Ending the Year with The Lynching

I couldn't end the year without tackling Saddam's "execution." We have come to this, and nobody in the mainstream media seems to have noticed. Dem politicos are silent. My thoughts exactly:

If you watch the video of the moments leading up to Saddam Hussein's execution, am I wrong that it bears a certain resemblance to the terrorist snuff films we've watched out of Iraq over the last three years? A dark, dank room. The executioners wear not uniforms of any sort, either civilian or military, but street clothes and ski masks. We now learn that the executioners were apparently taken from the population of southern Iraq, the country's Shi'a heartland, where Saddam's repression was most severe. And in an apt symbolic statement on what the Iraq War is about, two of the executioners who saw Saddam off started hailing Moktada al Sadr in Saddam's face as they prepared to hang him. Remember, al Sadr's Mahdi Army is the force the 'surge' of new US troops is meant to crush next year. That's where we are. --Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo

This too:

I [once] watched the video of Berg's beheading and it literally made me sick to my stomach. Do not watch it. It's a barbaric, horrible display of inhumanity ... I'm sure the same people who couldn't stop watching that footage --- ostensibly because they were outraged by the atrocity --- are enjoying this footage of Saddam going to his death today. They aren't all that different. There's the same sense of frenetic excitement among the executioners, the same vivid emotion, the same fear in the soon to be executed man's face. I'm hard pressed to say how that kangaroo court and this rushed, chaotic execution represents something so different. Saddam was undoubtedly a guilty man --- but the execution was done with the same symbolic purpose --- and in much the same style --- as those psychos who executed Nick Berg on camera and then ghoulishly passed around the video to make their political point. -- digby at Hullabaloo

Tell me again about the "civilization" Bush keeps saying we are building there or protecting here. I seem to have lost all perspective.