In today's leisured world it is apparently better to be inactively perfect than actively good.

Victor Davis Hanson: ...by any measure of fairness, Saddam's fate was singular in the annals of recent murderous dictators. The world seems to forget that usually such killers are either given statues, villas in exile, or, even when tried, rarely convicted and punished.

The mass-murdering Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao together killed off nearly 100 million people. Yet both died in their sleep. They are still heroes to many in Russia and China.

Worse yet, examine the fates of more recent killers. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the savage "cannibal" president of the Central African Republic, was given sanctuary by the now hypercritical France. He was even on friendly, gift-exchanging terms with then French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.

...Why, then, blame the nascent democracy in Iraq--and the United States--for his conviction, however clumsy and crass the execution? ... there is an even more disturbing paradox--the very moral contradictions of contemporary international justice itself. In today's leisured world it is apparently better to be inactively perfect than actively good.

Read it in RealClearPolitics.

[Sadam Hussein] [Iraq] [execution]