Both quotes from the Washington Post:

In Crawford, Tex., President Bush said in a statement, “This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.”

Street violence continued in Iraq with a string of lethal car bombings Saturday. About three hours after the execution, 34 were killed and 58 wounded when a car bomb exploded near a market place in Kufa, a Shiite city near Najaf. Later, 25 people were killed and 65 injured when two car bombs went off in the mostly-Shiite Huriiya area of Baghdad, according to a spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Two other cars blew up, one in the mixed -neighborhood of Dora and one in the mostly-Sunni Sulaikh neighborhood, but information about casualties was not immediately available. It was not clear whether the bombing was in response to Hussein’s execution.

When car bombings and 59+ casualties are such a part of the daily landscape that you’re not sure whether Saddam’s hanging had anything to do with it, I suspect paeans to the rule of law are a bit premature.

Rounding out with some Harpers-style statistics:

Number of Iraqi deaths for which Saddam was found guilty and hanged: 148

Number of Iraqi civilian deaths currently tabulated by Iraq Body Count: 52,139-57,707

Number of Iraqis estimated to have been killed by Saddam in atrocities trials that are now cancelled: “hundreds of thousands”

Number of Iraqis estimated to have been killed in post-Saddam Iraq, according to the Lancet, in the past four years: “We are quite confident that there’s been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher.”

But never mind that. Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead.