Over at Eschaton, Lambert (pinch-hitting for Atrios) is outraged (here, here, and here) that American soldiers killed Saddam's sons when it was possible to take them alive. (Lambert cites this MSNBC article, which notes that psyops teams were standing by but weren't used, and this DefenseLINK article, which says we had them surrounded and they couldn't have escaped.)

Lambert's right in theory, but it really doesn't matter: Never in a million years would the Bushies have agreed to ship the brothers Hussein to the Hague. They were never going to try them publicly in America, and they were never going to allow them to be tried publicly in Iraq. The same goes for their daddy: If U.S. troops take Saddam alive and can't kill him for some reason, he'll be bundled off to an Undisclosed Location so fast it'll make your head spin -- far from Iraq, where the people he brutalized can't get their own justice, far from the public courts of the U.S., and far from the International Criminal Court.

The Bushies love secrecy. They love control. They hate what they see as a sissified, pantywaist deference to due process. And they think the American people agree with them. And while I know Bush's poll numbers are dropping right now, I think there's something to this -- when Bush seemed to be kicking ass on his own terms, with utter disregard for the opinions of others, during each of the two wars, he was riding pretty high in the polls, virtually exempt from criticism.

Forget humbling or humiliating the Husseins before the people they brutalized. Forget placing them in the dock to answer charges while the world watches. The Bushies wanted these kills, and they got 'em. They want one more, and they'll probably get that one, too.