Modern-day Iraq has a chilling history of rulers falling to the fury that brought down their regime. King Faisal and Karim Ben Kasem being notable among them. With these two, the human cost did not overwhelm the nation and the bloodletting stopped with them. Saddam's path to the gallows is splattered red with the blood of the innocent and there are already portends of a grislier human toll to follow.

Even in his death he has not been vanquished. It took the mightiest coalition of the world the United States and the United Kingdom to bring him down. President George W Bush has termed it as "the kind of justice that was denied to his brutalized country." Indeed his regime committed atrocities. He has been tried sentenced and executed. But the wrong has not been righted. They legacy of Saddam's wrongs are not going to sleep in his death. It will unleash many more wrongs in mindless sectarian blood feud.

Iraq will be even more divided in his death. For while many celebrate his death there will be others equally vengeful to swear by his name. In strictest fairness it cannot be said that the fall of Saddam's regime and his death is Iraqi peoples own. He was hunted down by invading US and UK forces. Sadly there is no other way of characterizing the allied mission in Iraq for unlike the Gulf War mission it was not authorized by the United Nations.

However noble the mission is, it does not have the moral sanction to violate the territorial integrity and sovereignty of a UN member state. It is a dangerous precedent for the civilized world order. Iraq is still under occupation in spite of the fact that elections have been held and a provisional government has been formed. It however does not exist without the enforcing might of the occupying forces. The source of power that has bite operates from the green zone.

It may be said that the allied forces did not force its will on the trial. But it does not absolve the trial of the blemish that it was not held in free Iraq. That will make the voice of vindication to watch the proceedings with somber silence. Why, the fate of Saddam can evoke the images of martyr in the minds of his followers and the Sunnites. It can drive them on to plunge into sectarian strife with the fires of a wronged people. A dead Saddam will make it difficult for the allied forces to follow its timetable of withdrawing from Iraq in 2008.

Saddam had a quite number of vicious wrongs stacked against him -- killing of 148 Shiites of Dujail in 1982, execution of 8,000 members of Barzani Kurdish clan in 1983, killing of 5,000 Kurds of Halabja by chemical weapons in 1988, Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1987-1989 killing approximately 182,000 and the offensive against the Shiites in the south killing 1,000 in 1991. On the other hand Iraq has seen the death of over 200,000 Iraqis and 3,285 allied soldiers since Saddam was toppled in April 2003. Iraqis are dying in hundreds and almost everyday. The cumulative toll has the apocalyptic image of human fodder fed to the vaunted goal of establishing democracy in Iraq.

There was no democratic movement of note in Iraq prior to allied invasion. Nor was there any civil war vying for state power. The allied forces came as uninvited and not as emancipators. It was the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction WMD as emphatically cited by the US President that led to the war on Iraq. Later it became the war on terror when no recognizable trace of WMD was found. Saddam was a tyrant but he was never a patron of terror if one means al-Qaeda or other Islamic fire-brands. He did not have any Islamic agenda nor was he a devout Muslim, gladly enjoying his hard liquor. After the drubbing at the Gulf War he inserted the holy inscription "Allahu Akbar" in the Iraqi national flag.

The stand of the allied forces was shifting all the time. Now it occurs to them that the Iraqi people have been brutalized and that they need democracy. In the past it was business as usual or constructive engagement with Saddam's Iraq for US and its lesser ally UK. The engagement and camaraderie as shown by the warmth of Donald Rumsfeld continued when Iraq invaded Iran and till Saddam bumbled into Kuwait.

Saddam was gullible enough to believe that the US would condone his annexation of Kuwait in view of its sympathies on Iraq's grumbling against Kuwait for oil pilferage. The suffering that the Iraqi people endured after the Gulf War was due to the UN sanctions on Iraq. After the Gulf War debacle Saddam was a caged and clipped tyrant and vulnerable to levers of pressure that western powers could have exercised.

The purpose of all this is to say that we should trudge the path of judgment fairly. Even the devil may not be without its saving grace. Indeed Saddam committed vicious wrongs but the actions that pursued him to his downfall and aftermath are morally indefensible in its exercise of reason and fairness. The human toll is also reprehensible. We are left with three questions. Did he receive a fair trial, was it civilized to put him to the gallows on Eid day, and will the world see a united and democratic Iraq?

The first has invited doubt by the arbitrary and hasty nature of his trial. Almost all of his defense counsels boycotted the trial in disgust. World representation would have endowed the trial with fairness. Eid-ul-Azha has symbolic significance. It invokes images of sacrifice of the dearest nature. Allah almighty rewarded the intent and the Muslims offer sacrificial animals in its place. By this symbolic measure Saddam is either a dear sacrifice or a sacrifice of a lowly creature. Neither of the two is a justice for Saddam.

For the Muslims the day of Eid is a day of forgiveness, a day of humility, not of vengeance. Another wrong has been committed. The ethnic composition of modern-day Iraq is fractious to render the task of building a democratic a united Iraq, a democratic one for that very difficult. It is the allied trusteeship in 1920 that crafted Iraq into being. Strong, and often brutal leadership kept the country together. It is a triad of sectarian bellicosity. The populist Shiite Arabs, the war like Kurds and the majestic Sunnite Arabs, they all have lofty egos. They are unbending in their ethnic pride. Now that the ethnic compact has broken down it is everybody's fight and nobody's state to build. The allied forces may find an even bitter enemy in a dead Saddam.