“Saddam Swings!” screamed the headline of one of New York’s always elevating tabloids.

Well, indeed he did, and those amongst us who derive some badly needed bit of satisfaction from societally-sanctioned murders can once again raise their spirits and enjoy the ten-minute lift in their day.

Of course, few will cry for Saddam. (Although some Iraqi Sunnis may well decide to bomb for him. A Sunni teacher and mother from Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit said after the execution, “Saddam will be a hero in our eyes. I have five kids and I will teach them to take revenge on Americans.” Overheard in the White House: “Uh-oh.”) But if ever there was a case for capital punishment, this guy was like a walking billboard advertising the idea. Saddam launched unprovoked wars of aggression, he justified those with monstrous lies, he used weapons of mass destruction, he thumbed his nose at international law, he destabilized an already scary neighborhood, and he was a just plain mean old bastard of a guy on top of all that.

In sum, I don’t think anybody can argue that he made the world a better place during his time on the planet – though, interestingly, there may actually be an important exception to that observation. If it turns out to be the case that a brutal dictatorship is the only possible way to rule the powder-keg of an artificial polity that the European colonial powers created and called Iraq, Saddam could have quite plausibly argued that his despotism was actually saving lives. That is, if Iraq without a Saddam-like figure were to descend into – well, we know what it would descend into (or, worse, we more likely are only beginning to know) – then perhaps his argument is not so flawed. Perhaps his brutal murder of thousands prevented the alternative of hundreds of thousands perishing in an unending Hobbesian hell.

Of course, Saddam did not kill thousands, but probably hundreds of thousands. By one (not necessarily unbiased) estimate he was responsible for the death of four to five hundred thousand Iraqis over several decades. Yet the case for his defense, noxious as it may be, has some clear empirical merit. The best and most scientific estimate we have of the number of Iraqi deaths since George Bush lit the Middle East on fire suggests that we are now already near to doubling Saddam’s carnage, courtesy (as Toby Keith might put it) of the red, white and blue. And that is in the space of four years, as opposed to his two or three decades. Moreover, that is only the number of dead so far. Things are likely to get far worse in Iraq before they get better. In any case, if this conception of Saddam – Iraq’s violent savior from far worse violence – is correct, we ought to be reviling the likes of Winston Churchill for taking out their Magic Markers over brandy one evening, and creating a nearly-impossible ethnic cauldron of a country in the first place. Instead, of course, we lionize the Old Man as one of the greats of modern history, while Saddam is the devil incarnate.

Which brings me to my central concern here. It is not whether capital punishment is a good idea (it isn’t). It is not whether Saddam was justified in murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, or attacking his neighbors (he wasn’t). It is, rather, about the simple notion of justice. How is it, to choose a single example, that the fool who created the tinderbox of Iraq is a great statesman, and the guy who was left to hold it all together in order to prevent the disaster of civil war or worse is a genocidal maniac? Of course, Churchill did have some great career highlights along with the occasional whopper of a goof, and Saddam’s inexcusable crimes extended far beyond what was necessary to hold together Iraq. But, that said, who can deny the bias? Who can reasonably dispute that Saddam and Churchill represent opposing examples of victor’s justice?

Before Robert McNamara presided over the Vietnam disaster as Secretary of Defense, he had been an aide during World War II to General Curtis LeMay, a brutal warrior right off the set of Dr. Strangelove (or was it the other way around?), famous for later suggesting that Vietnam should be bombed back to the Stone Age. Back during the Good War, LeMay and McNamara methodically chose bombing targets in the Japanese homeland, employing scientific precision for the purpose of destroying that country’s war-fighting capacity, and more. Lots more. Well before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these two had flattened three score and seven Japanese cities – civilians and all – including the firebombing of Tokyo, an assault which McNamara admits “burned to death a hundred thousand Japanese civilians – men, women and children” in a single night. He further notes that, overall, their campaign wiped out 50 to 90 percent of the people living in 67 Japanese cities.

Matter-of-factly addressing the camera in Errol Morris’ film, The Fog of War, McNamara then goes on to recall how “LeMay said if we lost the war we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals, but what makes it immoral if you lose but not immoral if you win?”

And, indeed, that is the question. It’s a difficult one for Americans to grapple with, because of the pervasive beliefs we’ve imbibed about our manifest destiny in the world as a nation of good guys and vanquishers of ‘evil-doers’. Alas, a true reading of American history proves much less kind to us than that, and if two men as complicit as Robert McNamara and Curtis LeMay have the intellectual honesty to assess our foreign policy in such properly dispassionate and analytically neutral terms as these, the rest of us really ought to be able to do the same. Of course, we Americans know next to nothing about history and geography, to the point that it’s sometimes hard to decide whether that ignorance is the intentional cause or the effect of our exalted view of ourselves as exempt from basic human characteristics and the historical tendencies of any other nation which has possessed power at one time or another down the millennia.

But if we can set aside those unfortunate inclinations for a moment, perhaps we can fairly consider this question: By what standard of justice is it that on this day Saddam rots in his grave, executed for crimes against humanity, while George W. Bush lives like a modern-day king, presiding over the world’s all-time most powerful polity, his every whim catered to, still adored by tens of millions of Americans?

No doubt most Americans would shudder at the comparison, but, again, perhaps that is true precisely to the extent that we’ve been so well trained to be so poorly trained as historians and students of philosophy and the social sciences. Were that not the case, we might come to find the comparison between these two men far too close for comfort. (Which discomfort, by the way, would be a good thing in and of itself. Once this eight-hundred pound gorilla learns to get its jollies elseways, the world will be a much safer place.)

To Americans there can be no possible comparison between the deeds of Saddam Hussein and George Bush. The former was a murderer, they’d insist, a warmonger, a flaunter of international law, and a deceiver of epic proportions. And, while most Americans have come to now see George Bush as at least a foolish mistake and an immature bungler, very few would ascribe any of Saddam’s brutal transgressions to an American president, even this particular failure.

Instead, Americans know that our leader is vastly different and morally far superior, because Saddam used chemical weapons and Bush did not.

Except that under Bush as commander-in-chief, we have ourselves used both white phosphorus and napalm since we invaded Iraq.

But Americans are assured that Bush is no Saddam because Saddam murdered his own people, and Bush would never do that.

Except that by the same standard, the revered Lincoln did just what Saddam did – since the victims of the attack in question were secessionary Kurds, just like the Southerners who Lincoln killed by the hundreds of thousands when they fought to leave the Union. It ought also be mentioned that we originally backed Saddam’s version at the time these killings occurred, when he was blaming the attack on Iran, rather than his own government. And, worse, that was after we had ourselves supplied Iraq with the precursors for the chemical weapons we now say he used against his own people.

Well, even so, Americans are assured because Saddam was brutal aggressor, whereas Captain Bush, leader of the Good Guys, only fought this war because he had to, in order to provide for our national security.

Except that when Bush marketed us into war, he told us we couldn’t afford to wait a moment longer, because Saddam might use his weapons of mass destruction on us without warning – so we had to go to war, and now. Never mind that Saddam didn’t have any WMD. Never mind that he had never threatened nor attacked us. Never mind that the weapons inspectors were only weeks away from verifying that such weapons didn’t exist, and thus from preventing a war which has since claimed nearly a million American and Iraqi lives. But, of course, that meant they were also only weeks away from thereby removing Bush’s pretext for invasion. And while we’re at it, it’s worth mentioning that when Saddam committed the first (and far worst) of his two major aggressions against neighboring states – his invasion of Iran in 1980 – the US was not only far from condemning his act, but Republican deity Ronald Reagan even supplied Saddam with weapons, intelligence, economic assistance and restoration of official recognition to Iraq to assist him in fighting one of the nastiest wars of recent times, a war which may have brutally destroyed as many as two million people, a large proportion of them children.

Very well, our typical American might say, but Saddam was a gross violator of international law, and the United States would never do such a thing, even under this overly-exuberant president.

Except that the United Nations’ Charter allows a country to go to war only under one of two conditions. The first is self-defense – if that country has been or is about to be attacked – which of course was ludicrous to imagine Iraq doing to the US, even if Saddam had ever threatened to do, which he did not. The other legally permissible sanction for war is according to a Security Council resolution under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which calls for a global collective response to any militant aggressor. Of course, Bush applied all the carrots and sticks he could find to Security Council members (as well as spying on them) in order to win a vote he publicly promised to call, no matter what. In the end, neither vote nor victory transpired. When he saw that only two other countries on the fifteen-seat Security Council besides Tony Blair’s United Poodledom could be roped into voting for war, he withdrew the very resolution which he had only days earlier guaranteed he would table, “no matter what the whip count is”, having said then that “it's time for people to show their cards”. Knowing he would lose badly, Bush pulled the resolution, and no official cards were shown, because the unofficial ones were already virtually screaming world opinion. That canceled vote allowed him to later maintain the fiction that he was enforcing the will of the United Nations, one of the bigger lies ever promulgated in the long history of international politics. The truth was precisely the opposite, and no less an authority than Kofi Annan described the US invasion of Iraq as simply “illegal”. Still, all that said, and despite the fact that the United States was a founding member and even driving force behind the creation of the UN, some Americans would no doubt argue that Bush’s invasion was okay because we don’t have to follow international law when we don’t want to. While that claim is dubious on its face, it is additionally more than a little problematic because failing to follow the prescriptions of treaties to which the US is a signatory also happens to violate a certain document known as the United States Constitution, which labels treaties as “the supreme Law of the Land”. Oops.

Ah, but Saddam was a liar! Not our president, right?

Of course, by now most Americans have figured out on their own that this president has something of a tenuous relationship with the truth, and they don’t need any help from this commentator to see that. But a couple of key episodes are worth briefly revisiting in this context. Remember how before the invasion Bush was always telling us how he really wanted to avoid war if he could? We now know for a fact (chiefly because of the Downing Street Memos and Bob Woodward’s books) that he had, instead, already decided by that time to go to war, and was busy trying to do just the opposite of what he was saying. That is, he was trying to make sure that no obstacles prevented America from invading Iraq. This was actually the real reason Bush and Blair ever agreed to the UN weapons inspections program – they assumed Saddam would reject inspections, thus giving them a perfect pretext for a war with broad international legitimacy (a strategy Blair described as “wrongfooting” Saddam). It was all a public relations stunt. It was never intended to prevent war, but rather to make war inevitable. Similarly, remember also when the UN required that Iraq provide an inventory of their WMD, and Saddam came back saying ‘We don’t have any’? Bush immediately called him a liar. But, of course, we now know that Saddam was telling the truth and it was Young George, a grove of fallen cherry trees at his feet, who lied. He had to. He had by this time built the entire sales pitch for war around the threat of WMD. While he and his crew were busy selling us on the horrors of mushroom clouds and the like if Saddam was allowed to have WMD, in fact, a weapons-free Iraq was actually Bush’s worse nightmare. No weapons, no war.

Well, our by now weary but rapidly deprogramming American might whimper that at least their motivations were very different, weren’t they? Saddam was just plain evil. Bush, on the other hand, though he may be a complete bungler, was at least genuinely trying to bring democracy to the Middle East, and security to the United States, right?

Except that it’s pretty odd, isn’t it, that someone supposedly so interested in democracy for the Iraqi people can hardly be bothered to speak up (let alone intervene) as the people of Darfur are being obliterated in this decade’s Rwanda. I mean, isn’t that more important? Don’t you first have to be alive to be able to vote? And as to security, has anyone else noticed the absurd difference in intensity with which Iraq and its supposed WMD were treated in 2002 and 2003, versus the total yawn given by the same administration to North Korea’s very real nukes and real missiles in 2006? Let’s face it, people. While nobody outside the White House knows the real reasons for Bush’s invasion of Iraq (though they’re not hard to imagine – oil, Israel, raw power politics, electoral victory, Halliburton war spoils, military bases, and of course the Little Lad’s massive personal insecurities, especially vis-a-vis Poppy – all these top my speculative list), you nevertheless have to be more gullible than Gomer Pyle to believe today that the war was launched to protect America from the evil Menace of Mesopotamia (our, ahem, former ally), or because the same George W. Bush who has at home been the greatest instrument of democracy destruction this side of Jim Crow really gives a wank about Iraqis having the franchise. (Can’t you just hear him? “Iraqis must vote! But not Saudis – dictatorship is fine for them. And not the Sudanese – genocide is fine for them. But we must have democracy in Iraq!”) Of course, damn few folks outside of the US ever fell for any of this nonsense in the first place, which is why more people in the world think Bush is a scary monster than they do Kim Jong-il. Literally. But a lot of Americans did drink the Kool-Aid, and a lot have now figured out that they were burned, and a lot are pissed about that. And that explains a lot of what happened last November 7th.

So where does all this leave us?

Saddam used proscribed weapons. So did Bush.

Saddam killed his own people. So did Bush (and it’s curious, isn’t it, how Saddam was rushed to the gallows one day before the president’s casualties in Iraq broke the ominous 3,000 mark).

Saddam brutally attacked other countries without provocation. So did Bush.

Saddam lied about why he went to war. So did Bush.

Saddam actually had predatory intentions driving his aggressions. So did Bush.

Saddam massively violated international law with his brutal assaults. So did Bush.

It’s sadly difficult, isn’t it, to see much difference between these two monsters. So just how is it that Saddam swings out the Old Year, while Bush rings in the New?

If Americans can step outside of their trained ignorance and chauvinism for a minute or two and take a sober and unbiased look at George W. Bush, they will see what the rest of the world has seen for some time now. Here is a man who is little different than the beast just hanged in Baghdad. As shocking a statement as that seems for many, it is all too well supported by the clear evidence on record. And we would also do well to remember the degree to which the good folks at home are so often fooled by nationalist rhetoric into believing that the local mass murderer is a saintly patriot. For many, many Germans, Hitler was pretty great – until he wasn’t (though for some, even still). Ditto Uncle Joe Stalin and the benevolent Chairman Mao. How many Serbs thought Slobodan Milosevic was a genocidal monster? Heck, how many do today?

I guess we can all now see why the administration has worked so hard to dismantle the International Criminal Court, exerting ridiculous amounts of pressure on vulnerable countries around the world. The ICC was set up with full American participation, in full accommodation of American concerns, and the treaty establishing the Court was ultimately signed by an American president, only to be ‘unsigned’ by Bush before he launched his assault hammering other countries to exempt Americans from ICC jurisdiction. Who could he have had in mind?

The Court’s function is to punish ‘evildoers’ around the world who commit war crimes, wanton acts of mass violence, or human rights violations, when their domestic criminal justice systems won’t. We’re talkin’ nice folks like Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and...

...well, you know who.