The end of a beautiful friendship

Chris Floyd on the (probably) soon-to-be-deceased Iraqi leader (or, possibly, his Body Double #7):

The decades-long record of American collusion in the crimes of Saddam Hussein is clear and overwhelming -- and has been documented not only by news organizations like the Los Angeles Times but also by investigations of the United States Congress. Yet not a word of this is breathed in the media or Congress today; it is as if it never existed. And now the American-formed, American-backed government is about to take Saddam from American custody and hang him on an American-built gallows. It's like Al Capone throwing the switch with Frank Nitti in the chair.

Few will mourn Saddam -- a thug enthroned with the help of the CIA and sustained in power for years by the Bush Faction which is now about to kill him. The falling out of thieves ends ever thus. But far more disturbing is the way that the memory of even very recent, very public events can be manipulated and erased for sinister ends: in this case, to justify the mass murder of more than 600,000 innocent people. In the fever dreams of dominance and divine favor that pollute the minds of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the idea has taken hold that the blood of Saddam Hussein will somehow wash the clotted viscera of dead children from their hands.

It will not. It will lead only to more blood. But this is nothing now to such men. They are each, like Saddam, like Macbeth, "in blood stepp'd so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er. Strange things I have in head, that will to hand."

Strange things indeed are in their heads, and we have yet to sup full of the horrors they are willing into being.