Saddam Hanging Video Stirs Controversy

I'm not sure what people were expecting to happen when Saddam was hanged, but the outcry is building after the cellphone videos show how unruly the whole operation was. One person has now been arrested for making one of the videos that quickly spread around the internet:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The person believed to have recorded Saddam Hussein's execution on a cell phone camera was arrested Wednesday, an adviser to Iraq's prime minister said.

The adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, did not identify the person. But he said it was "an official who supervised the execution" and who is "now under investigation."

"In the past few hours, the government has arrested the person who made the video of Saddam's execution," the adviser said.

Iraqi state television broadcast an official video of Saturday's hanging, which had no audio and never showed Saddam's actual death. But the leaked cell phone video showed the deposed leader being taunted in his final moments, with witnesses shouting "Go to hell!" before he dropped through the gallows floor and died.

The unruly scene was broadcast on Al-Jazeera television and was posted on the Internet, prompting a worldwide outcry and big protests among Iraq's minority Sunnis, who lost their preferential status when Saddam was ousted in the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003.

Given the torture and murder conducted during Saddam's reign of terror, I don't think it was realistic to expect that his hanging, in front of a crowd largely made up of the Shiites he persecuted, was going to be a dignified gathering. These people wanted revenge and they got it.

If anything, this spectacle just further proves how difficult it will be to create anything resembling civility among the various warring factions in that country. I still believe that the only hope of sustained peace is a partitioning of the country into separate areas for the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.