The life of one of the most notorious dictators of the past twenty years ended just after ten o’clock Friday night, courtesy of the “short drop and sudden stop” of the hangman’s noose.

The Beginning of the End

Once a free-spending, extravagantly-living, ruthlessly brutal ruler of a rogue nation, Saddam Hussein’s world was turned upside down in March 2003, when a US-led coalition of 39 nations provided the “serious consequences” called for by the United Nations after Iraq was found to be in “material breach” of the world body’s Resolution 1441, the seventeenth UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) he had willfully violated since the Persian Gulf War.

Saddam’s repeated flaunting of the world body’s impotence to enforce any of its resolutions had prompted no fewer than thirty UN Security Council Presidential Statements condemning Iraq’s repeated UNSCR violations - all of which were offered while members of the world body were working with Saddam to circumvent economic sanctions, and to personally profit from the corruption of the "Oil-for-Food" program.

On the Run

Within three weeks of the allied invasion, Baghdad had fallen, the world had seen the statues of Saddam being toppled, and the dictator himself, who had only averted death on the eve of the war due to the lack of timely command approval for a bombing mission targeting his safe house, was on the run, moving from hideout to hideout, in fear of his life at all times, and narrowly missed on several occasions by allied bombs.

He was still in hiding on July 22, 2003, when his monstrous sons Uday and Qusay were killed in Mosul by the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and members of a classified Joint Special Operations Task Force, ending his male hereditary line, and stamping out his genetic legacy of brutality, which Qusay had upheld with his merciless slaughter of political prisoners, and which Uday had carried on with a gruesome flair which had even, at times, shocked his murderous father.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him."

Though the thought of Saddam defiant and uncaptured remained a source of hope to remaining Baathists fighting against the US and the fledgling Coalition Provisional Authority, the situation changed completely on December 13, when the mighty Butcher of Baghdad, who had ruled Iraq with an Iron Fist since 1979, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen, and who had repeatedly faced the Great Satan of the West and fearlessly refused to back down, was found hiding in a tiny “spider hole,” alone, powerless, pathetic, afraid, and cowering.

Saddam was apprehended from his final hiding place by the 4th Infantry Division, along with members of a classified Joint Special Operations Task Force. As he was pulled from the hole, he uttered the now famous words of surrender: “I am Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq. I want to negotiate.”

The soldiers replied: "President Bush sends his regards."

There was surprise on the part of some 4th ID soldiers to the cowardly, docile attitude of Saddam when he was finally captured. “There it was. It wasn't the blaze of glory we expected,” said Army Capt. Desmond Bailey.

The Mother of all Trials

The trial that resulted in Saddam’s conviction seemed, to the outsider, to be a series of stops and starts, replete with dictatorial defiance on the part of the lead defendant and sound bytes from Ramsey Clark, noted “peace” activist, former US Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, and former defense attorney for Slobodan Milosevic, who served as a member of Saddam’s defense team. The charges involved – the 1982 killings of 148 Iraqis in the small town of Dujail – were not as catchy or as interest-piquing as the subject of his future trials, which were to be for such things as the killing of countless Shiites in the 1970s and 80s, the 1988 gassing of thousands of Kurds in Halabja, the disappearing – and executing – of up to 182,000 people (mostly men, but including many women and children) in Anfal in the same year, the 1991 slaughter of thousands of Shiites and Kurds after their post-Gulf War uprisings, and the 1999 killing of students who demonstrated against the regime in Najaf.

The trial itself, though not without flaws, was carried out both openly and effectively, despite the claims of such “human rights” organizations as Human Rights Watch (HRW) that the trial was “so flawed its verdict was unsound.” Perhaps HRW particularly enjoys condemning affairs in which the US is involved, though they in comparison to the actual human rights abuses around the world, because they, like the UN (both of whom have nothing but words and suggestions to offer), know that, of all the world’s nations, America will actually listen to what they have to say. Regardless, HRW, which had condemned Saddam repeatedly in the past, seems, characteristically, to have all too short a memory – especially regarding the lack of “free, fair, and flawless” trials Saddam offered to his hundreds of thousands of individual human victims.

Saddam has now paid the highest price that can be exacted from him for all of his crimes, having been convicted of the murders for which he first stood trial, and having had his expedited sentence – death – carried out.

Nearly 2,000,000 Dead...

There is little question that Saddam deserved his fate.

"It's a very solemn moment for me," Feisal Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy U.N. ambassador said Friday night. "I can understand why some of my compatriots may be cheering. I have friends I can think of who have lost 10, 15, 20 members of their family, more.

"But for me, it's a moment really of remembrance of the victims of Saddam Hussein." Continued...