It's official. Maliki and his people are psychopaths. This really is a new low. It's outrageous- an execution during Eid.

Muslims all over the world (with the exception of Iran) are outraged. Eid is a time of peace, of putting aside quarrels and anger- at least for the duration of Eid.

This does not bode well for the coming year. No one imagined the madmen would actually do it during a religious holiday. It is religiously unacceptable and before, it was constitutionally illegal.

We thought we'd at least get a few days of peace and some time to enjoy the Eid holiday, which coincides with the New Year this year. We've spent the first two days of a holy holiday watching bits and pieces of a sordid lynching.

America the savior...After nearly four years and . Bravo Americans.   more »

The US was born a settler colony, that unique product of largely British (but also European) migration during the era of empire, which was to leave a permanent Anglo-Saxon footprint in such disparate lands as North America and Australia.

The settler colony produced a quite different dynamic and mentality from that of Europe and Asia, both of which were characterised by the relative continuity of their native populations.

The establishment of settler colonies meant the conquest and brutal destruction of the native populations.

It is impossible to understand the psychology of the Americans, or indeed the Australians, without understanding what they did to the Indians and Aborigines respectively. This was not ethnic cleansing but something closer to ethnic extermination.   more »

The silence of the western antiwar movement on the lynching of Saddam Hussein is deafening and is increasingly beginning to prove what a lot of discerning people have suspected all along – that the mainstream anti-war movement (including large parts of its left wing) in the west is the well concealed left boot of western imperialism, the conscience of the conqueror.

The main reason given by western radicals – including many on this board for ignoring the assassination of the deposed Iraqi president is the crimes against humanity he has allegedly committed.

Saddam Hussein has not been tried; he has been executed by the west’s leaders, while their ‘radical’ sons look the other way.

Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but as president of Iraq, he represented something which nobody ever talks about these days, the sovereignty of his nation, by his judicial murder by a foreign invader the sovereignty of every poor third world nation has just been executed.   more »

The spectacle of Saddam Hussein's execution, shown in pornographic detail to the whole world, was deeply shocking to those of us who respect propriety and human dignity.

The vengeful Shia mob that was allowed to taunt the man's last moments, and the vicious executioners who released the trapdoor while he was saying his prayers, turned this scene of so-called Iraqi justice into a public lynching.

One does not have to be any kind of Saddam sympathiser to be horrified that he should have been executed - and, so obscenely, on the dawn of Islam's holy feast of Eid al-Adha, which flagrantly defies religious practice and was an affront to the Islamic world.

What was the executioners' hurry? Why was Saddam condemned for one of his lesser crimes, ignoring the far larger ones for which many of his victims had sought retribution?

In their unseemly haste to kill him, the judges ended up looking mean-minded, bloodthirsty and vengeful, while Saddam retained a dignity to the end that drew the reluctant admiration of many of his enemies.   more »

I've been keeping track of the many turning points proclaimed by the preznit since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Yesterday, Bush said: "Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself"

That was, by my reckoning, the sixteenth "turning point" or "milestone" (along with one chance to "turn the tide" and a "watershed event") in the last three and a half years.

Less than two months ago, when Saddam was found guilty, Bush called the verdict "a milestone in the Iraqi people's efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."   more »

The assassination of Saddam Hussein by hanging had about it the very same haste and furtiveness, the very same pretense of legitimacy and crack-of-dawn obscurity as—remember that one?—the secret U.S. transfer of sovereignty to Iraq, like thieving shadows in the night two days before it was scheduled, on June 28, 2004.

There was then no “sovereignty” to transfer as the United States had neither earned nor managed to conquer the right to Iraqi sovereignty.

It had embezzled it, and poorly at that, in the amateurish heist known to this day as Operation Iraqi Freedom. There was, at dawn on Saturday, no “justice” meted out in the assassination of Saddam.

It couldn't even have that Mussolini feel about it: a popular execution in broad daylight, unafraid and unquestioning, because in this case the executioners themselves have too little to distinguish them from the executed.   more »