Perplexed by execution outrage

To the editor:Saddam Hussein personified the old dictum, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The recent macabre photos of his corpse reminded me of Shelley's poem "Ozymandias," which reads, in part:

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, ...

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Since Saddam was responsible for the deaths of more Muslims than any other modern person, I was surprised and perplexed by the outrage expressed by many other Middle Eastern Muslims at how he died. I could not care less about the respect, or lack thereof, shown this mass murderer.

To me this is analogous to an improbable and fictitious scenario in which the Jewish people would protest the way we killed Hitler.

My wife's uncle, a World War II pilot, who was shot down behind enemy lines on D-Day and is still living, had a sign on his desk that said, "Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out."

Dr. ED MASTERS, Sikeston, Mo.