I read this rational article at the usually rational Tom Paine.com and have asked permission to reprint it here. I haven't gotten permission as of yet, but it will either stay or come down once that issue is settled. All notices are intact. I have also provided a link to the article.

I really don't like the expression, "common sense." If sense were a common commodity, the world wouldn't be on life support. Criminy.

Uncommon Sense

The Problem Prisoner

Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in politics and national security issues.

Read the following paragraph and see what you’d change about it now that Saddam Hussein has been captured:

The U.S. war in Iraq was an illegal and unjustified use of unilateral American power, based on presidential lies and exaggerations about the threat to the United States posed by Iraq’s apparently nonexistent weapons and ties to terrorism. It has pushed Iraq into chaos, whose ultimate outcome is likely to be a civil war among its feuding ethnic blocs and the rise of an Iranian-style theocratic government led by militant Shiite clerics. In the process, President Bush has destroyed America’s prestige abroad, shattered its alliances, frittered away the goodwill toward the United States that emerged after 9/11 and established a precedent for preventive wars that can be used to justify aggressive military action in a dozen conflicts around the world.

But he got Saddam.

What does it mean? It’s better, first, to look at what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that the Iraqi insurgency will halt—it’s clear, by now, that the fighters in Iraq are mostly nationalists who oppose the U.S. occupation and Islamists who see the U.S. presence as an opportunity to strike blows against the Great Satan. It doesn’t mean a victory in the War on Terrorism; that’s Osama’s bailiwick, and Saddam never had any connection to terrorism in the first place. It doesn’t mean that Iraq’s rival factions are likely to set aside their differences and cooperate hunkily-dorily under Jerry Bremer’s umbrella.

And it doesn’t say much about U.S. military and intelligence prowess. What’s remarkable about his capture is not that he was found—after all, unlike the WMD, Saddam was actually there—but that it took so long. From the beginning, in March, there was never any doubt that Saddam would be captured or killed. Invading Iraq, by far the weakest point on the Axis of Evil, was not much of a challenge militarily: its armed forces were already devastated, eviscerated by the first Gulf War and 12 years of an embargo. But, a combination of poor military planning, bad intelligence and a misreading of Iraqi feelings about the U.S. occupation allowed Saddam to hide for nine months. That’s in part because a nation that was supposed to welcome American troops with open arms greeted them, instead, with arms.

Here is what it does mean.

First, Saddam’s capture will present a significant political problem for Bush & Co. All by himself, Saddam can unravel the supposed mystery of Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction. Call him a liar, but on this subject he can tell the truth. Iraq’s WMD were virtually extinguished in 1991, and lingering remnants dealt with by UN inspectors in the early '90s. Already, according to Time, Saddam in captivity ridiculed the WMD issue. “Saddam was... asked whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction,” reported Time. "‘No, of course not,’ he replied, according to [a U.S.] official, ‘the U.S. dreamed them up itself to have a reason to go to war with us.’" In coming weeks, unless the United States manages to muzzle Saddam and suppress leaks—not likely—Saddam can highlight Bush’s prevarications on WMD and terrorism.

Second, it means that the United States and its puppet governing council in Iraq will have yet another showdown with the world community over Saddam’s trial. The United States and its allies would like a quick show trial and an execution; James Woolsey—the former CIA director and one of the leading advocates since the 1990s for war in Iraq—has already called for a hanging, and Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress and the Pentagon’s chief Iraqi ally, says that preparations for a trial are already underway. But human rights groups, the UN and others in the world community will insist on a Milosevic-style international proceeding, sans death penalty.

Both of these problems could have been avoided had Saddam, like his sons, been killed rather than captured alive. The fact that he wasn’t is a tribute to the rationality and good sense of U.S. military units who seized him, but the fact that Saddam didn’t kill himself or fight back is a sign that he believes he can engage in yet more mischief as a prisoner, perhaps in an effort to rehabilitate his legacy or to justify himself as the last of the old-style Arab nationalists. Keeping him alive now is the job of the U.S. military, amid a swirl of political forces that would like him dead. Though he has apparently been spirited away to Qatar, he will have to be returned to Iraq for the inquest and trial. And Iraq, at the very least, is a nation of a thousand Jack Rubys. Link.

The above expresses my feelings about the capture of Hussein as well as anything I'm liable to pen.