the meaningless death of Saddam Hussein

“Man, seized suddenly with a divine fury, alien both to hatred and to anger, advances on the field of battle without knowing what he wants nor even what he is doing. What is this terrible enigma? Nothing is more contrary to his nature, and nothing repulses him less: he performs with enthusiasm that which horrifies him. Have you ever remarked that, in the heat of battle, man never disobeys? He might well massacre Nerva or Henri IV, but the most abominable tyrant, the most insolent butcher of human flesh, will never hear, there: we no longer wish to serve you. A revolt on the field of battle, an accord for mutually embracing each other and denying the will of a tyrant, this is a phenomenon that does not present itself to my memory. Nothing resists, nothing can resist the force that pulls man into combat; innocent murderer, passive instrument of a fearful hand, he plunges with bowed head into the abyss he has dug all by himself; he receives death without even thinking that it is he who has made death.
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Thus we see ceaselessly accomplished, from the gnat to the human, the great law of the violent destruction of living beings. The entire earth, continually imbibed with blood, is nothing but an immense altar where all that lives must be immolated without end, without measure, without let-up, right up to the consummation of all things, right up to the extinction of evil, right up to the death of death.”. – Joseph De Maistre, les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg

And so the sideshow is hung, instead of being strung up a la Mussolini when he was captured. Undoubtedly, immediate execution would have been both more appropriate and would have saved us the propaganda joke that has taken place since 2004. The New York Times, demonstrating de Maistre’s opinion of the fundamentally murderous nature of man, publishes a lot of the usual drivel, emitted from an unearned but assumed elevated moral plateau. John Burns’ piece uses the word evil a lot – except about state sanctioned murder, which, as De Maistre says, is irresistible, a force that pulls us all, head bowed, into the abyss we have dug ourselves. The Iraq war is this moment’s abyss. The kangaroo court that sentenced Saddam was careful not to tread on American toes. Thus, the Iraqis will never get a nice courtroom account of how, exactly, that war with Iran was financed. The Warmonger crowd in the States is forever harping on who supplied the weapons – the U.S. supplying very few of them, although of course only the U.S. would use its Navy to protect Iraqi shipping – as though nations were gifting the Meatman with weapons systems. As we know from the recent dustup about BAE, in which Tony Blair kowtowed from the very bottom of his Christian convictions to the anti-semitic tyranny of Saudi Arabia in order to sell them 30 billion dollars worth of WMD, all the trails of blood, here, are prefigured by trails of $$$. One trail, even now, goes trickling out from the Iraq government every month as it still, incredibly, pays Kuwait for the loans Kuwait made, with definite consultation with the U.S., in the 80s to keep Iraq battling Iran. All, of course, justified by the U.S. sense of entitlement. That sense which is leading the U.S. to the farther reaches of disaster in the Middle East – 2007 being the Year of the Moron, in which our Surgers will lament our lack of will in op ed pieces in the Washington Post, while kids they could give a fuck about get their nuts blown off in Iraq, and Iraqis that Americans would just as soon eat, whole – this being a cannibal nation – get blown in thousand to bits in the streets of cities we have ‘reconstructed’. Ah yes, let us remember that Kuwait had the good sense to retain, as its lobbyists for bleeding Iraq, Madeleine Albright and James Baker – who had their little spoons out for an extra serving of blood pudding.

Nobody thinks, at this point, that another execution or killing in Iraq is going to stop the mass killings. Well, perhaps President Bush, a man who has been wrong about almost everything for the last six years. Or is it everything? LI can’t remember when he was right about anything, but surely he doesn’t have enough talent to have that much anti-talent. His mediocrity does not disguise any hidden genius – he is what he is, a half educated scion of a rich house, elevated by the scruff of his neck from one post to another, each more inappropriate, who was destined to restore a Texas ranch, smoke pot, and cut cypress while boring his wife with his homemade Christian philosophy, but has been inflicted on this nation for our sins. There is a sense of futility, in the States, that haloes any of the "good news" from Iraq. Good. The demoralization of the U.S. war effort proceeds apace. This blog, at least, is trying to stab that effort in the back, and promote the Vietnam-Iraq syndrome to such an extent that the U.S. start seriously demilitarizing.

We will surely hear Saddam’s name a lot in the next couple weeks. And it will all be utterly meaningless jabber.

We must bring down the system of perpetual war.