Inexcusable Unforgettability, Unforgettable Inexcusability

Ten days after the stringing-up of Saddam Hussein, the Vicar of Downing Street has decided that it is safe to agree with John Prescott and the Prince in Waiting: the manner of the execution was "completely wrong". It was not merely an internal matter for the sovereign, independent Iraqi government to handle as it saw fit. It was not anomalous. It was "wrong and unacceptable", although his reverence seems to have been oddly inexplicit about what Britain will be doing to ensure that we are not forced to accept similar things in future. Instead, he talked about Saddam Hussein's crimes against his own people, which were endorsed by successive British governments and a source of profit to various British companies. The wrongness of Saddam's execution "should not blind us to the crimes he committed against his own people", his reverence observed. "The crimes that Saddam committed does not excuse the manner of his execution but the manner of his execution does not excuse the crimes," his reverence pontificated. "Of course any sensible, moderate person makes those points about the scenes that we have seen, about the execution, but it should not be then translated into some sort of excuse for the crimes he committed against his own people," his reverence lectured, noting in passing that "the people who he killed deliberately as an act of policy", rather than as collateral damage, ran into "hundreds of thousands" whom it would be wrong to "lurch into a position of forgetting" just because Saddam's execution was also carried out in a wrong and unacceptable manner, which we must never forget or excuse while not forgetting or excusing the crimes Saddam committed against his own people, whose sovereign, independent government, which they had the privilege of electing thanks in part to the efforts of his reverence, has just strung Saddam up in such a wrong and unacceptable fashion, and so, it would seem, ad infinitum. That latest celebrity residence which his reverence has blessed with his jet-setting presence over the holiday season must be home to some rather anomalous people, who clearly have been buttonholing his reverence day and night in order to urge him to excuse the hanging on account of the victims, or to forget the victims on account of the hanging, in defiance of what any sensible, moderate person, such as George W Bush's favourite doggie, would do.