SADDAM: Just a short note here, folks. I see that The Economist, a periodical I enjoy reading, editorializes this week that the new government of Iraq should not execute Saddam Hussein, even though an Iraqi court has tried him and sentenced the man to death for murder, more murder, even more murder, committing genocide when he wasn’t committing yet more murder, impersonating a human being while committing still more murder, and having execrable taste in home decoration (those overstuffed nudes on the walls of those palaces were just too too camp, you know). The editorialist offered any number of reasons why the Iraqis should not execute Mr. Hussein, many of them fairly credible to anyone whose legal, social, and cultural outlook does not derive in any way, shape, or form from Mr. Hussein’s Iraq. Iraq, however, remains a place where much of the population knows how to hold a grudge and sees no reason why they shouldn’t kill the people they hold a grudge against. That an Iraqi court sentenced Mr. Hussein to hang should not come as a surprise; the surprise here is that Mr. Hussein received more due process, however imperfect that due process was, than he ever afforded any of the tens of thousands of people he had shot, tortured, or fed into industrial shredders during his thirty year reign of terror. People who worry that this thug did not receive a fair trial should be happy he got any trial at all; the soldiers who found him would have done the world a great service if they'd tossed a grenade down that spiderhole.