No lengthy appeals process for the likes of Saddam Hussein, his one and only appeal court said he must die within thirty days:

See It Now

Two points: 1) What else will be happening 30 days from now? Uh, the SOTU, during which Bush will be trying to justify the Surge in troop levels that he thinks was indicated by November's election and the Baker Hamilton report. How unbelievably convenient.

2) Saddam's sentence here was only one of many that were supposed to follow. This was the easiest case for prosecutors to make, but the scope of the inhumanity here was comparatively small, "covering one case involving the execution of 148 men and boys in the northern town of Dujail in 1982," according to the above linked article in the NYT.

My question is two fold: Will we still try Saddam for the alleged hundreds of thousands of other murders he's responsible for, or will we let those slide, seeing as he's going to be unable to participate vigorously in his own defense, what with the being dead and all?

And the second fold of my question is this: even under the absolute best interpretation of our prosecution of this war in Iraq, we have been responsible for well more than 200 deaths of innocents, women and children and men. It's frankly impossible to believe that it's less than a few thousand. So the question is, when does Mr. Bush's capital trial start, and which version of the appeals process will he be availed of, the one he found so needlessly lengthy and overcautious in Texas, or the one he seems to approve of in Iraq.