By way of contrast, consider the wasted dramatic potential at the end of the Nuremberg trials, in Germany back in 1946. How did the surviving Nazi bigwigs like von Ribbentrop, Kaltenbrunner, et al. make their stage exits? On a drizzly October morning, they were all hanged by the neck until dead—but in the Nazis' case, the operation was performed in a dull, perfunctory manner, like taking out an overripe garbage pail. No high—fiving by the Soviet and American observers, no taunts at the soon—to—be—dangling—So, who's the master race now, suckah?—no sense of event, no sense of sheer wicked payback.
The bodies were cremated, then the ashes dumped in a rural roadside gutter, to be washed away by the rains, leaving no memorial relics for their followers to rally around. One would almost think the directors of that production were playing to an audience that was tired of war, sick of sending the drama's dialogue—less extras to their deaths in the mud. If the Allies had had any theatrical savvy at all, they could have raised the curtain all over again, sending World War II into an extended revival run.
The Shiites got it right. First you do your dance around the gallows, then you deliver to your Sunni enemies the actual corpse of their leader, for them to mourn and keen and get worked up about. These are people who aren't sick of war, who don't want it to end, at least not until they've wrung a lot more fun out of it. Stay the course; there's no business like show business.
Parties are just another branch of that business. The Third Reich had already gotten its ass kicked at Stalingrad when MC Goebbels took the mic at the Berliner Sportpalast and barked, Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg? Do you want total war? Or to put it another way, Have you had enough fun yet? His audience shouted back that they were ready for more, so Doktor Joseph kicked it up a notch—Nun, Volk, steh' auf, und Sturm, brich los! Stand back, folks, and let the storm break! And just look at all the good film footage we got from that.
Audiences have always appreciated a good exit. None of that sniveling Jimmy Cagney Angels with Dirty Faces shtick for Saddam; when faced with the PR problem of how to make a thuggish mass murderer look good, we found the answer. Right down to makeup and costumes, with Saddam's gray—tinged beard making him look avuncular and—dare we say it?—like one of the good guys in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Just as effective were the ski masks on the executioners, evoking Spielberg's Munich terrorists, as well as the punk convenience—store robbers from Alex Cox's Repo Man.
If only director George Bush had been in charge in 1945, instead of the kind of overly sensitive leaders who could actually lose their taste for other people dying. Think of all the fun we could have had, the USO dances, the boffing your fiancé one last time before he gets on the troop ship, the home front scrimping, the gasoline rationing—well, actually, that last one we still might get.
So the question's the same, though now it's Cecil W. behind the movie camera, turning around from the viewfinder to smile and ask us, "Total war? You know you want it."
Otherwise, Saddam Hussein will have died in vain, and the performance of a lifetime—frankly, he wasn't all that impressive for most of his career, but that last couple of minutes on the scaffold pulled it out for him—will have been a waste, one of the greats playing to an empty house, delivering his last soliloquy—"No, you go to hell"—while the footlights dim and the stagehands strike the set behind him.