One minute youre ordering the deaths of entire neighborhoods...

... and the next minute youre a punching bag for civil servants.

The BBC reports that 2 Iraqi court clerks beat up on the erstwhile ruler of Iraq, Saddam 'Da Man' Hussein for insulting 2 Shia saints. How humiliating is that? This used to be a guy who, with a snap of a finger, can have your entire family killed, and here he is, a forlorn, bedraggled shell of the ubertyrant he once was, eating knuckle sandwiches from government employees. Say what you want about the Bush war, but the world is better off without him. But did removing Saddam do any good? Yes it did. For Iran.

In the 80's, the Saddam's Baathist party had the full backing of the White House in its proxy war against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. It supplied them with materiel, moral support (Rumsfeld paid him a visit once), and one may surmise, top secret intelligence as well. The war turned out to be a stalemate with millions killed on both sides (most of them Iranians). Saddam already used poison gas on the Iranians, but that didnt cause too much of a fuss. "Hey-ell, Martha, he's a bad dog, but he's our dog." Saddam prevented the Iranians from dominating the Middle East and as long as he did that, he was one of the good guys.

Until he woke up one morning and said, "Im bored. Let's invade Kuwait." That quickly put him on Washington's excrement roster. Disrupt the world's oil supply, will he? The sumbitch is goin down! And he did. It was a turkey shoot when the allied forces made their move, placing vast tracts of the Iraqi landscape under invisible clouds of radiation from the use of depleted uranium ordnance that's still killing Gulf War veterans and Iraqi and Kuwaiti civilians to this very day. (Reporters covering the depleted uranium story saw children playing among the wreckage of Iraqi tanks, while the Geiger counters they were carrying were buzzing like crazed cicadas.)

Then came the September 11 attacks. After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration looked for whatever excuse they could to invade Iraq, and they found one: Weapons of Mass Destruction. And they found one Iraqi who was sure that they existed and that Saddam was making more: Ahmed Chalabi, the wealthy Shiite head of the Iraqi National Congress, who has never set foot in Iraq for 45 years. Never mind that UN weapons inspectors like ex-Marine Scott Ritter were testifying that Saddam no longer had the capability to create WMD's and if indeed he had managed to hide some of them from the inspectors, they would have been useless by now. (Apparently, these chemical and biological weapons have an expiry date like my vitamin supplements.) Never mind that that Saddam-Nigerian uranium information was shady at best. GW sent the troops and demolished Saddam's army, the force that was keeping the Iranians at bay. Iraq's population is mostly Shia Muslim like the Iranians and therefore natural allies. I bet the Iranians are just waiting for the US troops to leave Iraq, licking their chops, then they can exert influence on the internal politics of the new Iraqi government. Already, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is talking tough, pledging to push the Israelis nto the sea, and has re-launched Iran's nuclear program. Thanks to George W. Bush, things are falling in place for them.