Was the Saddam hanging justice or revenge?

The Latin lex talionis means the law of retaliation. Usually we think of the goal of this law as a core element of early biblical justice, familiarly expressed as, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, a life for a life."

One time I was teaching a Jewish Studies class about how Talmudic law interprets virtually all retaliation in terms of monetary compensation. The Talmud provides methods to determine what is the money value of the damages to an eye, the cost of pain, medical expenses, loss of income, suffering and humiliation.

This is a qualitative advance over the previous forms of justice via the literal direct retaliation of an eye for an eye, I explained.

A student raised his hand and asked, “How can you say the biblical idea is justice? It is barbaric to take out an eye. What kind of biblical morality is that?”

Momentarily I was caught off guard. Then I replied, “By the standards of our developed sense of civilization you are right. But imagine what came before the biblical reforms. If I put out your eye, then you took vengeance on my entire family, and I in turn came to wipe out your whole tribe. In comparison, the biblical scales of lex talionis were a step forward in civilization. The bible said that vengeance must be measured and managed.

And the Talmudic interpreters carried this notion further forward. They precluded direct physical retaliation and prescribed that money substitutes for bodily revenge.

Fast forward now to our world. We are taught to believe that it is governed by law meant to preserve universal order and to achieve justice. As such surely we reject the notion that one tribe may use laws as just another way to take vengeance on another tribe, regardless of the latter's brutality.

In our world we take for granted that the biblical "law" of lex talionis – a tooth for a tooth - is an outgrown quasi-legal principle. In modern civilization, it does not qualify as a principled or moral law. All it ever did was to balance tribal revenge, to keep it from getting out-of-hand. It was an improvement over a village massacre for an eye.

Merely managing our basest impulses has never been the civilized goal of the rule of law. We believe that it embodies ideals like justice, liberty, equality and that it be used to foster a good, ethical and moral life and to punish and deter crimes and evil.

Using courts as a sophisticated way to wreak a bloodthirsty revenge is actually a perversion of justice.

So now we ask, Was the Saddam hanging the immoral and bloodthirsty revenge of George W. Bush and the Shiites? Was the whole point of the invasion and war a veiled means for W to seek out and kill Saddam in revenge because in 1991 Hussein threatened to assassinate his father George Sr.?

Were the Shiite judges and executioners gleeful to hasten the death of Saddam to fulfill their need for blood vengeance against Sunni brutality? If so, then the hanging was a new low point in Middle Eastern society and a black chapter in the history of the American civilization.

Watch and listen to the cell phone video of Saddam’s hanging. You will hear the derision and mocking that is evidence of vengeance, not of justice.

Was the trial really about bringing to justice a man of evil for his crimes against humanity?

Or is it more fitting to drop the pretense that we and our partners acted out of any moral motive, any ethical imperative, any thirst for justice.

Would it have been better to say what we suspect motivated the whole process? To hell with law and justice. We wanted and got our revenge.