Saddam's execution

[tagryn]

Agree with this take by Allahpundit:

I don’t know whose bright idea it was to let three punks in leather jackets and balaclavas take care of business instead of the Iraqi army, but the more I watch it, the more it looks like a hit instead of a state execution.

So what should have been a moment of focus for Iraq's still-forming judicial system became basically a Mafia hit, done by al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Great, just great. As if disarming the militias wouldn't be hard enough without basically allowing them to take the credit for killing Saddam.

It also took me a little while to figure out the significance of the tradition started during Saddam's rule of giving those about to be executed a "red card." Seems most likely to trace to the soccer penalty of the same name which indicates a player has been tossed out of the game. This sounds like the kind of sick joke that Uday Hussein would come up with, and continuing it doesn't make any sense to me, other than "this is the way we've been doing it for a while."