Thug Bones in Bushland and Babylon

Thursday, 04 January 2007
Updated below.

George Bush lauded the hanging of Saddam Hussein as a hallmark of Iraq's efforts to create "a society governed by rule of law." But as both Steve Gilliard and Juan Cole note, Saddam was not actually hanged by the "sovereign" Iraqi government at all; he was turned over to the Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, religious Chekists in black leather jackets and black masks -- and the very people that Bush's viceroys say are the main instigators of the murderous violence roiling the Leader's Babylonian satrapy today.

Now, of course, there is an "investigation" afoot of how Saddam's execution was botched so badly, and how he was allowed to comport himself as a dignified martyr being sacrificed for the nation by crude thugs on one of Islam's holiest days. Or rather, there is the usual whitewash going on in which a bit of low-hanging fruit -- in this case, a guard -- will be thrown to the dogs while the true culprits escape accountability. Yet the fact remains: Saddam -- who had been a murderous blunderer throughout his reign, not unlike a certain brush-cutting goober from Crawford -- managed to pull off a PR masterstroke at the end. The level of sheer idiocy and incompetence it would take to make Saddam look good even for a nano-second is almost inconceivable; yet the remarkable Mr. Bush and his team were obviously up to the challenge.

Meanwhile Gilliard makes the telling observation that there is no essential difference between the Sadr forces and the Iraqi "government" anymore. Everything that Bush does to aid the Iraqi "government" merely augments the power of its various sectarian militias, the Sadrists above all. (Gilliard has long been penetrating, and prescient, on Sadr's role as kingmaker -- and perhaps future "king" -- in Iraq.) Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- the hardline leader of an extremist sectarian party that once made war directly on the United States and killed several Americans, but who is now, both Bush and Blair agree, "our guy" -- not only gave Saddam to the Sadrists to kill; he gave the very rope that hanged Saddam to Muqtada as a keepsake, as Cole reports.

But there is nothing really new in this. Bush has been backing death squads, sectarian militias and religious extremists throughout the war. As I noted in a post (Death Mask: The Deliberate Destruction of Iraq) in 2005:

Chris Floyd