By Chris Rooney

I feel like I ought to say something about the death sentence pronounced over Saddam Hussein. Perhaps this will just result in me sticking my foot in my mouth but even though the man was a genocidal tyrant and did a lot of damage to all the people in his country who he didn’t have on the payroll, it is still a fucked up and strangely tragic thing that he’s going to be hanged.

He was an asshole to be sure, but geo-politically speaking he was a dime-store thug who in the end has become a straw man for American foreign policy. In the end his trial and death will only be added to the laundry list of lies that lead to the Iraq war and continue to be used to justify North American military interventionism in the Middle East.

I bet he never would have guessed as he shook the hand of Donald Rumsfeld in that historic photograph from the 1980’s that the very same man, a chief architect in both his rise to power and his subsequent downfall, would likely be toasting his execution a few decades later, Machiavelli would be pleased.

Lastly, the things I find most unsettling about this event are it’s likely after effects. Saddam’s final words in the courtroom were chosen well:

"Allahu Akbar!" (God is Great) and "Long live Iraq! Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6117910.stm

“Long live the Iraqi people”… with nothing left to him and nothing but a kangaroo court standing between him, and whatever fate is waiting for him in the afterlife, he would fashion himself into a martyr. Coming generations of militant Iraqi nationalists, angry, powerless kids more than willing to look the other way at his records of torture, the torture of their neighbours, their fellow citizens to hold his image high as a champion against American Imperialism.

Meanwhile in Washington, in their mad rush to secure some kind of shallow victory at the polls this year those very same imperialist traitors have basically committed a human sacrifice under the thin guise of justice and in the name of international laws that they have no regard for themselves.

And now that their election race is over and their sacrifice was a dud they’ve thrown their new political opponents a bone in the shape of Donald Rumsfeld, another modern monster, and like Ashcroft and Powell before him, another piece of dirty laundry hung out to dry in the stale winds of Virginia. Nothing has really changed, it only becomes more sordid as new actors enter from the wings.

I feel like mourning.