But there it is: In a matter of hours, one would learn that
tuning in to any of a half-dozen Web sites would yield very
nearly a clinically complete version of what happened to Saddam
Hussein in the two minutes after the noose was strung about his
neck. It is technically possible to screen everyone admitted to a
death chamber in order to locate and embargo cameras, but as we
have vividly seen over the weekend, even when such cameras are
prohibited, the likelihood that they will be kept from the scene
is slight.
So that we face again the question we faced for so many years
awaiting the consolidation of the taboo: What are we going to do
now? And to what extent is U.S. resolve in the matter the
decisive factor? There is not a hint in Iraq of any prosecutorial
appetite to track down the spectators who took the pictures of
Saddam and peddled them with utter ease to the great brokers of
modern news, the Internet custodians.
Perhaps the public question will simply yield to practical
imperatives. We are not going to instruct the nations of the
Mideast in our protocols about viewing executions. To begin with,
we aren't even going to instruct them on whether capital
punishment will be tolerated. Public pressures tend to dictate
the answers to major questions, as when the government of Israel
made an exception for Nazis when constructing its law against
capital punishment, so that there was no impediment, a few years
down the line, to Israel's hanging of Adolf Eichmann.
We have many problems in Iraq, to which we would not wish to
add a regulation forbidding the execution of tyrants. An
obeisance of sorts was paid to the old tradition by the major
networks. They simply didn't film the neck-breaking. They looked
to one side, and probably saw it at home.