The video of Saddam Hussein being taunted by Shiite guards is not going down well with Iraq's Sunni minority, and may be cementing impressions that the Shiite-led government is a sectarian one, claims an NYT analysis.
It was supposed to be a formal and solemn proceeding carried out by a dispassionate state. But the grainy recording of the execution’s cruel theater summed up what has become increasingly clear on the streets of the capital: that the Shiite-led government that assumed power in the American effort here is running the state under an undisguised sectarian banner.
The hanging was hasty. Laws governing its timing were bypassed, and the guards charged with keeping order in the chamber instead disrupted it, shouting Shiite militia slogans.
It was a degrading end for a vicious leader, and an ominous beginning for the new Iraq. The Bush administration has already scaled back its hopes for a democracy here. But as the Iraqi government has become ever more set on protecting its Shiite constituency, often at the expense of the Sunni minority, the goal of stopping the sectarian war seems to be slipping out of reach.
... American officials are pressing Iraqi leaders, both Sunni and Shiite, to reconcile and have made it a central demand for continued support of the Iraqi government. But the prospects for mutual agreement seem ever more distant.
“I can’t think of any good reason for any level-minded person to be interested in reconciliation,” one secular Sunni politician said.
That unwillingness, shared by most of the Shiite political elite, is a serious challenge to any new American strategy proposal that President Bush may announce soon.
John Simpson, the world affairs editor for the Beeb, wrote the following from Baghdad on Dec. 31:
Walking round in Baghdad this evening, as people hurried home in the black-out to celebrate their New Year's Eve in the security of their own homes, it seemed that everyone knew all about the new video.
The people I spoke to, who seemed to be Sunni Muslims, were shocked by it.
They also appeared to be distinctly nervous that the video would sharpen the already serious sectarian divide here.
Under Saddam Hussein, prisoners were regularly taunted and mistreated in their last hours. For many of them, death must have come as a relief.
But the most disturbing thing about the new video of Saddam's execution for crimes precisely like this, is that it is all much too reminiscent of what used to happen here.
It is going to be increasingly difficult for the government of Nouri Maliki to convince Sunni Arabs here that Saddam's execution was not merely an act of retaliation.