Summaries here and here and here and also here.

Some reaction to the official hanging from across Africa, a continent most always given short shrift in mainstream U.S. media.

Paging Capt. Renault: The woebegone G. Walker administration is “shocked, shocked” that there exists incivility, disorder and enmity in Iraq.

Q: In Dujail?

A: In Dujail.

They covered their faces for fear of reprisals but they came nonetheless to mourn Saddam Hussein – dozens of Shi’ites from Dujail, the scene of the crimes for which the former president was executed.

In a sign of the complexities of the sectarian, tribal and political loyalties in Iraq, it was not only Saddam’s fellow Sunni Arabs who mourned his execution for killing 148 Shi’ites from Dujail. At a condolence hall on the outskirts of the town, prepared for the occasion, several dozen men from Dujail came to visit. As well as those killed after a failed 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in Dujail, hundreds of people in the town were arrested, tortured and deported and farmlands in the area were razed. Yet Saddam had his supporters there, not least the four former Baath party officials from Dujail who were on trial with him. Article

Yup, that ol’ security and sovereignty is moving right along. </snark>

Americans flew him [Saddam Hussein] by helicopter from the Camp Cropper jail at Baghdad airport to the former secret police base in the north of the capital where he was hanged after negotiations between Maliki and the U.S. ambassador that lasted late into the night.

The Americans screened an official delegation before escorting them to the execution site. Article

What struck ye old scribe was not the individual story so much as being oh so careful to not use the term “shot” — which raises all sorts of questions as to the what went down.

A U.S. Marine fatally wounded an Iraqi soldier in an altercation at the guard post they shared in Fallujah, the U.S. military said Tuesday. Article

Well, here it is 2007, the fourth calendar year in which the Iraq policy and the actions of the woebegone G. Walker administration continue to be flawed and wrong and destabilizing and dangerous and deadly and half-baked and about 3000 other adjectives, none of them complimentary.

Prior to the 2003 invasion, there existed a rough balance of power between Shi’ite and Sunni factions across the region - neither was able to achieve inordinate regionwide power or dominance. The US and Britain took directly on themselves the enormous task and responsibility of maintaining that rough regional balance of power when they crashed into the Hussein regime. They were entirely unprepared to assume that strategic responsibility, however.

[snip]

Now, the US and Britain are faced with the insurmountable problem of finding a way, at this extremely late date, to restore a rough balance of power to the region by attempting to reconstruct something similar to the mechanisms they eliminated and failed to replace in 2003. And they now have but one last chance, and they must be successful before the sectarian tinderbox they helped create is set aflame by only one of many impending sparks. All the odds are entirely against them.

The two powers realize they cannot literally reconstruct a dominant Sunni regime in Iraq to face down the Shi’ites and Iran in a bid to revive power-balancing mechanisms. Those former mechanisms are gone and they cannot be revived. Those are no longer workable strategies and policies, anyway.

[snip]

If the US and Britain imagine they can play the Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian rivalry card and somehow keep the repercussions contained within the realm of orderliness or “manageable chaos” by means of their naval and other forces, they are every bit as dense now as they were when they went into Iraq in the first place, imagining that that strategy would succeed.

Sectarian passions on both sides are already running far too high across the region to facilitate any form of manageable transition from the current simmering and mounting chaos to a hoped-for return to a rough balance of power. The US and Britain are playing with the lighting of the fuse of a regionwide sectarian explosion.

Are the two powers any more prepared to handle its multi-sphere implications and repercussions than they were prepared for those resulting from their 2003 invasion of Iraq? No, they most certainly are not prepared - but they are decidedly desperate to pull a “win” from the flames of failure, even if it means intentionally orchestrating a regional sectarian explosion whose outcome they imagine they can succeed in controlling.

[snip]

Not a restoration of a balance of power, but rather a further chaotic tipping of the balance toward one faction will be the most likely result of the implementation of their strategies. The Bush and Blair administrations are not known for their ability to conceive truly brilliant strategies and wisely implement them on the ground - hence the impending exhibition of their latest foreign-policy “talents” in the Middle East should be more than sufficient cause for alarm. Article

Decent overview, but it dances cautiously and timidly ’round the bonfire (emphasis added)

In interviews in Washington and Baghdad, senior officials said the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had also failed to take seriously warnings, including some from its own ambassador in Baghdad, that sectarian violence could rip the country apart and turn Mr. Bush’s promise to “clear, hold and build” Iraqi neighborhoods and towns into an empty slogan. [Put another way, digging a hole so deep that one can not only not get out, but can no longer even hear the voices of those on solid ground, shouting and imploring to cease. — voxd]

[snip]

Mr. Bush still insists on talking about victory, even if his own advisers differ about how to define it. “It’s a word the American people understand,” he told members of the Iraq Study Group who came to see him at the White House in November [And a word that has no relation whatsoever to the situation in which it is repeatedly moutheed and invoked. — voxd], according to two commission members who attended. “And if I start to change it, it will look like I’m beginning to change my policy.” [Because image and domestic politics (consequence be damned) takes precedence über alles within their skewed circle, eh? — voxd] Article

Case in point, succinctly stated:

No matter what we touch in Iraq, no matter what we do, it only makes things worse — never better — because the root of what we are doing is itself so rotted and incoherent and corrupt. It’s beyond doubt that we’re going to be treated to much more “freedom” and “justice” like this over the next two years in Iraq, at least. Source