So the Butcher of Baghdad is dead. I’m sure there are people toasting his execution all over the world right now. A certain occupant of the White House is probably planning a party, and maybe his dad is, too. Maybe they’re even entitled to one. I, however… I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not shedding any tears for the bastard. He deserved his ignominious and unmourned death. But so do a lot of other penny-ante dictators around the world whose sole purpose seems to be finding new depths of depravity and cruelty to visit on their people. And therein lies my deep ambivalence about Saddam Hussein’s execution. It isn’t that I don’t believe he was a bad guy. I simply have never understood what made him so uniquely bad as to justify all the energy America has expended on him over the past fifteen years.

As my three loyal readers probably already know, I opposed the Persian Gulf War back in 1991. I signed a petition and attended a rally against it. I even risked a number of friendships by speaking my mind. (Thankfully, most of them survived my candor.) I’m not too proud to admit that my opinion was heavily informed by selfishness, by my fear of getting drafted if the conflict exploded into something bigger and longer lasting than it turned out to be. I’ve since changed my mind and come to see that expelling the Iraqi invaders from Kuwait was the right thing to do. Keeping Saddam bottled up during the years that followed was also the right thing to do. But the one thing I haven’t changed my mind about is what I believe to be the gross overhyping of Saddam into some kind of near-supernatural boogeyman.

I’ve never — never — been able to muster the kind of enmity and fear toward Saddam that so many other Americans seem to feel. The man may have wanted to be another Hitler, but, to paraphrase that famous verbal bitch-slap that silenced Dan Quayle during the vice-presidential debates in ’87, Saddam Hussein was no Hitler. To my eye, he was a piss-ant with delusions of grandeur. That’s not to say he wasn’t a monster or that he didn’t do terrible things. But again, what made him different, what made him so much worse than so many others? And more important, was his death worth the American and Iraqi lives and the billions of dollars that have been spent to secure it?

I don’t presume to have an answer to those questions. But I do get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when they’re posed…