[Ramrod]

Two interesting letters in todays Telegraph

Saddam Hussein's death came at the hands of "a sectarian lynch mob". Elsewhere there is a sense of revulsion at the way Saddam was subjected to goading and taunting in his final moments. While we in the West rightly view these events with, at the least, distaste, unfortunately it shows once again that we don't understand the Iraqi and Middle Eastern cultures.

The death of Saddam surely followed the lines of thousands of executions he himself had ordered. Not only were his victims taunted: they were subject to torture before their deaths.

While this is no excuse for doing the same to Saddam, it is unreasonable to expect that the Shia would not dance for joy at the death of Saddam.

The belief that Iraqis should think in the same way as we do encapsulates the difficulties faced by the West in Iraq and the Middle East at large.

Saddam was going to be 70 years old in four months, and, according to the Iraqi penal code, men over 70 cannot be subject to the death penalty.

The first seems to imply that we in the West are (once again) being condescending and imperialistic by tutting over how Arabs executed one of their own in their own country. The second offers a reason for the unseemly haste......