And the number of those victims is staggering. Istrabadi estimated the total number killed during Saddam’s rule to be nearly two million people, from the mass killings of Shiites, Marsh Arabs, and Kurds, to the Iraqis killed in the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars. “Up until April of 2003,” he said, “Saddam was still having people murdered, and filling mass graves with bodies.”

“Saddam was very fond of Josef Stalin,” added Istrabadi, saying that the dictator had sought to emulate the killer of 27 million of his own countrymen in his own rule – a fact that was borne out by the number of Iraqis who perished during Saddam’s purges, slaughters, and temper tantrums.

The fact that Saddam was executed before he could also stand trial for those more massive slaughters has a downside. The number “148” is not nearly as imposing as the hundreds of thousands of deaths for which he was to be tried, and lends itself to much greater sympathy from those infected with the infamous BDS (“Bush Derangement Syndrome”), who wish to equivocate for Saddam, and to condemn the elected President of the United States for being a worse killer than this deposed dictator, now that they have a number of Saddam’s victims to parrot. However, the openness and relative expedience with which the proceedings were carried out provided the correct verdict, and it is possible that the carrying out of the sentence could not have come at a better time for Iraq.

Iraq Still on the Brink, but With One Less Killer

Then again, it is also possible that Saddam's execution could not have come at a worse time. With sectarian violence still raging, insurgents scoring their daily kills, and America still awaiting the release of President Bush’s new Iraq plan, the situation in the troubled country is both unstable and incendiary, and a significant increase in violence as a result of the former tyrant’s death, should it fail to be prevented, could be a catalyst in pushing the ailing nation over the edge.

Had it happened last year, or in 2004, Saddam’s execution might have sent a strong statement about the direction Iraq was headed in, and it is possible that it could have served as a rallying point for the fledgling Iraqi government, its army, and for anti-Ba’athist, anti-Saddam Iraqi nationalists, helping energize the nation and propel it in the right direction.

That result is still possible, however unlikely. A significant increase in violence – as a direct result of this action – is similarly unlikely. Though there has been dancing in the streets and celebratory gunfire on the part of most Iraqis – and the threat of violent reprisal, particularly against the US, by Sunnis – the most likely effect that the Saddam execution will have on Iraq, and on America, will be to provide the following: a brief moment of celebration or of rage, a subject for a few days of media coverage, an opportunity for encouraging words on the Iraqi justice system (along with threatening words to Saddam’s fellow dictators, who may or may not take serious note), and, of course, the inevitable rage from the dictator-loving Left, whose more extreme elements have already gone on record saying that the noose would have been better used on those “real war criminals” named Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, despite the fact that the heroic military which they have led is a rigid observer of human rights (yes, it’s true!), and takes the greatest care of any in the world to avoid, at all costs, the killing of the innocent.

On a personal note, beyond all of that, as someone who has been to Iraq, and who – along with plenty of others who served – has seen the mass graves and the torture chambers with his own eyes, and has met men whose children have been murdered, wives and daughters raped, and limbs removed by Saddam’s underlings simply for their day’s entertainment, I can unequivocally say the following: Saddam’s execution provides an opportunity for a sigh of relief from actual lovers of humanity – not façades like HRW and others – that such a murderous criminal will never again harm another human being. And that is always a good thing.

“In the last analysis, he seemed not terribly brave.”

Saddam died much in the way that he was captured, and not at all in the way that he lived. As former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said when Saddam was captured:

"Here was a man who was photographed hundreds of times shooting off rifles and showing how tough he was, and in fact, he wasn't very tough, he was cowering in a hole in the ground, and had a pistol and didn't use it and certainly did not put up any fight at all," Rumsfeld said.

"In the last analysis, he seemed not terribly brave," he said.

When facing death, the man who had killed so many during his reign of terror proved not only to be mortal, but to be a coward, as well, fearful of painlessly meeting a fate which had ordered to be inflicted in the most painful ways upon thousands of people in the past.

In the end, the man who had talked so tough, and who was responsible for ordering the torture of so many people, and the end to so many lives, went out, as T.S. Eliot once put it, “not with a bang, but a whimper.”