"Oprah For Tyrants"

In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Claudia Rosett writes:

In the short time since Saddam Hussein went to the gallows, we have heard almost every variation on the theme that his death was all wrong. He was killed too soon, in the wrong way, by the wrong people, on the wrong day, following a flawed trial. In the opinion of some, he shouldn’t have been executed at all.

What’s really wrong here is the transmogrification of Hussein into a sort of Everyman, in whose fate we are all invited to read some portion of our own humanity – and whose execution becomes a prism through which to focus on our private preoccupations with the universe. This is Oprah for tyrants. In a dangerous world, it does us no service.

It was Hussein himself who made this execution necessary. He was a totalitarian killer, a man who murdered his way to power and kept it at grotesque cost by working the levers of terror, torture and war. Along with the basic demands of justice, there was also the matter of security. The only sure protection against a Hussein comeback was to kill him.

Exactly. Or as Dean Barnett wrote yesterday, “If you