Thomas Friedman ponders a hanging and a funeral, and Maureen Dowd goes to the funeral and ponders what people were thinking. She uses BIG words, like "inchoate" and "solipsistic." We're all very impressed...

Last Saturday was a strange day. It started with the hanging of Saddam Hussein. The more I read about the hasty, quasi-legal maneuvers used by Iraq’s Shiite ;eaders to rush Saddam to the gallows on a Muslim holiday, Id al-Adha, and the more I watched the grainy cellphone video of the event, in which a guard is heard taunting Saddam with chants of “Moktada! Moktada!” — the Shiite cleric whose death squads have killed hundreds of Sunnis — and the more I read of the insults Saddam spat back, the more it resembled a tribal revenge ritual rather than the culmination of a constitutional process in which America should be proud to have participated.

Bassam al-Husseini, an aide to Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, was quoted by the BBC as saying Saddam’s execution was “an Id (sic) gift to the Iraqi people.” Many Sunnis would not share that view. For his part, Saddam, a Sunni, used his last breaths to spew vitriol against “the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians.” For Persians, read Shiites.

No wonder the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, reported from Baghdad: “Altogether, the execution as we now see it is shown to be an ugly, degrading business, which is more reminiscent of a public hanging in the 18th century than a considered act of 21st-century official justice. Under Saddam Hussein, prisoners were regularly taunted and mistreated in their last hours. The most disturbing thing about the new video of Saddam’s execution for crimes precisely like this is that it is all much too reminiscent of what used to happen here.”

But as I said, Saturday was a strange day. After watching Saddam’s hanging in the morning, I was sitting at my computer late in the afternoon and suddenly heard the strains of “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” being played on the TV in the next room. When I checked what was going on, I saw President Ford’s coffin being unloaded from Air Force One.

I have to admit I got a lump in my throat watching that scene and listening to that stirring melody. Saddam’s execution was a snapshot of a country divided. Gerald Ford’s funeral was a snapshot of a country united — political supporters and opponents alike paying tribute to a president, who was surrounded by an honor guard representing every color of the American rainbow and whose place in history was secured by an act of pardon and national healing.

How fortunate to live in a country where this is the political norm, built up over generations.

“Because of our basic unity, we can afford to be divided on specific issues,” said Michael Mandelbaum, author of “The Case for Goliath.” “Democracy is about differences and contesting them in the public sphere, and it only works when there is basic agreement about the fundamentals. We should feel fortunate that we have a democratic history and set of beliefs. Those beliefs can be imported by those who want them and don’t have them, but they can’t be exported. We can only create a context where others would want to import them.”

The raw tribal theatrics of Saddam’s hanging highlight just how few of these values Iraq has imported. We are to blame for not creating the security needed for those values to take hold. But not enough of our Iraqi allies have risen to the occasion, either. It was our closest Iraqi partners who oversaw Saddam’s tribal hanging. We have to look that in the eye.

Saddam deserved to die 100 deaths. But imagine if Iraq’s Shiite leaders had surprised everyone, declared that there had been enough killing in Iraq and commuted Saddam’s sentence to life in prison — sparing his life in hopes of uniting the country rather than executing him and dividing it further. I don’t know if it would have helped, but I do know Iraqis have rarely surprised us with gestures of reconciliation — only with new ways to kill each other.

Now President Bush wants a “surge” of more U.S. troops to Baghdad, in one last attempt to bring order. Whenever I hear this surge idea, I think of a couple who recently got married but the marriage was never very solid. Then one day they say to each other, “Hey, let’s have a baby, that will bring us together.” It never works.

If the underlying union is not there, adding a baby won’t help. And if the underlying willingness to share power and resources is not present among the major communities in Iraq, adding more U.S. troops won’t help either. Adding more troops makes sense only if it’s to buy more time for positive trends that have already begun to appear on the horizon. I don’t see them.

As Saddam’s hanging underscored, Iraqis are doing things their way. So maybe it’s time to get out of their way.

And now for Maureen Dowd:

It was a scene that Mary McCarthy could have written the devil out of: a funeral for a fine, bland fellow that filled everybody with unfine, unbland thoughts. The formal serenity of the service, disguised, but only barely, the virulent rivalries and envies and grudges and grievances that have roiled this group for many decades.

None of the eulogists noted the irony that the man who ushered out one long national nightmare had ushered in another, the one we’re living in now. It was Gerald Ford, after all, who gave America the gift of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — the gift that keeps on taking.

The two former Ford officials, who doomed Iraq to civil war and despoiled American values, were honorary pallbearers yesterday, as was that other slippery and solipsistic courtier, Henry Kissinger.

The Group was even more on edge because of a remarkable trellis of peppery opinions that had tumbled out of the man in the coffin, posthumously. The late president, hailed as the most understated and decent guy in the world, had given a series of interviews on the condition they be held until his death — a belated but
bracing smackdown of many of his distinguished mourners.

It was impossible not to wonder what the luminaries were truly thinking, as they sat
listening to fugues of Bach and Brahms and encomiums to the ordinary-guy leader.

Nancy Reagan’s imperturbable expression behind her big square sunglasses did not disguise the gloating words visible in the bubble over her head: “And they call this a funeral?”

It could not compare, of course, to the incredible Princess of Wales treatment that her husband had for his state funeral. And Nancy, hypersensitive to any slights to her Ronnie, would not have been pleased with Mr. Ford’s interview with Michael Beschloss published in Newsweek, in which he blamed Ronald Reagan for costing him the 1976 election by challenging his nomination and then failing to hit the trail for him.

It was good of Mr. Ford to bring 41 and 43 together in a solemn respite from their uneasy competition over Iraq.

“Told you so, you sons of guns — we were right to stop at Safwan and stay out of Baghdad,” the father’s bubble read, as he watched Rummy and Henry the K, both of whom had treated Poppy with such veiled contempt, as though he were a feather duster. “Those vicious Moktada-loving Shiites dancing around Saddam’s dead body prove that Brent and I were right.”

Lynne Cheney glared at Poppy as he gave his eulogy, knowing that he privately thinks that the vice president has destroyed not only Iraq and American foreign policy, but the Bush family name. Her storm cloud of a bubble is expurgated.

Hillary’s bubble was full of mockery for another New Yorker in the National Cathedral: “You think you’re so smart, Rudy, but you leave your entire presidential battle plan in a hotel room for your rivals to find? The victim role doesn’t suit you.” Condi’s bubble was as opaquely dark as Hillary’s was risibly light — drooping with the inchoate fear that her nearby erstwhile mentor, Brent Scowcroft, had been right
about Iraq after all.

As Poppy spoke from the altar, praising Mr. Ford’s generosity, he must have been mulling that his predecessor was ungenerous in spitting on him from the grave. Mr. Ford told Mr. Beschloss that Bush Sr. had sold out the party to the hard right and had taken a phony, pandering position on abortion.

Poppy had to have enjoyed watching Dr. K get up and lavish praise on his old boss, after Mr. Ford had sniggered to Bob Woodward that the “coy” Bavarian diva had “the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.”

W. graciously walked Betty Ford down the aisle, even as he must have curdled inside about her husband’s telling Mr. Woodward that it had been “a big mistake” on the part of W., Dick Cheney and Rummy to justify the Iraq war with nonexistent W.M.D. “I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security,” he said.

Ex-presidents weren’t supposed to criticize sitting presidents. Adding insult to injury, Woodward himself was in the cathedral. How did he manage to get all these deathbed confessions, W. had to wonder. “Jeez,” his bubble read, “does he have an interview with my old man in the can?”

Rummy’s pop-up was as cocky as ever: “Golly, I’ve been gone three weeks and things are really looking up in Iraq.”

James Baker’s secret thoughts were as bright as his tie: “I tried to help you out, son, but you’re too dang stubborn. Or ‘resolute.’ Stubolute. A clear case of TMC — too much Cheney.”

Dick Cheney’s bubble was trouble: “I’m surging, I’m surging, I’m surging.”