So now the Vatican has been touched by the soul of Saddam Hussein. He should not be executed, said Cardinal Renato Martino, the prelate in the entourage of Pope Benedict who is responsible for the Council on Justice and Peace, that is, matters of justice and peace apparently everywhere. [...]

In the statement speaking if not for the Holy Father than for the Holy See, there's a lot of stuff about how nobody should take a human life. It must end naturally, the pronuciatmento asserts, as if this were a debate on abortion and Saddam were an innocent fetus in his mother's womb. Actually, the Vatican had been soft on Saddam's regime in order to buffer the Chaldean Catholic Church during and against the worst of his depradations.

The important question was never really about whether Saddam Hussein was guilty of crimes against humanity.[...]

What really mattered was whether an Iraq freed from his death grip could hold him accountable in a way that nurtured hope for a better future. A carefully conducted, scrupulously fair trial could have helped undo some of the damage inflicted by his rule. It could have set a precedent for the rule of law in a country scarred by decades of arbitrary vindictiveness. It could have fostered a new national unity in an Iraq long manipulated through its religious and ethnic divisions. [...]

What might have been a watershed now seems another lost opportunity. After nearly four years of war and thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, it is ever harder to be sure whether anything fundamental has changed for the better in Iraq.