(editor’s note: this article was intended to go up on Jan 1st, but life has kept me away for the past two days, trying to play catch-up now)

Spent the past few days thinking about this whole situation. Even before Saddam was executed I had mixed feelings.

Now, the first and most important part of this is that yes, I agree Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator. Killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, ruled with an iron fist. Not a guy I would have put on a bumper sticker during an election cycle. I shouldn’t even need to point that out, but I figure I should since there are enough people who’d love to rip me apart for defending him.

No, what bothers me is the politics of it all. I never thought it would be possible for things that should, ideally, be huge progressions towards the welfare of the world to be twisted and turned into political maneuvering.

Bush, unsurprisingly, hammered in the point that Saddam was brought to justice, making good use of the word “justice” a few times. I almost burst out laughing at this, though:

“Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror,” he said.

Bush was asleep when Saddam was executed for the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from an Iraqi town where assassins tried to kill him in 1982. On Monday, Iraq’s highest court rejected Saddam’s appeal of the sentence and ordered him put to death.

Asleep? It happened at around 10pm EST (6am Baghdad time). Where was Bush when this happened? If he was anywhere in the United States, being asleep for an event like this just highlights how little he truly cares about this. I was up until 2 the night of the November elections despite having to be up awake the next morning, I’m pretty sure ol’ Bushie could sacrifice a little beauty rest to be on top of Saddam’s execution.

But that’s just it. Bush doesn’t care. I planned on staying awake as long as necessary to get the final report because we’re seeing the first time a dictator has been executed since Mussolini. Not since WWII have we seen a dictator actually be punished for what he’s done. This was a major event in my eyes.

I caught this article accusing Bush of lying in his use of the word “justice”, and while I haven’t yet sourced every claim, if any of these are true it’s a hell of an indictment.

The world’s two leading human rights organizations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both came to a different conclusion from Bush.

Amnesty International called the trial “deeply flawed and unfair.” It was “a shabby affair,” said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.

Now, I can hear the Big Balls crowd already. They’ll say it doesn’t matter. We KNOW what he did. We KNOW he killed all those people (hell, we gave him the weapons)! So who cares how shoddy the trial was? All that matters is we got him, and we killed him.

Well I care. If we just wanted cowboy justice he should have been shot as soon as we found him in the spider hole. Drop a grenade in there and say he had a gun. Arresting him and setting up this whole trial business is in the interest of saying “that’s right, we care about fair justice”.

But if that’s not happening, it reflects poorly on us as Americans. It sends the message that we want to LOOK like we’re offering even the worst of humanity a fair and impartial trial, but we really just want vengeful pseudojustice. How does that separate us from that which we’re supposed to fight? Aside from putting up the front of level-headed justice, it really doesn’t.

I’m still one of those fools who thinks that America actually SHOULD be the ideological beacon of hope for the world, not just the military power that says “our way or the highway”. I know, it’s naive, but hey. Call me crazy.