"Bagged the Rat" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Bagged the Rat

Some mornings begin more quietly than others. This wasn’t one of them. First up was the news that the big rat had been flushed from a hole near Tikrit. What had become of the world’s most fearsome dictator was not a pretty picture. Of course he never was, even when he was our pet dictator. Not to be confused with our hood ornament dictator.

The Bush Boy got the word before dawn today. The phone rang. It was his Rice-Cake calling with the good news. Well, ostensible and probably temporary good news. I mean, no one thought that Saddam should have been in power as long as he was, and mostly we’ve been arguing about whether or not we had to have this awful IraqAttaq to get rid of him.

Consider the history. Saddam was ratified, if not covertly installed, by American governments going back to the days of Ronald Reagan. During the Iran-Iraq War, the U.S., together with the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council and 25 additional nations sold weapons to both sides in the conflict. And when an Iraqi fighter shot a missile at one of our naval vessels, killing dozens of U.S. seamen, we, um looked the other way, because he was our despot.

We messed with him again in 1990 when Daddy Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker -- yes, he’s the same one whom Bush-Lite has sent back to Iraq now -- dispatched an emissary, April Glaspie, to visit with Saddam. Therein the signals got confused. Saddam thought he’d been given permission to take the Ramallah oil fields over the border in Kuwait. So he did and that led to a full-scale invasion, and Operation Sturm und Drang, now familiarly known as The Gulf War.

So after propping up this psychotic killer for almost two decades, we dig him out of a filthy hole. And that was our goal...a regime change. The cost of capturing this villain, half-way ‘round the world, is approaching $300 billion, not to mention the loss of tens of thousands of lives and the respect of the civilized world.

If I were cynical, I might opine on the timing of Saddam’s trial -- October maybe -- but I’d rather bemoan the fact that twixt now and whenever, more lives will be squandered, and many more billions of dollars will be transferred from our grandchildren’s education funds to the corporate pockets who invested early and now own most of Iraq’s future and have an unhealthy hold on our own.

This just in...Saddam Hussein, in an interview with Barbara Walters, reports that in his hole, he realized the error of his ways and took Jesus Christ as his personal savior. He said he hoped to go back to Baghdad to help the limbless orphans of war after spending a few days in Crawford on his knees, praying, with Karl Rove.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.