There is only one way how to avoid giving birth to a new generation of Saddams not only in Iraq, but also in the rest of the Arab world – don’t carry out the death sentence given him by the kangaroo court appointed by American instigators, who of course have no qualms about supporting and abetting capital punishment. Back home they are known to have sent juveniles in wheelchairs and handicapped teenagers to the electric chair.

The great divide between European and American mentalities on the issue of capital punishment was happily all too apparent last weekend as soon as the death sentence on Saddam Hussein was announced. While the Americans insisted it was “a great day for the Iraqi people” and that it was “a sign of democracy”, European statesmen reacted in a much more down-to-earth manner, insisting as always that capital punishment is not a civilised mode of punishment.

If the mere announcement of the death penalty provoked an immediate and obvious contrast of reactions among Iraqi citizens, I cannot understand even by a long stretch of the imagination how it could in any way be described as “a great day for the Iraqi people.” Is the obvious division of a long-suffering nation now considered to be a source of national celebration, or was someone else secretly happy they could finally inflict a long-awaited vendetta on a dictator whose obnoxious methods of running the country, and the vicious cruelty of his regime, were to be ignored as long as he was a strategic ally buying precious weapons from them?

I am grudgingly ready to accept Tony Blair’s assertion that their having removed Saddam Hussein from power, even if there had to be an illegal war and an illegal invasion to do so, warrants no apology. But to insist that the mere execution of the

man can somehow be portrayed as “a positive sign of democracy” confounds the vast majority of people who are genuinely against capital punishment, whichever version of it is applied. A life is a life, no matter how one ends it.

Converting Saddam’s death sentence into an indefinite prison sentence, one that sees the former dictator in a cell for the rest of his life would do far more good than having him hung in public, electrocuted, gassed, shot by firing squad or lethally injected. Should there ever be a free and democratic Iraq, it would give most people the greatest pleasure to let Saddam watch it happening from the confines of his prison cell.

The problem is Iraq as it stands today, divided along religious and political lines, cannot hope for a better future. The Americans regularly try to sell us the idea that all is well and this Arab nation has finally shifted in the direction they have always wanted it to, prior to ignoring international law and pushing into the heart of Iraq, using as a pretext the threat to the democratic world from weapons of mass destruction they insisted were being developed by the Saddam regime. That they were proved wrong – and so caught to have lied to the

rest of the world – has since been evident in the unsuccessful exercise at sweeping it all under the carpet of international political convenience.

Soon after, George W. Bush had gone as far as to declare the war had been won and Iraq was in the process of rapid democratisation. The TV News footage of his favourite posture, that of the resolute President squinting with pleasure at the sight of hundreds of uniform-clad soldiers and sailors clapping and celebrating around him while they were cunningly imbued with the notion of a military victory, is still fresh in many people’s minds. Years – not months – on, American soldiers are sadly still paying the price of their President’s obsession with war and war-mongering. October 2006 was a horrible month for American deaths in Iraq and all the signs indicate more of the same as long as imposed foreign rule continues to pull the strings of a puppet government in Baghdad.

Colonial history, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, is replete with examples of how illegal interference in other people’s affairs and military interventions often create dangerous

political vacuums that soon implode into a general

feeling of helplessness and anguish.

Executing Saddam Hussein would be yet another bad example to a nation that has had more than enough of executions. There is every possibility that it would in fact prompt a new generation of Saddams intent on “righting the wrongs” of the illegal war and invasion that were inflicted upon them. How could they ever forget the fact that their very “saviours” had manipulated all the vendetta process while completely ignoring such realities as homes destroyed, parents, loved ones and relatives killed, jobs lost, scandals and abuses in contracts for American firms only, mercenaries and private armies let loose on a civil population, torture and humiliation inside US-run prisons, and social and religious anomalies that were never addressed.

Saddam Hussein used to warn the Americans, when they had abandoned him to his fate, that Iraq could turn into another Vietnam for them. It is a prediction that has slowly, but surely, is being seen to come true. If the man hangs, his prediction won’t just fade away. If his life is spared, there will always be the possibility of proving him wrong in front of his own people, desperate as they are in their search for true peace and prosperity; not the kind being pushed down their throats by the United States and its hapless allies in Iraq, but theirs and theirs alone.

The Iraqis are a proud nation, one of the most enterprising and creative in the whole Arab world. Thankful that they have one way or another finally got rid of their dictator, they should be allowed the time and the space to face the challenges ahead... as Saddam slowly rots away in his cell.