There’s nothing like a little frontier justice to get the mob juices flowing. A lynching - with or without due process and a functional, objective justice system - always provokes an upswing in fresh murders. That’s been well-researched and documented.

The only proven deterrent factor is that the person lynched will no longer be able to kill, but that same deterrent is achieved by maximum security confinement.

With the lynching of Saddam Hussein, one of the more brutal dictators our government gave aid and comfort to in the past half century, we get the predictable array of partisan responses. Anybody opposed to the hanging is automatically The Left, The Left supports Saddam’s barbaric acts, and more than a few would love to see any representative of The Left plunging through the gallows floor and twitching his last.

For having an opinion rooted in logic, morals, theological belief or emotion.

If opinions are outlawed, only outlaws will wield opinions. And 100% of our population would then be outlaws.

Don’t attempt such logic if you find yourself amid a lynch mob, though. Facts can get you killed.

People who accept the state has a right to kill will often accept all manner of barbarities that are associated with that right, applied. One cannot accept justifications for war without also accepting that the practice will include intentional murders of innocents, torture, rape, suicide and an assortment of cruelties that will haunt many victims and perpetrators for years afterward.

Similarly, the application of capital punishment will unleash copycat killings and a spike in the murder rate. Innocents will ultimately share the noose, chair or gurney of the person the state kills. If you permit capital punishment, you grant approval of the fresh murders it provokes.

I won’t engage in moral relativity. Does Saddam deserve this end more than a killer of one person? If capital punishment were outlawed, such relativity would be a moot point. I prefer to keep it moot, even if societies prefer to err by permitting the inhumane practice.

The US is no safer. Iraq is no safer. Iraq’s neighbors are no safer with Saddam dead. That was achieved with his capture.

The record of his complicity with previous US government officials may never be known now, which is a loss to us in pursuit of a healthy democratic republic, as secrets are the greatest threat to our nation’s undoing that currently exists.

It’s further noteworthy that Moqtada al-Sadr set Saddam’s execution as a precondition to his return to the government coalition, which could explain the sudden rush to get the deed done.

There’s no doubt that millions of Iraqi families of Saddam’s victims will be happy at the news. It will, at least, end the foolish speculation that Iraq’s civil war can be ended with Saddam returned to power. But every step of the process that was necessary to get the deed done was littered with tens of thousands of fresh victims that did not add to the blood on Saddam’s hands, but left it on ours.

And millions of Iraqis would find similar cheer if it was Bush hanging from the gallows.

The popular emotion is not a reliable indicator of justice done or civilization achieved.

As Josh Marshall eloquently noted:

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It’s a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Try to dress this up as an Iraqi trial and it doesn’t come close to cutting it — the Iraqis only take possession of him for the final act, sort of like the Church always left execution itself to the ’secular arm’. Try pretending it’s a war crimes trial but it’s just more of the pretend mumbojumbo that makes this out to be World War IX or whatever number it is they’re up to now.

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing’s a mess and that they’re going to be remembered for it — defined by it — for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president’s issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off — so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic ‘So There!’

Marx might say that this was not tragedy but farce. But I think we need to get way beyond options one and two even to get close to this one — claptrap justice meted out to the former dictator in some puffed-up act of self-justification as the country itself collapses in the hands of the occupying army.

I do not condemn his executioners. I do not condemn supporters of capital punishment. I do not set myself as anyone’s moral superior by stating my moral objection. Nor am I superior for recognizing the practical reasons for ending the practice.

I mourn the cost to the whole of civilization when any bloodletting is viewed as permissible by a state. It is pragmatic to practice armed defense against the aggression of an armed invader It is moral to kill to survive.

But our survival was never in doubt.

The survival of moral legitimacy remains in doubt, in the practices of our old government, and in the practices of Iraq’s new one.

People dedicated to the advance of civilizations, to the belief that the world can coexist peacefully, must always seek fresh ways that our human species can evolve to. This is not fresh, it is not evolution, it is repetition of practices that advance nothing.

We can mock the barbarism and futility of ancient societies that danced around volcanoes and offered human sacrifices to appease the angry gods. The barbarism and futility of this current practice earns like mockery. If nothing is advanced, it remains pointless.

It satisfies a lynch mob. Temporarily. Till the next rabid mob forms in pursuit of fresh meat.

Update from Robert Scheer:

The fact is that Saddam Hussein knew a great deal about the United States’ role in Iraq, including deals made with Bush’s father. This rush to execute him had the feel of a gangster silencing the key witness to a crime.

At Nuremberg in the wake of World War II the U.S. set the bar very high by declaring that even the Nazis, who had committed the most heinous of crimes, should have a fair trial. The U.S. and allies insisted on this not to serve those charged, but to educate the public through a believable accounting. In the case of Saddam, the bar was lowered to the mud, with the proceedings turned into a political circus reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials.

And the graphic summation from Mr. Fish.