Measure for Measure
A big thing happened, it has to be conceded, when Maliki affixed his signature to that death sentence. Sunni rulers had been hounding Shiite rebels for centuries in Arab lands; Saddam himself had put to death some great men of standing in the Shiite religious establishment. In April 1980, in a deed that is still recalled with terror by the vast majority of Shiites, a great figure of the Shiite seminaries, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, was put to death by the Hussein regime-along with his immensely talented sister, Bint al-Huda, a poet and a writer of exquisite sensibility. Sadr had become the great martyr of Iraqi Shiites; he is said to have been the intellectual inspiration behind the Dawa Party to which Maliki belongs. Saddam's execution was an act of fealty to that beloved man. For the Shiite faithful, justice had been slow in coming.
It had taken a foreign war to decapitate that tyrannical regime in Baghdad, it is true. But the judgment that mattered was an affair of the Iraqis. We have been asking them to claim responsibility for their country, bemoaning their political abdication. On that morning in Baghdad, three years after he had been flushed out of his spider hole, Saddam Hussein came face to face with the wrath and hurt he had bequeathed Iraqis. Those vengeful men taunting him as he fell through the gallows' trapdoor were in the most direct way the children of his cruel reign of terror.
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