is that we expect Iraq to be a "civilized nation-state," I'd say they did their part.

Finally, how can I be surprised at the moral myopia, arrogance, and lack of perception from our political and media leaders in their reaction to this normal Hobbesian behavior? Do I have a right to expect better?