One of my dearest friends is a Kurdish-American Iraqi immigrant who lost 40 relatives to Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, the Anfal. She was condemned by Hussein’s government for her work with foreign NGOs, and eventually evacuated to America from Iraq as a political refugee in the mid-90s. Anyway, we were talking yesterday about our New Year’s Eve plans, and also the impending Hussein execution, and she made some smart points I hadn’t heard elsewhere:

1) Hussein was being executed before being tried for all his crimes against the Iraqi people. Rather than a full measure of truth and reconciliation, Iraqis got just one short prosecution, followed by the death of their tormentor. And he was executed for crimes against the Shia, not what he did to the Kurds. Today, Washington Kurdish Institute president Najmaldin Karim makes the same point in The New York Times: “we have not had full justice. Saddam Hussein did not confront the full horror of his crimes.”

2) The timing of the execution, as best she understood the Iraqi thinking, was moved up because Eid ul-Adha — The Feast of the Sacrifice — started on Dec. 30, Saturday. The disruptions caused by holiday, as well as the moral obligations it imposes upon believers, might be expected to have some mitigating effect on Sunni reaction and possibly diminish social unrest and retaliations following the execution. Steve Benen, guest-blogging at The Washington Monthly, points to this Juan Cole op-ed in Salon, which presents a more worrisome picture of the timing’s impact:

The tribunal…had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam’s hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday — and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.

The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a “sacrifice” for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public.

3) The death penalty is “uncivilized.” What with the routine blood lust one hears from American commentators over the punishment of a man who did not kill their relatives, I thought her final point — an opinion apparently not shared by many Iraqis — showed a remarkable level of class and dignity. More importantly, she pointed out that in an honor-based society like Iraq, continued trials of Hussein that made him a figure of mockery and humiliation would have had more power in undermining support for him than would executing him rapidly. A hanged man can be a martyr, after all, but a weak, powerless old man with a funny beard who is on trial for years on end is just a sad, pathetic, emasculated social joke.