I am reminded of a sequence from an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus called “The Cyclist.” A bicyclist played by Michael Palin is brought before a Russian firing squad. The squad fires off a volley of shots. The officer, played by John Cleese, looks in the direction of the intended victim (who is off camera) for a long moment. He then turns to his men and demands to know, “How could you MISS?”

In the old days just about every town had someone who could do the delicate math equations required to get it right but like many lost folk arts it’s become well nigh impossible to find that sort of craftmanship. Needless to say, the public schools are no help at all, with teachers wasting time on Math and science while they try to justify their so-called 4 figure salaries.

And here we see one of the ultimate lose/lose propositions that the mindset of many in the Middle East puts us into. We take down a despot and aid in his execution. Well, even more then in our culture, one man’s Middle Eastern despot is many men’s Middle Eastern hero. We’re now hated even more by those who had it made under Saddam & Company and those that most wanted him dead had very little love for us to begin with. Two thumbs up!!!

Every single step of this venture has been mishandled and bungled to the point that there may very shortly no longer be such a thing as a “winning” strategy in Iraq. These executions have just been added crap to the manure pile. The failure to have any plan for Iraq beyond getting Saddam, the troops not having the numbers or the tools to truly do the job that they were charged with, the contents of the Iraq Constitution, the terrorist ties in the Iraqi Prime Minister’s past and on up to these obscenely mishandled executions… Iraq is no longer a quagmire, it’s a f*****g nightmare.

And events here aren’t helping. I had some hope back in November that some things might change for the better in the coming year. Bush actually looked, for at least a few days, like he had finally been pushed out of his bubble. I had hoped that he might have finally been smacked hard enough to start doing what needed to be done in Iraq. I was wrong. All he seems to be doing is just enough to push a pullout or a complete failure in Iraq into the lap of whoever our next President turns out to be.

Not much good is going to come out of that.