Taking out the Garbage

At long last.

Saddam has been executed by the freely elected government of Iraq.

There will be no 72 virgins awaiting his arrival.

If anyone ever deserved to die at the end of a rope, it was Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, he was held to account only for one of the least abhorrent of his crimes: the brutal 1982 murders of 148 Shiite men and boys - some as young as 11 - in the village of Dujail.

Ding Dong the Butcher's Dead.

True, his execution will not automatically build a better Iraq. Indeed, in the short run, it may even exacerbate the violence.

But this hanging does guarantee that never again will Saddam Hussin brutalize people, as he did for 35 years.

It speaks volumes to the barbarity of this despot that murdering little children in cold blood ranked as one of his lesser crimes.

He was never even brought to trial on the most heinous charges against him - including his genocidal assault, using deadly nerve gas, against Iraq's Kurdish population, which took a reported 100,000 innocent lives.

But that was in large part because Saddam and his lawyers - including America's most embarrassing former Cabinet official, Johnson administration Attorney General Ramsey Clark - alternately boycotted and disrupted the proceedings.

To be sure, the tribunal that sent Saddam Hussein to his just rewards might not have met the full, strict criteria of the U.S. criminal-justice system - though whatever its faults, they fell far short of the dire predictions of its critics.

Besides, it's not as if there was mitigating evidence waiting to be admitted by a different set of judges. No one, save Saddam and his staunchest defenders, ever doubted that he was guilty as charged.

No Rush to Justice.

More than two years passed after Saddam's capture before he was placed on trial - in open court, broadcast on TV for the entire Iraqi people and the world to witness. And the case against him was painstaking and carefully built.

Certainly, it was infinitely fairer than the justice meted out to any of Saddam's victims.

He was the first Arab tyrant made to answer for his crimes in open court by an independent judiciary. That, at least, is a sign of progress - and a potential warning to the region's other tyrants.

America did not go to war in Iraq in order to hang Saddam Hussein. It was to remove him as a threat to regional and global security by denying him the ability to realize his goal of obtaining weapons of mass destruction - weapons he would gladly have used.

Nevertheless, his demise is a welcome by-product of the conflict.

Justice has been served.