Kill 150? Get Executed. Kill Thousands? Get Elected.

Saddam Hussein's shabby, curiously timed conviction is an absolute disgrace to, well, basically everyone. Not that the guy doesn't deserve a conviction for being one of many thugs that America has supported when it was in our interests, demonized when it was not. (For a blast of truth on this score, cue up South Park: Bigger. Longer. Uncut.) But nailing him on one facet of his brutality rather than taking the time to unearth his shady connections to anyone who bought oil and helped bring the street-fighting scumbag to power (and keep him there, until we didn't want him anymore) is a disgrace. That the so-called verdict was timed one day before the midterms is not only an international embrassment, but also a strategy that will ultimately fail.

See, the one thing that the Bush administration and its band of ass-backwards neocons -- especially the gaggle who recently soiled their adult diapers over the fact that Vanity Fair published their honest opinions on the war before the election was even here -- is that no one in the world, except the energy sector and those under Hussein's brutal jackboot, gave two shits about Saddam before 2003. They wanted, and still want, Osama bin Laden's head on a platter. He's the one who killed thousands of Americans, and he's the one who needs to face a war crimes tribunal smack dab in the middle of Manhattan. Sure, Saddam has oil, but America could use justice more than crude right now. And right now, crude is all it has.

Why? Like I said in an earlier post about crunching numbers and counting bodies, data is everything, and the data on this war in Iraq is more depressing than our ongoing Holocene mass extinction event. Sure, Saddam may have killed way more than the 150 Dujail Shiites in 1982, but that's all Iraq's kangaroo court decided to saddle him with. And two things about that stick out:

1) If killing 150 of your own people is a war crime, then what exactly is killing 2,800 of your own people, as Bush has done, to capture, imprison and convict him? And that's only the Americans: We've killed anywhere from 30,000 (Bush's number) to 600,000 (the Lancet's number) Iraqi civilians. Add the uncounted Iraqi combatants to that total and it is entirely possible that, when all the bodies are counted and the numbers are crunched, the Bush administration's neoconservative, neocolonial escapade in the holy land could conceivably be pushing one million dead. Throw that up next to 150 dead and you begin to get the picture. It gets uglier.
2) In 1982, when Saddam was busy terrorizing and executing his doomed Dujail victims, we were his best friends on Earth. In fact, the infamous Rumsfeld-Hussein handshake took place in 1983, after he had been dropping chem weapons on Iran without mercy. Further, as Jeremy Schaill explained in Z Mag, Rumsfeld was the highest-ranking official to meet with Saddam in six years at the time, and later boasted about his efforts in restoring relations with Iraq during his bid for the 1988 Republican nomination. In fact, he was actually in Iraq mending fences when a 1984 U.N. report revealed the extent of Hussein's chemical weapon attacks, which killed 20,000 Iranians and victimized about 80,000 more by the time all was said and done. Did we have a problem with it at the time? Yeah right. In 1984, the New York Times reported that "American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name" and America sold him $200 million worth of Bell 214ST helicopters. If you think he used them to cruise the countryside, you need to get off of Haggard's meth.

So, where does all this data leave us? I'll tell you where it leaves me: In the funny farm. Because Saddam's midterm conviction proves that the Bush administration -- the hyperreal leaders of the new Iraqi "government" -- has capitalized on a country (or world, pick your poison) losing its collective mind.

In short, Saddam kills thousands, with our help and handshakes, but gets nailed with a war crime conviction for killing 150 of his own people. George Bush kills thousands of his own people to catch Saddam (and his oil fields), while killing tens and possibly hundreds of thousands more Iraqi innocents caught beneath the "shock and awe" of American military firepower. And he not only wins reelection, but is rewarded with the suspension of civil liberties in his own country and times the Iraqi dog-and-pony show to, what else, win another election for his party.

But what about his people? Are we in this equation at all? That we can read and cheer the conviction of Saddam Hussein but recoil with horror at the possibility our own leader could be more of a monster is a definitive sign of the apocalypse. We will all burn for this. Whether in the Bush administration's nuclear fallout from a bunker-buster delivered to Tehran or a climate crisis future engineered by the neocolonial pursuit of declining fossil fuels is still to be determined. But none of us are innocent. If I believed in a monotheistic god, I'd beg for his or her forgiveness. But all we have is ourselves. And we have failed ourselves. Just in time for the election.