It's hard to imagine anyone looking at the images of Saddam Hussein standing on the gallows with a hangman's noose around his neck and agreeing with George Bush's crass observation that the execution of the former dictator was an "important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy".
Since when did execution become synonymous with peace and liberty?
Recent history has left us in no doubt that Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist tyranny committed the most awfulcrimesagainsthumanity including the gassing and torturing of countless thousands of his own countrymen and women.
However, it would be a serious mistake to imagine that the eye-for-an-eyemindsetthatsobedevils progress towards peace across the Middle East is something that should be endorsed by the "free world".
"An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind," Mahatma Gandhi once observed in an often quoted but rarely heeded maxim.
Perhaps more than anywhere else on Earth, the Middle East has suffered from an endless cycle of retribution andrevengethathasprevented any true and lasting steps towards reconciliation between its warring communities be they Arab and Israeli or Shia and Sunni.
As we enter a new year, how wrong and delusional it would also be to believe that by killing Saddam Hussein - especially at such a sensitive time in the Islamic calender - the interests of restoring peace and stability to Iraq have been well served.
How can nation building begin at the end of the hangman's rope? If terror from the bottom up already exists in Iraq, its hard to see how the rule of terror from the top down is any more justifiable.
If the current Iraqi government has made one of its first defining acts that of executing its chief political enemies, it could all too easily find itself on a dangerous path that leads to one monstrous regime simply being replaced by another. The existence in some instances of what are effectively state sponsored "death squads" operating under the guise of official paramilitary or police units on the streets of Baghdad is brutal proof enough of how susceptible any governing regime can be to the tacit acceptance of such dictatorial measures.
SomemightarguethatIraq's beleaguered government has no time for niceties and that bigger sticks are the only sure way of bringing order to the country. Like so much of what has gone before in the story of this conflict, such thinking is illusory.
Ask most ordinary Iraqis what they thought of Saddam's execution and of course you will find those for and against. Sunnis for whom he was a strongman and hero, Kurds and Shi'ites for whom he was a despot.
But far and away the vast majority ofpeopleinthecountry,Shia, SunniandKurdalikenowfind themselves too preoccupied with personal survival to care much about his ultimate fate.
Within hours of the former ruler plunging to the end of the rope that would end his life, there was a spate of car bombings, shootings and suicide bombings from Baghdad to Tal Afar.
What's more, if many Iraqis must find themselves asking what good Saddam's killing has done for the national interests, then we too must question our own government's failure to condemn outright an act of execution which we would damn were it carried out in any other country, and which we long ago abolished.
Foreign secretary Margaret Beckett'sstatementthat Saddam had now been "held to account" smacked of the mealy-mouthed utterances that we have come to expect from the Blair government when the real complexities and realities faced in Iraq are brought into the open.
While Saddam's death might bring a sense of justice for some, others, amongthemmanyKurds,feel disappointedthathistrialfor genocide was not fully seen through providing them with the sense of closure they so wanted.
No truth and reconciliation process here. No sense of real justice being done. Even less that peace in 2007 will be any closer as a result of Saddam's dramatic and chilling exit.
As 2007 beckons, the signs remain ominousforIraq.Anyhopethat Saddam Hussein's killing would herald in a new era is a wanton one.
"Your purified land has rid itself forever of the filth of dictatorship and has turned a black page in Iraq's history," said Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki only hours after his death.
A black page might indeed have been turned, but the book's ending is a long way off. This coming year we can only hope that for the countless millions of Iraqis who live daily in fear of their lives there will be some respite from the horrors around them.
To you our readers, we hope that you have a happy and peaceful New Year in these troubling times.
