That's the angst that any decent person should experience contemplating capital punishment.

I fault George W. Bush for running the system of slaughterhouses in Texas with such enthusiasm, and for his willingness to stand on a hill of corpses to advance his political career. As you point out, some percentage of those he ordered killed were innocent; but that's a thought that people like Bush are careful to never let cross their minds.

I think my point is that to some degree the decision to execute a wrongdoer isn't about justice, so much as whether the death will have a positive effect on society as a whole. If you don't trivialize capital punishment by using it as the first resort, it can stand as a poweful statement about good and evil.

The misdeeds of a leader represent a special category in human affairs, one that tugs at our primate instincts. We're well-equipped to examine another tribe and judge the actions of its leader; and we have a tendency to then start looking closely at our own alpha and gauge whether he too is capable of such misbehavior. It's no coincidence that other leaders feel compelled to denounce a villain such as Saddam; they know that their own people might tend to make comparisons and so they take great pains to distance themselves. Saddam Hussein put every leader everywhere on the spot to prove he/she is better than that.

Thus the symbolism. We derive some reassurance from seeing the state dealing with misdeeds at the level of leadership. In many ways, the execution of Saddam Hussein was a matter for the top levels of our civilization to work out. We in the peanut gallery are judging them all by how they deal with, as we see it, one of their own who went rogue. If they had failed to accept that responsibility, it would undermine our confidence in the trustworthiness of our own leadership.

There's an epic symbolism in the death of Saddam Hussein. It's a powerful story that will be handed down through years, an object lesson and a warning that serves to reinforce our understanding of good and evil. It matters little to us that the state can execute the relatively powerless; it means everything that the state can deal with the powerful as they deserve.