Death of Two Leaders

[Shadow]

As President Ford is laid to rest, word comes that Saddam Hussein has been executed by hanging.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/saddam.trial/

Will Hussein's death be a good or bad thing for Iraq?

[RCMerchant]

Hard to say...some of his followers will make him into some kinda martyr.

[Doc Daneeka]

If he had a choice between living and dying he would have been a martyr.

[Zapranoth]

Execution by The Ball would have been better...  that's what your sig makes me think.

"Hussein!"

*crash!*

[Ash]

Ford has received much more publicity & recognition than other former presidents who have passed on.

I don't recall Reagan getting this kind of royal treatment.
Flags flown at half mast for a month...a funeral on live TV...no mail on Tuesday...etc...
Reagan didn't get any of that as far as I can remember.

[RCMerchant]

Ford pardoned Nixon.This qualifies him as a puppet in my book.
Good riddance to Hussain.An evil,cowardly shmuck.

[Andrew]

The speed with which it happened surprised me.  Of course, I think that the American court systems take far too long to sort things out.  I understand that time is needed for appeals, in cases where the death penalty has been imposed, but twenty years might be a bit long of a time.  Also, do we really need a court case that last three months?  People deserve a fair trial, but three months or more of testimony?

President Ford took over in a time of turmoil.  Him deciding that Nixon's part in Watergate was not serious enough to qualify for all of the trials and hearings seems like a good idea to me.  I often wish something like that had happened with President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.  "Look, here is the deal: he lied.  Go back to your lives."  Of course, the situation with Clinton was a bit different.  He probably could have diffused the issue by admitting it and things could have moved on.

[Yaddo 42]

I had a long post about Ford not getting more attention and fanfare than Reagan, but it was eaten in midpost due to my damn phoneline and the rain.

Several of us were talking about Saddam last night. On the one hand, couldn't happen to a nicer guy. However I don't think it will make one iota of difference toward improving things in Iraq. The Sunnis and Shiites seem willing to keep killing each other, coalition forces, contractors, innocent civilians of any background, and make holy martyrs of themselves no matter what. Saddam became irrelevant sometime ago.

When I heard it was coming soon, I felt they wouldn't do it on a Friday, and when I read that the time of the Hajj was coming, I was pretty sure they would do it before that started also.

[Yaddo 42]

Correction: the Hajj has started, apparently the Islamic holiday that was a point of contention was Eid ul-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, which immediately comes after Hajj has ended.

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm from the UK, and we don't have the death penalty (sorry for stating the obvious). So the reaction of people who'd be opposed to an execution in the UK has been interesting. You're either against the state killing people or you're in favour of it, I reckon. Hell, I sound a bit like GWB there.

I think he shouldn't have been killed, but then again I think he should never have been in charge of Iraq in the first place- we in the west should have left well alone before the Iran-Iraq war (and even further back than that). Playing puppet master to a bunch of despotic regimes is a bad idea and maybe we've learned a lesson from this. Maybe not.

Gerald Ford...the main thing I know as a Brit is he was never elected as President (the first one since god knows when) and he pardoned the criminal Richard Nixon. Shame on him.

[RCMerchant]

Nixon was a crook.he should haveen prosecuted as such.

[trekgeezer]

Saddam is finally getting what he deserves, but it does go to prove that the enemy of my enemy is my friend until he becomes my enemy too. Same thing we learned in Afghanistan.

As far as I concerned Jerry Ford did the US one giant favor by pardoning Nixon. The trials would have gone on for a decade or more and it would have ripped an already suffering country apart. We were just getting out of Viet Nam (something we still seem not to have gotten over or learned anything from) and the country really needed a break.

Most of Ford's detractors from back then have finally realized this and openly admitted they were wrong at the time.

[Famous Mortimer]

As far as I concerned Jerry Ford did the US one giant favor by pardoning Nixon. The trials would have gone on for a decade or more and it would have ripped an already suffering country apart. We were just getting out of Viet Nam (something we still seem not to have gotten over or learned anything from) and the country really needed a break.

From what? For what purpose? Did it work? Rather than being forced to look at the mistakes it made, everything was swept under the carpet and the US seems, by your own admission, to be making those same mistakes again. I'm struggling to see anything positive in what Gerald Ford did, and sweeping generalisations like "the country really needed a break" mean virtually nothing. Already suffering? I think the country the US blew up and whose innocent civilians died in their tens of thousands probably suffered ever so slightly more.

I also can't think of a criminal trial that's ever gone on that long- I think you're confusing it with a civil trial in Victorian times. Nixon deserved to stand trial for his crimes, and didn't. Simple as that. Unless you think Nixon would have appealed over and over again and completely ruined any vestiges of dignity he had left?

[trekgeezer]

Sorry Mortimer, but that's all you get from me. This is not a political discussion group.

I have one question though, what war was caused by Nixon not going to trial  that killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians?