Executing leaders is simply bad politics - history shows that they backfire. Saddam's reputation will be salvaged , writes Jim Duffy
Name the last monarchs of Italy, Russia, and France; US presidents from the 1860s and the 1960s; a 1920s Irish minister. The odds are that most people will not remember the last Italian king (Umberto II) and will get the last French king wrong (they'll say Louis XVI; it was Louis Phillippe), but will remember Tsar Nicholas II of Russia while naming Lincoln and John F Kennedy as US presidents and Kevin O'Higgins as an Irish minister.
So what have Tsar Nicholas, Lincoln, Kennedy, O'Higgins, and indeed Louis XVI got in common, and why do we remember them? One thing: all died controversially. Nicholas and Louis were murdered on the orders of the leaders of the regimes that replaced them, while Kennedy, Lincoln and O'Higgins were assassinated.
It is a lesson from history the current Iraqi regime - and George Bush - should have learned.
Executing deposed leaders, no matter what their crimes, gives them in death a perception of martyrdom; they appear not as past perpetrators of crimes but victims of new leaders determined to use the execution of a predecessor to distract people from the travails of the new regime.
The real fear must be that by executing Saddam Hussein the Iraqi regime has made him a martyr, someone whose dignity in death would be compared to the lynch mob look of those who hanged him.
The case of Tsar Nicholas offers a parallel example.
Nicholas, unlike Saddam, was not an evil man, but his regime was brutal, corrupt and murdered opponents.
So damaged was Nicholas's reputation that, after he abdicated as tsar, his own first cousin, Britain's king George V, withdrew an invitation to allow him to live in exile in Britain, fearing that the controversial former tsar's presence would provoke civil disturbances and political instability.
The execution of Nicholas II rescued his reputation, changing him from despot to martyr.
His negatives were forgotten, he was canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church and given a state funeral in post-communist Russia.
Saddam was far worse and his death will not wipe away records of his crimes.
But it will give him a new aura for millions: the victim; the murdered leader.
First, though few who oversee regime changes ever remember it, most despots still retain the affection of a large number of people: those who themselves never experienced a reign of terror; who never knew anyone killed, and who will be willing to deceive themselves into believing that stories of the ex-dictator's brutality are all the creation of manipulating outsiders. Jews and the CIA are the usual fall guys for such claims.
(Millions believe 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy to blame Islam and start a war against it, while millions believe Princess Diana was killed to stop Prince William having an Islamic half-brother! Both claims are absurd.)
Even worse, however, is the fact that regimes created by revolution rarely prove democratic, and frequency prove despotic.
The corrupt French monarchy was replaced by the reign of terror; the Iranian shah was replaced by the ayatollahs. Russia had communism under Lenin and Stalin. In all those cases - Louis XVI's monarchy, the shah, the tsar - the old regime ended up remembered almost with fondness compared to the nightmare that followed.
The danger is that, should Iraq descend into civil war and chaos, those millions who never experienced the extremes of Saddam, will come to compare today's chaos with the stability and law and order of Saddam's day.
As with Nicholas and Louis, the shah and others, he will be seen as the "lost leader", murdered by his successors not because of crimes he carried out but to be silenced. Executing leaders, quite apart from the morality of it, is simply bad politics.
It always backfires, making them martyrs and earning for them a reputation in death far above the one they earned in life.