Lets everyone see the full-on sectarian chaos that this Iraq misadventure brought to a climax. And more importantly, it further deconstructs the myth of the purple fingers (in case there's anyone left who believes in that one); put another nail in the coffin of the  absurd idea that there's some sort of God-sanctioned gift of republican liberty being seized by grateful Iraqis.

Most of all, let all the people who ate up the 2002 propaganda hook line and sinker, let them see what the billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives has bought:  Not protection of us, which would be a proper role for any moral American government, but rather paving the way for fanatic hooligans to execute a rival hooligan.

Most certainly there are still some Americans so foolish that they went to bed the night of Hussein's execution saying, Thank goodness, now we're safer.  They're funny.  

A video of the final minutes of Saddam Hussein, released to the Arab media late Saturday and widely broadcast around the world, demonstrates that the execution of the former Iraqi president was an act of sectarian vengeance by the Shiite Muslim groups placed in power by the US invasion of the country. ...

Beyond the events recorded on the video, the very fact that Mahdi Army loyalists were among the guards in the death chamber and could record the proceedings without hindrance has enormous political significance. It demonstrates the extent to which the US-backed Iraqi regime has become the instrument of factions in the sectarian conflict raging throughout much of Iraq. ...

By Monday, with the digital recording circulating throughout Iraq and the entire Arab and Muslim world, it was clear that for the Maliki government and the US occupation regime the execution had become a political debacle.

Richard Dawkins
In executing Saddam Hussein, we have vandalised a unique resource for political, psychological and historical research.

The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces. This was an opportunity to set the world a good example of civilised behaviour in dealing with a barbarically uncivilised man. In any case, revenge is an ignoble motive. The usual arguments against the death penalty in general apply. If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged. But I want to add another and less obvious reason why we should not have executed Saddam Hussein. His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars.

Imagine, in fancy, that some science fiction equivalent of Simon Wiesenthal built a time machine, travelled back to 1945 and returned to the present with a manacled Adolf Hitler. What should we do with him? Execute him? No, a thousand times no. Historians squabbling over exactly what happened in the Third Reich and the second world war would never forgive us for destroying the central witness to all the inside stories, and one of the pivotal influences on twentieth century history. Psychologists, struggling to understand how an individual human being could be so evil and so devastatingly effective at persuading others to join him, would give their eyeteeth for such a rich research subject. Kill Hitler? You would have to be mad to do so. Yet that is undoubtedly what we would have done if he hadn't killed himself in 1945. Saddam Hussein is not in the same league as Hitler but, nevertheless, in a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data......