The capture of Saddam Hussein was an eventuality that has finally come to pass. The amount of diligence that the US occupation forces has expended on this squirrel hunt has been enormous, in dollar terms it could be termed the most expensive man-hunt in history. And so the tyrant is captured. What happens next will be the typical rattling of sabers, the congratulatory backslapping, and the insistence that might is after all right. The pure bourgeoisie will revel in their state of social ferment and toast each other with Johnny Walker Blue.
But what of Iraq and her people? What of Iraq?

Irregardless of the Pentagons propaganda mills that spill fear into the streets of our nation and the world, and the oil barons and corporate slave traders incessant greed, Saddam Hussein was and is still, in the end, an opportunist. Groomed by the military industrial colonialist elite, and placed in power by the CIA, funded lavishly at American taxpayer expense to buy weapons and centrifuges and spores, Hussein as an opportunist was also not a fundamentalist. He was much more a capitalist, although a wayward sort, certainly in the biting of the CIA's hand that fed and nurtured him. As such, he exercised a tyranny that was Western, at times perhaps the most Western of the Arab tyrannies. He held no truck with Islamic fanatics, and imprisoned and attacked them as much as his gilded neighbors to the South in Kuwait. Now that he is finally gone, who will take his place...will it be a colonialist government of yes-men and Bechtel clones? That's what the psychopath bush wants undoubtedly. His capture, though, has created a power vacuum for those who might genuinely want a free and independent, a culturally whole, Iraq and who have been fighting for that against colonialist forces. This is not to say that those people wanted a return of Saddam, but while he was on the run and separated from colonial inquisition and punishment, he must have represented something untouched by the overwhelming military superiority of the invaders of Iraq and as such a figurehead of refusal to bow down to that colonial capitalist hegemony.

Now that he has been captured a power vacuum has formed. Forces of Islamic fundamentalism, such as those represented by bin Laden, the Taliban, and other truly dangerous entities are looking at a situation that is ripe for exploitation. How much of Iraq does the occupation forces control? Forty, maybe fifty percent of the country. They cannot at this point adequately control the border and the mass desertions of nearly half of the Iraqi army does not bode well for the colonialist forces to fill the vacuum. I am afraid that bin Laden's fundamentalists will now take up whatever resistance psychology that Saddam may have engendered in those Iraqis who supported a free Iraq untainted by American corruption and values.

Past the backslapping and the gleeful republicrats yes-sirs, the specter of a dangerous Iraq just became a lot more destabilized, and for American soldiers and destiny perhaps much more deadly. The confrontation of the psychopathic bush's Christian fundamentalism and bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism will perhaps play out among the GI graffitied ancient ruins of Ur and Babylon, pushing us all closer to the bizarre conflagration that bush needs to justify his own twisted and cracked sense of individuality.