The mainstream for-profit news media's hunger for bloodshed is in full force this holiday season. Their task has been made easier by the fact that US troop deaths in Iraq, 3000 total, have reached their second highest monthly level since the 2003 invasion, 111 in December, only to be outdone by November 2004's second siege of Falluja. Iraqi sectarian violence has swelled to claiming over 3000 civilians every month. But strangely, the story on everyone's lips, of course, is the televised death of a dictator.

The absurdity of the comments surrounding the hanging of Saddam Hussein should suffice to show what kind of ironic propaganda slips into the cultural mainstream. Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, a Shiite, claimed that out of respect for human rights, he had no choice but to hurry the appeals process and execute Hussein. No human rights body in the entire world supports capital punishment, so whose rights was he referring to? Certainly not Hussein's, and certainly not all of humanity, unless we want to dub Hussein inhuman for shits and giggles. And if the justice was merely for unimprisoned Iraqis, why then were the executions not sought out for those who sold Iraq his weapons of mass destruction, for the infamous chemical attack on his own people? However, this was not about revenge, or was it?

Amazingly the Bush Adminstration's distancing remarks were that Iraqi justice had successfully been carried out, as opposed to some standard of international justice, which we seemed to be promoting ever since 9/11's "bring them to justice," Western style. So long as Hussein died in a "dignified" way without mutilation or humiliation, the Green Zone could have a very merry New Year's. The Shiite side of the civil war was not to be as lucky yesterday, as the executioners were seen to be all Shiite, and the taunting and execution in Saddam's old execution chamber a bit off the mark of dignity.

When discussing whether international justice has been meted out evenly, it is important to list the war's most grievous violations of global agreements on "civilized" warfare, elucidated in the Geneva Conventions: initiating combat without a threat of imminent attack, denying humane treatment to prisoners of war, attacks on soft targets such as media institutions and medical transport units, and the oft-forgotten law barring humiliation of prisoners, which includes televising their incarceration or death (see faces of Uday & Qusay Hussein, and Abu Al-Zarqawi). But fortunately for America, we apparently had nothing to do with the capture, incarceration, establishment of the tribunal, and handover of the former president. Nor would American backers ever get a chance to be held to account for our Machiavellian support for Hussein's rule by fear throughout the 1980's. Not that the World Court would be able to really hold the US conservative elite responsible for complicity in war crimes--don't forget that we were already found guilty for our support of death squad attacks on soft targets in our proxy war in Nicaragua in the early '80's, to which we only stepped up our "anti-Soviet" campaign.

What was accomplished by this execution? A reinforcement of the ideology of shame and revenge in Islamic culture. The end of a distraction from fighting "Iraq's enemies" that haven't been disarmed, to be sure. And surely the Shiite and Sunni torturers and murderers across Iraq are quaking in their ski-masks about having a sham trial and "dignified" death if they are ever to be captured. Bush can now tell his daddy that we finally "took him out." But the most significant thing accomplished was the fruition of Hussein's born-again-Muslim fantasy of being remembered as a martyr who fought the crusaders. In death at the hands of infidels he understood he could have more lasting power than sitting in a spider hole eating Snickers bars until the shitstorm blew over. So perhaps it's time that Usama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar "involuntarily" came out of their holes to be martyred, so that they again have relevance to the diffuse and decentralized broken web of simmering revenge that constitutes our global civil war.