Assorted Afflatuses

Television has taken a break, as it always does, this holiday season. So, unlike most weekends when I can plop down on the couch and enjoy my hot chocolate with a dash of entertaining television, I sat down this Saturday to watch the news. BBC World had switched from its typical self-produced content to a re-branded feed of the BBC's domestic 24-hour news station, BBC News 24. Not unexpectedly, they had never-ending coverage of Saddam Hussein's recent trip to the gallows in Iraq.

But amidst the analysis and looped video clips, one aspect of Mr. Hussein's execution struck me as imbecilic — at least on the part of the Iraqi government — and incongruous: the men who hanged Hussein looked like run-of-the-mill extremists. And, of course, the executioner's choice to shoot the video with a low-quality camcorder — again, like the extremists — further casts them in the same light. If Mr. Hussein's face were blurred, I never would've guessed that the video came from the Iraqi government.

This event will probably plunge Iraq further into chaos and violence, now that the government has essentially equated itself with the same people who try to destabilize it day and night. The government should have put Mr. Hussien in prison for life or developed some other, more humane punishment, to set it apart from the extremist groups and put itself on the moral high ground.