Blaming Saddam for being what he was is like blaming a rattlesnake for killing. That's how it lives, and it's what that Crocodile Hunter guy would've called "a bee-YOO-tiful ambush predator." Saddam was right for Iraq the way a Sidewinder is right for the Mojave. The NeoCons scared us by shaking his fangs in our faces, as if Saddam planned to bite every single commuter in LA, when all he wanted to do was stay alive and in power -- because those were the same thing for him -- in the Iraqi desert, where everything stings, sticks or bites. We may as well have gone on a crusade to wipe out all the snakes and spiders in the desert for being what they are. Only difference is, we wouldn't have lost 3000 soldiers that way.

...

Until we hooked him out of his burrow, the only thing Saddam had really done to America has hand us our most glorious victory since Inchon, in Gulf War I. He was like a lot of Third-World rulers: great at internal security but hopeless at conventional war. Like a rattler, he was totally harmless to anybody with the brains God gave a stray dog.

Meaning, anybody but Bush and Cheney. Those dudes remind me of this Darwin-Award winner who went to the hereafter on Lake Berryessa. He was fishing, noticed a rattler swimming beside his boat, grabbed it -- and when his fishing buddy told him to throw it away, this genius said, "Oh, no, it's harmless -- look!" and held it up to his face to show how harmless it was. The snake did us all a favor and took his genes out of the pool by biting him right on the nose, and he died before his buddy could power back to shore.

That was Saddam's last favor to us: showing us -- the hard way, no denying that -- how flat-out stupid our bigwigs really are. Bush is standing up at the podium every press conference with that rattler dangling from his nose like a mega-booger, yelping, "I'm fine, I'm fine!" but one of these days, and none too soon, he'll pass out and pass on, thanks to Saddam.

We did Saddam an accidental favor in return by giving him a rare old-school death. Maybe that's not important for some of you moral-types but it would be to my heroes. It would matter to John Paul Jones, it would matter to Alexander, it would matter to Subotai, and it matters to me. I wish I could have a death like that. Instead I'll die the same way you will, tubes coming out of my fat carcass, leaning over to watch the cardio beeper zig when it's supposed to zag, scared out of my head and ashamed to look down at this civilian belly hyperventilating its last chickenshit breaths.

Not Saddam. We may not have meant to, but we showed him the ultimate respect

Fuck me. War nerd doesn't mince the shit does he?