Summary here.

Jabara said the delegation had needed to secure American permission, from as high up as President George W. Bush, for a US aircraft to fly Saddam home on a 180 kilometre (110-mile) journey which would be too dangerous by road.

“We went to contact the Americans to secure a plane and that took more time than expected because it needed the approval of the US State Department and even Bush personally, we were told,” he said. Article

Sadly ignoble, yes.

…Meanwhile the hanging has been merely the enactment of a scene written in American stage directives almost two years ago, to fulfill another one of those sensational benchmarks the Bush administration invented as substitutes for real strategy, for policies that could make a workable difference for Iraq.

[snip]

Iraq is in a state of Hobbesian civil war and all the American president can do is point to the latest episode of Iraqi “Law & Order”—Saddam’s assassination—and call it “justice.” The hanging, of course, is an irrelevance. A moot point. An entertainment. It won’t make a difference to anyone in Iraq no matter how fattish the headlines in the United States. The trial was a sham, the hanging an act of revenge, the barbarism of a hanging alone, of capital punishment in any form, one more symbol of the immorality of this whole production under American aegis. (It would have been nice to see Saddam, like any criminal, any terrorist, any “evildoer” from Timothy McVeigh to Osama bin Laden rot in a dank prison the rest of his days, days elongated as much as possible to enable him to mull over his defeat and diminishment, and to enable the rest of us to know that justice needn’t be retributive to be effective and, most of all—what it has never been in Iraq and never could be given the American compulsion for revenge—just.)

Saddam became irrelevant in 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War, in the same way that Casto would have been irrelevant for decades had it not been one president after another’s fixation on granting him a legitimacy he doesn’t deserve, by granting him an enmity he could only welcome. Saddam became that fixation after 1991, marginal and idiotic though his shows of shelled-out power had become. The invasion gave him a brief grasp at the old relevance, but it couldn’t last. Article

Editorial du jour:

For all the talk about the violence in Iraq, Americans are focusing little attention on the human costs to the Iraqis.…

[snip]

It’s understandable that Americans do not want to acknowledge the terrible consequences in Iraq of the U.S. operation there. But if we want to understand the reasons for the daily violence, its astonishing durability and its decentralized nature, we need to ask hard questions about the role of the U.S. military in starting a war and then failing to find a formula for quelling the consequent violence.

Denying that large-scale civilian death and suffering has occurred leads us to false assumptions that the violence is wholly internecine and prevents us from learning the most useful lesson of this debacle - that counterinsurgencies relying on force actually produce more insurgents. Article

Two wars in one theatre – the real one on the ground, and the ersatz one in the fever dreams of the woebgone G. Walker administration.

The Iraq attack, unwittingly, made Iran, the American administration’s nemesis, the most influential player in the Iraqi political arena. As the violence and chaos in Iraq are unlikely to come under control despite considerable American military presence, many in America are trying to persuade Bush that he should open a dialogue with Iran and its allies. To come out of the quagmire that is Iraq, the US administration is mulling over the idea of giving Iraqis greater responsibilities in governance. But such calibrated doses of policy will not pacify Iraq. Only a complete withdrawal of occupation forces will hold out any hope. Besides, the moot point is not whether Saddam was guilty or not, but how fair the trial had been under a US-propped Shia regime. Four of Saddam’s lawyers had been killed and two judges removed for being “too soft” on Saddam as the ‘kangaroo trial’ got under way. From the start, observers had been noting that throughout the case Iraqi court officials had consulted closely with, or been guided by, US embassy lawyers. This has turned the Saddam trial into a farce. Saddam’s end also closes a chapter on other charges against him which might have brought out the full scale of his crimes, possibly including the unpleasant facts about his collaboration with US administration in those heady days of the Cold War. Article