The semi-public execution of Saddam Hussein in the first hours of the religious feast of Eid al-Adha was bad law, bad politics, bad psychology, bad religion and immoral. Nor was it even competent, the mask of an "impartial" law-based state slipping sickeningly as executioners and witnesses revealed their personal animus.
There is no dignity in legal execution, as countless tales of prolonged final agony in the brutal US system remind us. But a state purporting to espouse democratic values which manifests what many will see as the thuggery that Saddam embodied will undermine further its little credibility.
The execution will be seen as a crude act of revenge and will serve to teach potential tyrants no lessons other than the need better to cover their tracks and to ensure, by any means, that they are not caught. In the words of the Quaker prison rights campaigner, Elizabeth Fry: "Does capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means, it hardens the hearts of men and makes the loss of life seem light to them."
The decision by the US to press for the trial in an Iraqi court was wrong from the start. In part it reflected the US aversion to the International Criminal Court; in part, a desire to legitimise and give an Iraqi authority to an act that was being portrayed as "victor's justice". Yet that would have required establishing a court in which international norms of justice prevailed. Human Rights Watch was not alone in seeing the trial as a travesty - judges appeared to have little understanding of legal norms (and one was replaced at the government's request for showing deference to Saddam), defence lawyers were murdered, and witnesses testified anonymously.
Their testimony, and that of many who wait now in vain for further trials that will not happen, was often harrowing and painted a picture of a monster. Let there be no doubt: Saddam used violence, and ordered it, with a cynicism and brutality akin to Hitler or Stalin. His genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the Shia, his wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait, his brutal treatment, often personally supervised, of dissenters in the Baath party and civil society were matched in criminality by his plundering of the the Iraqi state.
Yet the reality is that his execution at a religiously sensitive time, after a trial with only the veneer of due legal process, will not serve to close this bloody chapter of Iraqi history.
Today President George Bush continues to take counsel on where to go next in the morass that Iraq has become. And again he will be hearing from those like Vice-President Dick Cheney who said the invasion could be done with the minimum of troops and who are now calling for a "surge" in US troop numbers ahead of a handover to the Iraqi authorities. Neo-conservative wishful thinking will not make it so any more than repeatedly insisting that the court which condemned Saddam was a model expression of an emerging democracy made it so. Saddam's legacy will be yet more spilled blood.