Sending Saddam home.

To a 'celebratory' party last night held by someone I shall just refer to as "N", who is quite a senior professor at Oxford. She and her brothers all left Iraq in the late seventies after the then notorious Saddam Hussein and one of his evil Tikriti clan took a fancy to their mother. Their father would regularly be arrested off the street and questioned by Saddam Hussein about his wife, the couple's sexual habits, their eating habits, what clothes or perfumes she liked and so on and so forth, and then abruptly released. Then one day he never returned. They never heard from him again and soon after that they received a visit from one of Saddam's thugs telling her openly that she must get rid of the children ... or someone would do it for her. N and her brothers all went to live in the USA with a relative and she qualified at a US college and emigrated to the UK in the mid-80's. She has a series of letters that her mother managed to get sent out to her describing living in perpetual fear of Saddam, the beatings she endured from this animal and the hell she must have been undergoing. The letters end in August 1982 and, like her husband before her, she was never heard of again.

It wasn't so much a celebration of Saddam's demise but more a solemn remembrance of how her family was, the happiness they had together and how this evil man destroyed it. She felt it right that he should have been accorded exactly all the respect that he never showed his victims; that he should have had the opportunity to pray to Allah, which he never accorded his victims; that he should have been treated with the dignity that he never showed his victims and that his tribe should have the right to give him an honourable funeral and interment ... exactly the opposite of what he ever gave to his victims. As for whether or not he should have been executed? Her youngest brother said, "when you treat a wound you remove anything that may cause it to go bad, you cleanse it, stitch it together and cover that with a dressing until it has healed but you don't leave it to fester and get worse. Saddam was like an old wound in the side of Iraq that would never heal and would just continue to cause more and more trouble until it was necessary for someone to kill him in secret. It is better that it was done this way."