A Nightmare, Ended?

From Gates of Vienna, life under the late Saddam Hussein (you know, the guy whom many Democrats and UN bureaucrats said Iraq was better off with):

...in every household that someone had already lost his or her mind; in other societies such a person would be in a mental hospital. I also realized that there wasn’t a household that did not mourn at least one family member who had become a victim of this police state.

I wept with relatives whose son just screamed all day long. I cried with a relative who had lost his wife. Yet another left home every day for a “job” where he had nothing to do. Still another had lost a son to war and a husband to alcoholism.

As I observed the slow death of a people without hope, Saddam Hussein seemed omnipresent...

Of course, some can only consider the "crime" of Hussein's execution; since a quarter-million deaths at an Arab hand pales before the execution of one tyrant by a Western hand:

Generally, said the columnist Tim Hames in The Times of London, the response to the execution would be different in Britain and Continental Europe from the reaction in the United States. “Even those of us who supported the invasion in 2003, and continue to do so today,” he wrote, “will harbor within their ranks, like me, those who find the notion of this crime offensive.”

“Mainstream middle-class sentiment in Europe now regards the death penalty as being as ethically tainted as the crimes that produced the sentence,” he added.

You are incorrect; and hopelessly out of touch, you pathetic liberal elitist. Take a look at Der Speigel's survey of European attitudes towards "swinging Saddam" before you speak for them, jackass.

But for how long will Saddam's evil resonate after his death? The gleeful slaughter that takes place in Baghdad on a daily basis seems to be orchestrated by a generation poisoned by Hussein's hateful and bloody rule. Can Iraq ever fully wake up from this nightmare, or will the killing go on until the last infected man falls, full of shrapnel and bullet holes? Or can the goodness that resides in all men rise up within the hearts of those whom have lived under the shadow of evil for so long? Can the Iraqis say "enough!", and finally, truly, put an end to Saddam's reign of terror?

Or will they share Saddam's fate, and consign themselves to a living grave? The aftermath of Hussein's rule only goes to demonstrate the pure horror of his regime - what a shame it is that he could only be killed once; while his nation dies a thousand deaths....