happy trails.

It looks like Kindly Uncle Saddam is going to swing at the end of a rope within the next 24 hours.

Now, I've mentioned before that i am not a huge fan of the death penalty. My dislike of capital punishment does not mean that I don't recognize certain crimes as worthy of execution, but rather that I find the death penalty to be unevenly and inconsistently meted out in this country.

That said, if there is a candidate for getting his neck snapped by a rope, it's someone who sets up a country as his personal fiefdom, executes political opponents and dissidents at will, and who starts not one, but two lengthy wars of aggression with his neighbors that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. (For the patchouli crowd: Gulf War I was not evil America kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, it was Iraq invading Iran back in 1980, kicking off an eight-year conflict. Gulf War II was the aforementioned eviction of Saddam's goons from Kuwait after they visited that country in force without permission.)

Oh, and it turns out that Arab countries don't use the "Western" method of hanging, whereby a strategically placed knot on the rope stuns the condemned while his own body weight breaks the neck swiftly at the end of a longish drop. They use a short drop method, where the weight of the condemned is not sufficient to break the neck, which results in a comparatively slow death by asphyxiation.

Still, it probably beats dying by poison gas, or getting tossed into a plastic shredder. Uncle Saddam also got more due process than any of the people who had to walk the plank during his reign.