Well, wouldn't you know it? Now that Saddam Hussein has been condemned to execution by hanging, there appears to be great agitation in the world about his death sentence. It seems to me that maybe there should be a consensus on a few people in the world who actually deserve to be executed. How about Osama bin Laden for one? Or, looking backwards, Hitler or Goebbels? Mussolini was hung by Italian partisans, and who could say now that justice would have been better served if he'd been tried in a court of law? Still, Tony Blair is against the death sentence for anyone, including Saddam, although he won't make a fuss about it. This is not the case for other European leaders and for officials of the European Union, who are especially perturbed by the mass murderer of Tikrit. Of course, Amnesty International "deplored" the sentence. A report by Hassan M. Fatah, writing in today's international edition of The New York Times, reports a statement by the secretary general of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly asserting that Iraq "does not need ... a state-orchestrated execution. Saddam Hussein is a criminal and should not be allowed to become a martyr." Since Fattah wrote from Dubai, the bulk of his dispatch dealt with reactions in the Arab world. And the Arabs are hysterical ... or feigning hysteria. Mostly, it's about the unfairness of the trial. This is a joke. There is not another political trial in the Arab Middle East--and who can vouch for non-political trials?--that is not rigged. Fattah, an excellent reporter (who before he went to The New York Times wrote often for TNR), wrote that common wisdom in the area was that Saddam was guilty but that "flaws in his trial offset (my emphasis, not Fatah's) his guilt." Other tropes in Arab reactions: One is that the trial and the sentence were fixed by the Bush administration to "boost the Republicans" in advance of today's elections. Then, there is the reaction of some modernizers. They don't like capital punishment at all. But actually, capital punishment is practiced in every Arab and Muslim country. Some of you may remember when, in 1977, even a Saudi Arabian princess and her commoner lover were executed by stoning. For whatever it's worth, I believe that if Saddam had not been sentenced to hang, he would have been seen to have been declared innocent. In any case, a photograph accompanying Fattah's story depicts a host of Palestinian youth carrying posters of Saddam at a protest against the trial. Besides: There's a meticulously argued article in today's Wall Street Journal (Europe) by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. He draws the contrast between the perfect injustice of Saddam's reign and the imperfect justice of Saddam's trial. Looking back historically to the Nuremberg trials, he makes an excellent case for the probity of the proceedings in Baghdad. And don't forget that the great American left-wing hero, Ramsey Clark, was one of Saddam's lawyers. P.S. An afterthought about Saddam: Don't you think that the Iraqi government left in power would not have pursued, with some franticness and anxiety, nuclear weapons--given that Iran is now well on its way to having them? If not, tell me why?