I will always love you

Mark Steyn has a great piece on Whitney Houston's version of "I will always love you," which Saddam Hussein used as his campaign song during his last "election."

Whitney Houston had managed to transform a blameless country song into the mother of all power ballads. Within a year of its release, the number was every other Lite FM listener’s all-time favorite love song. The theory seemed to be that the louder you bellowed it the more romantic it got. In Britain, people began requesting it for funerals, which is marginally less ridiculous than, as many others did, requesting it for weddings – even though it’s a song about parting:

If I should stay
I would only be in your way
So I’ll go
But I know
I’ll think of you ev’ry step of the way…

Not exactly "for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health". But, by that stage, it was just the ultimate all-purpose romantic ballad, and the fact that doing it Whitney-style made it all but impossible for most folks to sing only added to its karaoke klassik status. It’s the archetype of the Houston-we-have-a-problem approach: a crazed melismatic pile-up in which the object seems to be to make the one-letter word “I” into a world-record polysyllable: “And I-I-I-I-I-I…”

As Steyn says: "Truly a terrifying Weapon of Mass Destruction." And you gotta ask: What is it about Whitney Houston and murderous Arab megalomaniacs?

They never should have buried Saddam

Cremating him and throwing his ashes to the four winds would have been more sensible. Instead there's a very real danger that his burial place will become a shrine.

AGHDAD, Iraq - Thousands of Iraqis flocked to
Saddam Hussein's hometown of Ouja on Sunday, where the deposed leader was buried in a religious compound 24 hours after his execution.

Dozens of relatives and other mourners, some of them crying and moaning, attended the interment shortly before dawn near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. A few knelt before his flag-draped grave. A large framed photograph of Saddam was propped up on a chair nearby.

Iraqis react to Saddam's hanging

Najmaldin Karim, a Kurd, conveys what I meant in my last post about Saddam.

Killing Saddam now, however, for ordering the massacre at Dujail in 1982, means that he will not face justice for his greatest crimes: the so-called Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, the genocidal assault on the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s, and the slaughtering of the Shiite Arabs and Kurds who rose up against him, with American encouragement, in 1991.

The sight of a tyrant held to account, if only briefly, has been an important precedent for the Middle East. The shabby diplomacy that has allowed dictators to thrive is now discredited.

Sadly, however, we have not had full justice. Saddam Hussein did not confront the full horror of his crimes. Building on previous initiatives by Arab nationalist governments to persecute the Kurds, he turned ethnic engineering and murder into an industry in the 1970s. Hundreds of thousands were evicted from their homes and murdered. Swaths of Kurdish countryside were emptied of their population, men, women and children taken to shallow graves and shot.

From Iraq's Al-Zawraa newspaper: "The body of the snake will die only after its head has been crushed."

Dead

Saddam has been hanged.

"Now, he is in the garbage of history," said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of Dujail.

Iraqi television showed what it said was Saddam's body, his head uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.

I wish he had been tried for gassing the Kurds. And I wish his trial hadn't been such a circus. But I'm glad he's gone.