It’s very close to the second anniversary of the fall of Saddam, and the news is good. Very very good. For this anniversary season, I think it only fitting that Iraq has just elected Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani to be its interim President.

From this AP article, we hear how the once-beleaguered Kurds received the news:

In the north, Kurds danced in the streets.

Those same streets where so many of them once lay dying from Saddams’s little chemistry experiments.

But there was someone else watching today, someone with a more than mild interest in the proceedings, and I doubt he was dancing:

Ousted members of the country’s former regime ”” including toppled leader Saddam Hussein ”” watched the event on television in their prison cells, Human Rights Minister Bakhtiyar Amin told Al-Arabiya television.

When I picture all the possible punishments for Saddam, it’s hard to know what could actually be appropriate. In the end, nothing–nothing–would be enough, even monstrous sorts of revenge that we, as civilized people, should not tolerate.

But the news today has made me think that perhaps the old saying about justice is true, after all–it grinds slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine. It brought a smile to my lips to picture the old tyrant, accustomed for so many years to wielding the absolute power of death and destruction to all who opposed him, and summarily and preemptorily snuffing out all political opposition, to be sitting in a cell somewhere in Iraq, watching this election on TV.

I don’t even care if he had a beer and a few taco chips while he watched.