Two and a half decades ago, Saddam Hussein ordered the killing of nearly 200 of his own countrymen. On December 31st, 2006, he was executed by his new Iraqi government. Hussein had the nearly 200 Iraqis murdered because of their opposing religious and, consequently, political beliefs. Since then, Hussein was labeled a “mass-murderer” and “evil” by more than one United States president.
Was Hussein a mass-murderer? Yes. Was he evil? Maybe. Although killing other humans is wrong on almost all levels, what Hussein did in the eighties is what leaders have been doing the since the beginning of civilization and still practice today; that is, killing to protect their and their country’s way of life. Political leaders throughout history that been “murderers” in different ways ranging from overseeing soldiers that have killed civilians to ordering an execution without a proper trail. Those same leaders have been labeled anything from peace keepers to Satan. Two examples from the World War II era are Adolf Hitler and Harry S. Truman. Obviously, Hitler tried the destroy the European Jewry by literally rounding up European Jews and killing them in cost-effective concentration camps. On a different level, as the President of the United States, Truman had to decide whether to have a full-scale invasion on mainland Japan (costing millions of military and civilian lives) or to drop two nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities killing hundreds of thousands, of which he chose the latter. I am not trying to put Hitler and Truman on the same level because they are not. BUt they both made decisions that ended up in the death of many humans.
A little known “mass-killer” was the United States president, Andrew Jackson. As a general in the United States army (under presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson), Jackson and his army slaughtered thousands of American Indians in the American South and Midwest. He was so barbaric that he would impail the heads of his victims on sticks outside of where the tribe used to live to warn other Indians that they were next. And yet, in any high school history book, Jackson is seen not only as a great president, but a great American and his brutal conquest against the American Indians is euphemized, if mentioned at all.
In the new millenium, there have been two major political leaders that could be considered “mass-killers” and they are on opposing sides of the “War on Terror.” The first is Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden as claimed to have orchrastrated the 9/11 attacks on America killing thousands, he is also responsible for numerous other terrorist attacks that add up to thousands of deaths. The other is George W. Bush who ordered the death of hundreds as the governor of Texas (a feat unmatched by any otehr governor in Texas history) and seen the death of thousands in the controversial, pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, that he ordered. Both of these men are responsible for thousands of deaths in the past decade, but the chances are that you only see one of them as evil and that depends on whose government and ideals you live under.
All of the forementioned men (Hussein, Hitler, Truman, Jackson, bin Laden, and Bush) are responsible for countless deaths, but each one has been viewed differently in the press and in history. During the 1930s & 40s, Hitler was at a God-like level in Germany, but now he is almost unanimously called evil. It is hard to find anyone who would make a different decision than what Truman made to end World War II, but there are those that see him as one of the initiators of the nuclear time-bomb of a world that we live in now. The fact is that how governments, the media, and historians view leaders and their decisions to kill for the sake of their country’s way of life varies extremely across the board. Different cultures and countries see different choices and actions differently because each culture has a different way of life to protect. The United States has to protect its western way of life while Al-Quida has to protect whatever is left of it’s non-westernized life. For that reason, no one should execute a leader for doing what he thought was right for his country because no matter how barbaric it may seem to some or many, it may be seen as necessary by others. For that matter, killing anyone – world leader or common criminal – because they killed someone else is hippocritical and barbaric. We learn in preschool that it is not right to hurt someone else because they hurt you; moreover, we learn that it is better to forgive and forget. But for some reason, when we grow up it becomes okay to kill someone else because they have killed someone.
