Death Sentence for Saddam

So the Saddam Hussein trial is over at long last, and it looks like, unless his sentence is successfully appealed, the ex-dictator will hang. I'm certainly no apologist for Hussein -- I'll leave that to Ramsey Clark -- but the verdict makes me sick. Although for a brief moment at the outset of the war in Iraq I succumbed to the temptation of "left-interventionism" a la Christopher Hitchens -- the idea that the West can and ought to actively enforce human rights through intervention, combat dictators, and export liberal/progressive ideals around the world -- I quickly recanted and have ever since been a firm believer that the war in general, and our government's efforts at state-building in particular, will fail horrendously. Hussein's death sentence seems to me an indication of that failure -- we've now fought a war to build a state that, in the 21st century, maintains the death penalty, enacting it no less by use of the gallows! So much for progressive values. I can't wait to read what the (anti-death penalty) European press has to say about this one...