Updated: Robert Fisk’s - A dictator created then destroyed by America is brilliant.

Updated: According to a variety of news sources, the execution of former US ally, Suddam Hussein, has occurred.

To say that the hanging of Saddam Hussein will be a positive for the Bush administration is only a given in so much that it will reaffirm the amnesia prevalent in American society. That another former US proxy gone awry and labeled an enemy of freedom will have succumbed to the irreproachable might of American show justice. Whether it be the engineered removal of a former CIA asset like Manuel Noriega or the use of Hussein’s genocidal crimes to, in part, justify the 2003 invasion (despite the fact that the Reagan administration continued to support him even after he committed the worst of his crimes), the death of Saddam Hussein will most likely be publically forgotten just as quickly and quietly as the hunt for Osama Bin Landen has been.

With regards to Hussein’s execution, here are the statements released by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Today, in Iraq, 75 Iraqis were killed and 145 more were wounded. Such numbers are typical and entirely dismissible to most. They are, in truth, simply numbers, not people to the majority that sit an ocean away and watch the catastrophe in Iraq worsen.

Obviously I could post such numbers every day because every day this month has been basically the same, if not worse. But what is especially significant is that recent US losses have pushed the US death toll to 2,978 – five more than were lost in the attacks of September 11th, including the those who perished in Pennsylvania and Washington.

Too late to be of any real consideration, we already know that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, nor did it aid those that did. So today, In Iraq, 75 Iraqis and six US soldiers died in a military and sectarian disaster based on the lies of men and women that, at this very moment, are safely enjoying themselves with family and friends somewhere far removed from harms way.

Saddam Hussein, despot and long-time US ally, whom many still cling to as the primary afterthought for the invasion, will hang by the neck until dead, his appeal today having been rejected.

In truth, that’s all Mr. Bush has to show for this farce. The hanging of a man that was once a regional ally of the United States, even after he committed his worst crimes. Progress, democratic reform, for the good of the Iraqi people – all of them echoes on teleprompters.

I need a Caucasian.

An excerpt from the December 24th, 2005, edition of The Independent…

“German troops in Flanders, accessible from home by land, received, along with their wooden gift boxes decorated with a wreath and a Flammenschwert - a flaming sword - tabletop-size Christmas trees with candles conveniently clamped to the branches. The law of unintended consequences activated itself. On Christmas Eve, as darkness came early, the Germans - at some hazard - placed trees atop trench parapets and lit the candles. Then they began singing carols, and though their language was unfamiliar to their enemies, the tunes were not. After a few trees were shot at, the British became more curious than belligerent, and crawled forward to watch and to listen. And soon they began to sing.

By Christmas morning, no man’s land between the trenches was filled with fraternising soldiers, sharing rations, trading gifts, singing, and - more solemnly - burying the dead between the lines. (Earlier, the bodies had been too dangerous to retrieve.) The roughly cleared space suggested to the more imaginative among them a football pitch. Kickabouts began, mostly with balls improvised from stuffed caps and other gear, the players oblivious of their greatcoats and boots. The official war diary of the 133rd Saxon Regiment says “Tommy and Fritz” used a real ball, furnished by a provident Scot. “This developed into a regulation football match with caps casually laid out as goals. The frozen ground was no great matter. Das Spiel endete 3:2 fur Fritz.” Other accounts, mostly German, give other scores, and British letters and memories fill in more details.

The high brass on both sides quickly determined that they could not let the situation develop. In the national interest, the war had to go on. Peace has always been more difficult to make than war, but it was materialising. Under threat of court martial, troops on both sides were ordered to separate and restart hostilities. Reluctantly, they drifted apart. General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien’s order to II Corps from his cushy rear-area headquarters read: “On no account is intercourse to be allowed between opposing troops. To finish this war quickly we must keep up the fighting spirit.”

But some units were too contaminated by Christmas to be reliable, and it took a few days to bring in replacements. Both commands ordered rolling artillery barrages to disrupt the stillness and to motivate responses.”

It was in the spare bedroom. “How do you want me?� she asked, flat, taciturn, vacant. We fumbled and then froze in an awkward rhythm, ruined statues, wasting heartbeats humming like amps plugged into bad power, the familiar smell of wet pennies, incredulity.

Sagacious; from the light we inched away, stones worn smooth padding riverbeds. Right after, and for a time, gaping air, silence like lions starved and whipped to hate.

I waited in the front room for the postman, and daily there was naught. And then, as if I had never been, even the postman stopped.

That sunrise at the end of the world was blinding, the doors swung wide, pierced through two bodies. One exhausted, one running away.

How do you do it? That’s the question. Micah Zenko recently exclaimed ‘Let’s Get Everybody’s Troops Out of Everywhere’. I couldn’t agree more. Of course the hue and cry that follows such simple logic is replete with the usual interjections – who will intervene on the side of those that are being unjustly treated? Who will stop genocides and tyrants? I suppose that depends on which ones are advantageous enough to bother with.

This being the season of giving, I have some suggestions.

The over complication of global matters is precisely what maintains the status quo. The status quo, for the most part, focuses on a tried and true mechanism to which most of the planet has set their watches and is rather straight forward. The exploitation of weaker economies, which the proponents of globalization have attempted to convince the world is, in fact, in the best interest of those being exploited, is parceled with the acquisition of privatization rights in many developing and third world countries in exchange for the inclusion of arms transactions or similar forms of support, the end product of which is rarely scrutinized if those being sold or given arms or aid in exchange for privatization considerations happen to either coincide with the foreign policy agendas of those supplying the arms or aid*, be it directly or through proxies, or are simply involved in internal struggles, the outcomes of which are of little consequence. Obviously, where pro-free market governments exist (i.e., burgeoning or established plutocratic infrastructures), it’s all the better for those looking to exploit them, so what does it matter who runs the country as long as they’ll play ball? There’s always ways of supporting those that might otherwise be deemed questionable, just so long as they’re willing to facilitate the needs of those looking to exploit their countries in return for helping them retain power.

Take away the guns - end occupations. Shut down Raytheon, shut down Indian Head, shut down every factory that produces everything from Kalashnikovs to landmines and occupations will end. Remove the tools used to maintain the status quo, and the status quo will inevitably be replaced by a new reality.

Human nature, some profess, is intrinsically linked with greed, the desire to make war, to control others, to dominate. And if that is the case then by way of mankind’s most devastating achievement perhaps we should hand things over to the cockroaches in one giant fireworks show. Because if those limitations must be adhered to with regards to our actions, then what is the point of defending any ideology or principle? What even is the point of claiming one more just or spotless than another?

If religious fanaticism can kill without regard, so too can the legions of democracy – examples of both have been given us long before now, from the Crusades to the conquests of the Rome.

A fraction of this planet preys daily on the majority of it, a fact that most of us simply refuse to believe because it infers that we might be in the wrong and that we are the ones that will ultimately have to make the hard choices regarding new perspectives.

How do you do it?

You raise your children to tell the difference between the individual and the mechanism. Because unlike the mechanism, the individual inevitable seeks redemption. Tell them that though evil exists in this world, it is found in all of us to some degree, and therefore all of us ultimately must struggle to free ourselves from its occupation. And that, in the end, is where our wars ought to be fought.

* A fantastic example of this was the debt dissolution in 2005 by the G8 of some $44 billion dollars for 18 of the world’s poorest nations. In the agreement were privatization stipulations guaranteeing that they would ultimately make more than they forgave, despite the fact that the package was championed as a massive success, leading to global music concerts and awareness campaigns that used the precedent as a sign that progress could be made without ever identifying the realities behind it.

Dale Mugford, who’s been known to creep around here from time to time (by the way, I hope your recovery is going well Dale), once wrote - “When the largest industry in the world is no longer War, I will accept Darwin’s theory of Evolution.”.

War, Cherubs, is the #1 clambake on the planet – even more so than Bill O’Reilly’s latest book. More time, money, and effort is invested in developing, selling, and implementing tools of destruction than any other enterprise on earth – including condom sales, which, by all accounts, should be through the roof. Because let’s face facts – sex is a far better enterprise than war.

Killing people is a goldmine. Finding new and fascinating ways of ripping the human body apart, slowly burning flesh away from bone, exposing it to such high heat that it basically disintegrates, corrupting and neutralizing the central nervous system – all of it is bank. Then there’s the hardware needed to make sure that it all goes off without a hitch. The vehicles, the helicopters, the aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, submarines, and the logisitical support provided by all of those patriotic contractors.

That, my friends, is progress. Not capitalizing on illnesses in the name of profit – though Big Pharma does pretty well and has some fantastic tricks of their own – but real progress, like taking something as devastating to the human body as a large bullet and adding to it the ability to burn your insides as if washed in an acid bath once it punches a hole in you the size of a golf ball.

Progress is being able to sucker kids into loving death by playing video games in which they can launch devastating ordinance from miles away and watch them decimate pixilated buildings and people. It’s those same kids that end up sitting on ships in the Persian Gulf with their finger hovering over a button doing it for real. Progress is found in the fact that having palyed the video game before hand, they can envision how ‘cool’ it’ll look when that ‘baby’ blows to shit whatever it is that it’s being launched at.

Progress is being able to say that you have a formidable and highly advanced military capability and aren’t afraid to use it, no matter what the cost to your principles, because the truth is that your principles are based on having a formidable and highly advanced military capability.

Nations such as the US and Russia, China and Great Britain, have impressive military capabilities. All of them are also nuclear powers, the first two being the world’s preeminent nuclear powers. So is it just me, or does anyone else find it somewhat telling that a group of fanatics can hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings and they’re called lunatics, while the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are responsible for almost 90% of the world’s conventional arms exports, arms that find their way into the hands of children in Africa pressed into military service, and even the hands of the very ‘enemy’ that the ‘civilized’ world is supposedly now fighting, and they’re championed as being just?

Comedian David Cross probably put it best - “You cannot win a War on Terrorism. It’s like having a war on jealousy.”

In the name of dethroning tyranny, a country was invaded and occupied. And now the justification for not abandoning the folly that ensued is that too much damage has been done and too many people have died.

That’s progress.

Oh: You can bet your bottom dollar that this is going to be like Christmas, Halloween, my birthday, your birthday, all rolled into one.

Oh Dear: According to British Intelligence, London will, for cetrain, be attacked this holiday season. In light of this, they are rounding up those they feel might be a threat. And after they’ve detained all of those people, being that they’ve assured everyone there is going to be attack, they’ll probably have to shoot an innocent Brazillian multiple times and then claim they thought that he was trying to carry it out.

Oh My: The Saudis have chosen a new ambassador to the United States. His name is Adel al-Jubeir. You might recall his work from just after 9/11. He was the PR man “charged with disassociating the royal family from al Qaeda in the wake of the 9/11 attacks”.

Oh No: If you can believe it, someone was actually trapped for days under fallen trees in Stanley Park.

Oh Snap! Thankfully there’s an ‘e’ at the end of his last name, because this moron deserves to be trapped under fallen trees for days.

I’ve taken to drinking Caucasians. Good enough for The Dude, good enough for me. Actually, I’ve just taken to drinking, which is something that I never really thought that I’d do again. But here I am, a bottle of wine a day and Caucasians for the witching hour.

Some people drink to remember, some people drink to forget, some people drink so that they can compile stories that are basically 90% fiction because they were too drunk to remember anything – but the stories are always legendary you’ll notice. There’s never anyone sitting at a gathering that suddenly pipes up and says “ya, I got loaded and passed out on the lawn and then started puking straight up in the air like a garden fountain�. You don’t hear too many of those, at least not at my age. Then again, I don’t really go out and drink. I prefer to do my drinking at home or at nearby hole-in-the-wall joints.

Last night I found myself out on the street talking to some guy up in a second floor room in some hovel of a hotel while on the phone with the police because someone was trying to break into his room. He kept asking me to stay where he could see me, anxiously glancing between what I assume must have been the door to his room and me standing on the sidewalk. It was bizarre though, a friend of mine downstairs called the police too, but besides her, no one else did. Here’s this guy yelling out a window for help, for someone to call 911, and people walking down the street or driving through the neighborhood in their nice cars with the windows rolled up did nothing.

And you wonder why I’ve started drinking.

The police eventually found me and then went up and took care of it, so I suppose everything worked out in the end. It’s not uncommon for young men and women from the interior with mental problems who have turned to drugs and alcohol for some relief to one-way-ticket it to this place. They end up down here in slum hotels, many of them scared stiff, and eventually just fall into the black hole and never escape.

No worries though. It’s nothing that a few Caucasians can’t fix.

Oh, just to quickly interject, someone’s finally been charged in connection with the Haditha massacre. That’s not bad for the US military. It happened over a year ago, they covered it up for a few months, and now eight soldiers have been charged. Caucasians all ‘round.

I’ve been searching my mind in an attempt to think what I’d like for Christmas. No blow-up dolls please. I’m a terrible conversationalist.

Oh: Wouldn’t it be excellent if I went mad, kept blogging, and this blog became a daily window into the disintegration of my mind? Now there’s a blog theme that hasn’t been taken.

Oh Again: Read this. Get mad.

Someone either left a comment today or emailed me and told me that someone is already using my old MySpace url. I had no idea you could use previously used url’s.

Oh, a few fantastic reads to get you all riled up before bed. The first, from Sherwood Ross, is entitled Bush “Developing Illegal Bioterror Weapons” for Offensive Use. An excerpt…

“In violation of the US Code and international law, the Bush administration is spending more money (in inflation-adjusted dollars) to develop illegal, offensive germ warfare than the $2 billion spent in World War II on the Manhattan Project to make the atomic bomb.�

Read the article, run around a little, bang some pots and pans together, and then pour yourself a tall glass of milk before sitting down and reading Repeat Iraq Tours Raise Risk of PTSD, Army Finds…

“U.S. soldiers serving repeated Iraq deployments are 50 percent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress, raising their risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the Army’s first survey exploring how today’s multiple war-zone rotations affect soldiers’ mental health.â€?

Let’s make sure the soldiers have everything they need. How many times have you heard that one? Sitting here, having just written that, I wonder if they’ve even removed the metal from Ben Allbright’s head yet?

For the first time in almost four years the Great Ape has sort of admitted that the US is losing the war in Iraq. His solution, though I’m sure only a part, is to increase the size of the US military in general by 70,000 troops in, of course, preparation for a what he likes to remind everyone is, at this point anyway, a war in perpetuity. So I guess they’d better start scouring lower income neighborhoods now before they’re forced to do something drastic and send middle class kids overseas. Because the last time that happened the war so many were supportive of came to an abrupt end.

If we’re to listen to academics like Tariq Ali, then abstract revelations begin to creep into the minds of those Americans completely disconnected from the products of their vengeful recklessness. As the good professor points out - “ideological zealotry has helped destroy Iraq, revive the Taliban and increase the terror threat�. With this fall seeing an average of 900+ attacks against Americans and Iraqis every week, who’s going to argue with him? You?

But hey, what does it matter? What’s $110+ billion this year alone for a war started by men that are little more than adjuncts for war profiteers? (one has to find new and inventive ways around using the now tired phrase military industrial complex). Come to think of it, the Bush family certainly aren’t strangers to war profiteering. The President’s grandfather certainly had some dirty little fingers in some dirty little pies.

Now, who’s for a little Christmas Turkey Loaf in a FEMA trailer?