A: I guess what's different is that it's a very politically explosive issue. We mustn't be too dogmatic about politics. I do believe that forgiveness needs to be considered a good deal more by people as something that sometimes societies need -- not only individuals. For me, the big question about how you treat Saddam Hussein, who's a very bad man, is: What will be the impact of the way he's treated upon the society? That is, Iraqi society first, and our own, too.
If we keep the question on the great terrorists such as Saddam Hussein, we make it the most difficult question of all. But when we are asking about, you might say, the ordinary murderers in this society, it shows, I think, a great doubt as to whether or not that murderer is capable of being reformed and restored -- and also whether society can be the better restored if it does not go kill people at the rate that we are now killing them. Of course, the possibility of making a mistake in an execution has now been pretty well looked at, with DNA development.
Q: We talk about the pursuit of justice in the case of Saddam Hussein, and yet justice in the eyes of the Iraqis may be different from justice in the eyes of Americans and the West. Are they reconcilable?
A: They may not be reconcilable. There is a case for political prudence in some of this. I think about what the Allies in the Napoleonic wars finally did to Napoleon. Now, Napoleon killed his hundreds of thousands. He is not my hero. Instead of killing him, they sent him off first to Elba, finally off to St. Helena, way off of South America. Not that the British would not have loved to have killed him, but it was politically prudent not to do so just to get him out of the way.
Now, killing somebody is the ultimate way of getting somebody out of the way; but in the case of not killing Napoleon, there was a political reason not to do so, because there were an awful lot of Frenchmen who would have had the more resentment of Britain if that had been done.
Q: What political reason would there be for not killing Saddam Hussein?
A: There are two reasons. One is it doesn't bring back any of his victims to life. The second one is that the precedent of capital punishment, I believe, is bad for society, generally. I'd have to say, in my humble judgment, it's bad for Iraq as well.
Q: Even though that's what most Iraqis might want?
A: Yes. Unless we're just going to be utter relativists in ethics, we have to have the right to disagree with some other culture's consensus. And they have the right to disagree with our consensus. Somebody said, "Explanation is where the mind is at rest." Principles in ethics are where the mind may be at rest, too.
Q: There are those who say they condemn the execution of Saddam Hussein, but as you have stated, we ourselves have executed more people than the other western industrialized countries combined.
A: That's right. I can only say it would be only consistent for Americans to get rid of capital punishment, and that is a claim that I make in other circles and have long made. [It's] not an easy question, because even in the European Union these days, there are numbers of people in the publics of the European nations who think they ought to get capital punishment back again. So the argument goes on, and perhaps there's no easy settlement of it.
Q: Do religions of the world -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam -- define justice differently than the secular world?
A: There often are some differences, yes, though there is also some kinship. The relationship of mercy to justice is a perfectly legitimate, secular question as well as a religious question. Often, forgiveness has been said to be a strictly religious "something." One of the reasons I wrote AN ETHIC FOR ENEMIES was in order to make forgiveness a socially important matter and a secularly important matter, too.
But it's certainly true that some religions, especially Christianity, have a stronger emphasis on forgiveness than some of the other religions. But both Judaism and Islam do have forgiveness in their theology. Every High Holiday, on Yom Kippur, Jews are supposed to confess their sins to each other and engage in forgiveness, especially if forgiveness is asked for.
Q: But Judaism acknowledges the propriety of the death penalty.
A: Some Jews do and some don't. Many parts of the Hebrew Bible do that, and some of my Christian friends who champion capital punishment would say, "Well, it's in the Bible." [But] we don't burn witches at the stake, and we don't execute homosexuals now in this society, and I regard that as a moral gain. Not everything that is stated in the Bible is good for all the centuries. And it's certainly true that the founder of Christianity, Jesus, set the great examples of forgiveness that have made Christians always aware that forgiveness is the ultimate form of love. You saw that at work in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission at times in which there was a transaction of forgiveness between the victims and the perpetrators. But it wasn't easy. Anybody who thinks forgiveness is easy has not tried it.
Q: Notwithstanding the atrociousness of the crimes and the will of the Iraqi people, what is to be gained by sparing Saddam Hussein his life?
A: [What is] to be gained is the setting of a precedent that excludes counterviolence or violence in kind from a legal system. It will distinguish the legal system from the instrument of revenge over against the instrument of a justice defined as having in it something like mercy and concern for the decrease of violence in the society.
I don't think that anyone who has studied social violence can doubt that violence is a kind of a disease. Once it gets going, it goes on a rampage through the society. And we can talk about a feud, or we can also talk about the way in which wars degenerate into revenge and counter-revenge and become a destruction of human life that could go on forever. Again, that's what the ancient Greek philosophers really were very concerned about -- the playwrights, especially -- when they were trying to limit the capacity of revenge to take over a society and, in effect, to dissolve the society.
Q: So what are the primary goals of punishing Saddam Hussein?
A: Well, first of all, to advertise that he is guilty of great wrong. A second reason is to put him in some position of limitation so he won't have the power to do that again. I think after the Napoleonic example, he ought to be taken out of Iraq -- exiled. The punishment has a kind of justice in it that advertises that this society is not going to let criminals be subject to impunity, that is, no punishment. There is a cost to be paid.
Q: The rule of law?
A: Yes, the rule of law. By all means.
Q: Could the trial of Saddam Hussein have an impact on nation building in Iraq?
A: Oh, I think so. By all means -- especially if the judges can be so set against some of the things that he did, that they will refuse to do the same to him. They're building a culture, in other words -- rebuilding it. The culture of revenge is what, for me, is the great danger. A culture of some ability to live with the people who've done you wrong without either doing the wrong in return or simply killing them -- that, for me, is the way down to a kind of disaster that we have many social, historical examples of. I'd like to think, for example, that if it is true -- and I just say "if" -- that revenge is very natural, let's say, in the Islamic world, I'd like to see it become less natural.
When I think about what happened on 9/11, the deaths and the attack on this country, and when I go through those airport security measures and so forth, something in me really rises up that's like hate. I know the temptations to hate, and I have not been the direct object of some of those awful things yet. But everybody has that temptation, I think. And I do not want a society to be my ally in nourishing my hatred. I want it to be the ally of nourishing something more just than revenge, more hopeful of restoring my relationship to the very people who have harmed me. That may be a high ethic; but in the end, it is an ethic for life rather than for death.
Q: How should the new Iraqi regime deal with hate?
A: Well, for one thing, it should provide occasions in which people can express their hates. My heart goes out to that Iraqi who said, "I'd like to see Saddam tortured and tortured and killed and then raised from the dead and tortured and tortured again." I understand a little bit of that kind of feeling, and they have to be let out. In South Africa, they let it out publicly. They let the cries of injustice come in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A society must find a way to pay attention to victims. For me, that again is why the justice question is larger than how you deal with a particular criminal. Let us pay more attention to the hurts that linger after the specific crime is over.
Q: What do you say to that person who wants to see Saddam executed again and again?
A: First of all, I'd try to understand that. I'd have to shake my head and say the trouble is we can't kill him 20,000 times -- not really. And the other thing is, I'd have to say that a society that imitates an evil is simply perpetuating it. Not to imitate the evil that is done unto one is exactly where the justice question comes to bear. And that, it seems to me, is a matter of human welfare and not just, you might say, a strict principle of justice. [It] has to do with what's good for the rest of us -- not simply what's good or bad for the criminal.
Q: And you think it's better for Iraq and for the rest of the world for Saddam Hussein to spend the rest of his life in prison, rather than be executed?
A: I do.
