Imagine you went to a party and the most sparkling, witty and popular guest in the room was burly sex-killer Fred West. That should give you a flavour of what an unbelievably monumental, visible-from-space clusterfuck Saddam Hussein’s public execution turned out to be.

Saddam’s capture, trial and execution shows in microcosm how bright a beacon of democracy Iraq has become under our tender attentions. Of all the shifting reasons we were casually tossed in the run up for war, torture, farcical show trials and quasi-judicial executions were some of the most compelling. We all know people don’t like change and resist it wherever possible but it makes you wonder how many Iraqis are comforted by the continuing of these practices after Saddam’s downfall.

Then, after the invasion, we find the people we’re fighting against like nothing more than publishing shaky videos of their grisly executions on the internet. And then after the invasion we find the people we’re fighting *with* like nothing more than publishing shaky videos of their grisly executions on the internet. Tactical mastermind Donald Rumsfeld said ‘freedom is a messy business’ but the intractable reality is worse than even the abattoir of pants-shitting terror that we’re sure constitutes Rummy’s dreams could come up with.

Saddam looked like a pale half-starved elderly badger in the moments before his death but the blood-soaked old butcher showed considerably more dignity than the ski-masked executioners in their Sweeney-era leather jackets braying the name of theocratic thug Moqtadr Al-Sadr. It’s really some achievement making Saddam look good. Those blokes don’t deserve arrest, they deserve their own TV series where they conduct gob-smacking feats hitherto considered impossible. No doubt Tony Blair has taken note and hired a bunch of thickset and terrifying men to publicly harangue him should he every be charged for selling honours.

Considering many of us, the state of the NHS being what it is, will leave this world shrieking for morphine on some cancer ward, Saddam’s exit suddenly becomes rather enviable. Who would you rather be, Saddam who got shouted at a bit by a bunch of knobheads and then offed in seconds or 91 year-old Olive Nockels who, the inquest into her death heard this week, expired slowly and begging pathetically for beetroot sandwiches after doctors decided to withhold treatment and food from her? Any Middle Eastern dictatorships currently with a vacancy should write to the usual address.

(First published in this week’s 5th birthday edition of The Friday Thing. Or would have been if Pond hadn’t forgotten it, the berk. Consider this like a DVD extra. TFT was on its Winterval hiatus when Saddam took the drop hence this piece being slightly past its sell-by date)