What’s wrong with hanging Saddam?

Yesterday Saddam Hussain’s automatic appeal against his death sentence was rejected, and it was announced that he has to be hanged within 30 days, and that it could happen much sooner. Today, he was able to release [an open letter](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6212393.stm), insisting that he would “sacrifice” himself and become “a true martyr” and calling on Iraqis to unite against “the enemies of [their] country, the invaders and the Persians”. The [world reaction](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6211761.stm) includes a number of the usual condemnations of the death penalty, including from the British and Italian governments, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

I can’t honestly see why people cannot divorce the problems with having the death penalty in their own countries, for the good reason that it tends to take away not necessarily the worst of the worst but the poorer criminals (or innocent people) who cannot afford to hire good lawyers, from the execution of a war criminal like Saddam Hussain. Saddam is not a poor black man caught with his arm round a white woman in some backwater in Mississippi, nor the learning-disabled tag-along accomplice in a robbery who did not realise that his “big buddy” had a gun and intended to use it. He’s a fallen dictator with a long record of tyranny, starting pointless wars, and mass murder. I can see no reason to delay his execution other than that it may result in more details about his rule not coming out.