January 3, 2007 / By Peter W. Galbraith

IN HIS FINAL minutes, one of Saddam Hussein's executioners shouted, "Go to hell, Saddam." The condemned man replied dryly, "You mean the Iraq that is today." After his body dropped through the trap door, the assembled witnesses chanted Shi'ite slogans.

It was Saddam that turned Iraq into hell during his 35 years in power. He murdered as many as half a million Iraqis and plunged his country into two catastrophic wars with neighboring Iran and Kuwait.

But Saddam was not executed for any of this. Instead, he was hanged for ordering the killing of 148 Shi'ite men and boys in the village of Dujail in reprisal for an assassination attempt that took place there in July 1982. While the trial was criticized by human rights groups, the verdict was consistent with the evidence. Saddam's signature was on the order for the execution and he freely admitted that he had signed the document. His explanation -- that the killings were justified since the would-be killers were linked to the Iranian-backed Dawa Party and Iraq was then at war with Iran -- was no defense. Reprisal killings of innocent people are by definition a crime against humanity.

The manner of Saddam's execution made it clear that Iraq's Shi'ite leaders -- and in particular Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- were more interested in revenge than justice. Al-Maliki, a Dawa Party leader, signed the death warrant in apparent disregard of Article 70 of the Iraqi Constitution that gives Iraq's president and two vice presidents the responsibility for ratifying death sentences.

Saddam's execution meant there would be no accounting for his other crimes: the destruction of the marshes and the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s, the murder of tens of thousands of Shi'ites in the aftermath of the 1991 uprising, the killing of 8,000 members of the Barzani clan in 1983, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and the murder of tens of thousands in various purges over his decades in power.

Obviously, it was never practical to try Saddam Hussein for every crime he committed. But the rush to execution actually interrupted Saddam's ongoing trial on genocide charges in connection with the 1987-1988 "anfal" campaign against Iraq's Kurdish minority. That trial was scheduled to resume Jan. 8 and would have concluded in a matter of months.

The Kurdish genocide was the gravest -- and by far the best documented -- of Saddam's crimes. I stumbled across its beginning in September 1987 when, as a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I got permission to visit Kurdistan. When Haywood Rankin from the US embassy in Baghdad and I crossed from Arab to Kurdish territory, we were amazed that places shown on our maps no longer existed. Later, we came across deserted towns with bulldozers parked next to partially destroyed houses and realized what was happening. By 1990, Saddam had destroyed 4,500 of Iraq's 5,000 villages. He also used chemical weapons to attack at least 200 villages and towns. In September 1988, I led a mission with Chris Van Hollen (now a Maryland congressman) to document a series of bombings on 48 villages that took place days after the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Sixty-five-thousand survivors made it to Turkey and the ones we interviewed provided graphic -- and totally believable -- accounts of what they experienced.

The rubble of destroyed villages combined with eyewitness accounts made for a compelling case. But, Saddam's killers -- bureaucrats that they were -- kept detailed paper records of their work, along with videotapes of executions and torture sessions. The Kurds captured these records during the 1991 uprising that followed the first Gulf War, and a few months later Jalal Talabani (now Iraq's president) gave me custody of 14 tons of documents that eventually went to the National Archives. Supported by a congressional appropriation, Human Rights Watch used the documents to demonstrate that Saddam had committed genocide and thus helped lay the foundation for the case that was eventually brought.

The Kurdish trial also promised to shed light on a deeply amoral period in western diplomacy where the major powers, including the United States, chose to overlook genocide for strategic and economic reasons. According to his former foreign minister, Tariq Azziz, Saddam apparently intended to make an issue of western support in his trial. This could also have been awkward for some in the current administration. While serving in the Reagan or Bush administrations, some of the principals of the current war -- including Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell -- played down the significance of Iraq's use of poison gas, including, in the case of Powell, against the Kurds. And months after the 1988 gas attacks on the Kurds, the current president's father -- with the apparent support of his defense secretary, Richard Cheney -- doubled US financial assistance to Iraq.

An extension of Saddam's life for the few months would have made little difference to his eventual fate. But it would have made an enormous difference to have had an irrefutable record that Saddam was responsible for the genocide against the Kurds. As it is, the door is open to a future leader in Baghdad asserting it was never proven. Saddam's trials could have served as the basis for truth and reconciliation, as similar processes have done in so many other countries. Instead, the hanging will further divide Iraqis, and not just the Sunnis whose protests were predictable. Only President Bush, who still sees al-Maliki as a genuine national leader, could believe Saddam's execution, as it was carried out, to be a milestone on Iraq's path to democracy.

Saddam got the justice he so deserved. The rush to execution by Iraq's revenge-driven sectarian government denied the same to all but the tiniest fraction of his victims.

Peter W. Galbraith is author of "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a war Without End.