So they caught Saddam Hussein

This most exciting of events happened at 8.30pm Baghdad time on December the 13th 2003. All through today (the day after) the news has been swamped with images of the bearded Saddam Hussein looking old and harried, and rather peacefully submitting to an examination by a US army doctor. Talk about surreal.

This all happened after the US, and UK invaded Iraq because they were worried about Weapons of Mass destruction, which haven't been found, and there was very little evidence for before the war. Saddam and his kids fled, and launched insurgent attacks on the invasion forces. This has become a continuing source of worry and embarassment to the occupying forces, and things were beginning to look oddly Vietnam like, until yesterday.

The real impact of this won't be understood for several weeks, and maybe seen in a subsidence or intensification on attacks on the invading armies currently occupying Iraq. This man was the central pillar of the whole 'axis of evil' nonsense that the West has been spouting over the past few years in its War on Islam. Whoops, I meant War on Terror. The fact that most Muslims on the planet will be rejoicing at the capture of this secular socialist nightmarish dreg of a human being who had the audacity to call himself Muslim while systematically killing over a million of them will perhaps escape the notice of those glued to their television sets as they watch Blair and Bush flap their lips and try to convince everyone that they were right all along.

I guess I'm a little bitter.

The point here is that Saddam Hussein would have been better brought to justice by Muslims than non-Muslims, and if those Islamic political organisations hadn't been handcuffed by the West he would have been dead or imprisoned a long long time ago, before so many people died and were tortured needlessly. As it is, this becomes a propaganda coup for another invading force, which will sow another generation of young men and women with a blinding hatred for America. So another cycle of repression, revenge, and violence will begin.

It might have been better if Saddam had done what Hitler did, but then again, who knows what lies in the heart of any man. And Saddam, for all I despise him, for all that he is loathed and reviled by the world, is all too human. He struggled to survive against forces that most of us wouldn't even believe, and he did so for a very long time. He's sixty six years old at the time of his capture, and he looks every day of it. They took his people, country, they took his sons, and now they've taken him.

Is this really something to rejoice about?

America seems to think so.

I'm not bitter per se, but there's a little Church Lady in my head saying "How conve-e-e-e-e-enient!" Now Bush's popularity ratings are going to surge again (Bush: "Thanks, morons!"), and they're going to stay high as the Democrats trash each other into the ground through the primary season. Then, right as Howard Dean gets the nomination (and well after everyone knows, courtesy of Dick Gephardt, how much of a closet Republican he is), they'll suddenly find Osama bin Laden! You can almost hear the white people chanting in the shadow of the World Trade Center: "Four more years! Four more years!"

So then our little asshat President is going to have four years as a lame duck, serving up and weildering triple-secret flaming executive powers without any court of public opinion to keep him in check: only a Republican Congress that's too busy counting their stacks of MTF* krugerrands to care. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton plots in the darkness to lead a coup, starting in Harlem and spreading across America until Bush fires the nukes and blows everything up.

So, you see, that's why I feel rather nervous about this recent development. Hussein was a very bad man, but did it have to be Bush catching him? It's as if Chiang Kai-Shek teamed up with Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler.**

But, of course, the answer to my question is that Bush's political team knew what they were getting themselves into. This isn't a quagmire for them: it's a quagmire for the rest of us, who believe in civil liberties and fair elections and not pissing all over our friends overseas. Now we have to live with their bullshit for at least four more years. But, y'know, it's no big deal. I'll just move to Canada or something.

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*MTF = Moonies, tobacco, and firearms
**There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

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I've been getting a lot of flak over this, so maybe I should make it a bit more clear: I wasn't rooting for Saddam. I don't condone anything he did. I wouldn't want him to be back in control of Iraq, and I'm glad that he's gone and that those guys have some chance, however remote, of forming something approaching a democracy, which nobody in the Middle East has managed to do yet. Again, I'm not bitter. I'm just ambivalent. This is a victory for the coalition, but it's also a victory for the Republicans, and anyone who doesn't think they're going to use it for political gain is living on the Good Ship Lollipop.