No doubt Saddam deserved to die. There’s very little dissent about that.

There is some dissent over the taunting atmosphere over which he was hanged. Even the war criminals from Germany and Japan, even Eichmann in Israel, were hanged with greater dignity than this. To pretend it doesn’t matter is, frankly, self-demeaning. Of course, people are entitled to demean themselves if they feel the ideological necessity of doing so.

On the other hand, there can be little argument about what the cellphone video indicates. It indicates that the Shi’ite sectarians are in charge of Iraq, that they violated their own constitution and slapped the Sunni minority in the face, and that they also slapped the US in the face, by conducting this execution literally in the name of Moqtada Al Sadr, who, in case you forgot, has American blood on his hands.

So the upshot of our invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein is to turn Iraq over to a bunch of Islamic fanatics. The United States of America brought this about, we have handed Iraq to the Mullahs of Iran on a plate, and we have, once again, sullied our national honor by our association with this execution. Just great.

Nor is this the position of the left alone, like, say, the New York Times or Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. It is also the position of numerous war supporters, including, so far, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Friedman, Jim Hoagland, and Charles Krauthammer. It’s fair to say that there is broad consensus on both sides of the political spectrum that the execution, as it was carried out, was a disgrace and a potential disaster.

For the left, Saddam’s hanging is — like everything else that comes down the pike — just one more Bush-bashing opportunity. For the rest of us — especially the Iraqis who suffered the tyrant’s jackboot first hand — his execution re-establishes the right order of things.

“Mercy for the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”