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The Christmas season been one of one obituaries. Farewell to the inspiring-but-flawed, the nice-but-probably-mediocre and the dangerously-self-deluded…

And now Saddam Hussein is dead, and we don’t mourn the passing of a murderous dictator. However we should mourn the manner and method of his passing. Capital punishment is a sordid, mechanical ritual that dehumanises both the convicted and the judicial apparatus that condemned them.

Saddam’s untimely death serves no practical purpose. It is a symbolic act that supposedly allows the Iraqi people to expiate the sins of a bloody period of oppression. And all in the midst of another bloody period of chaos in which thousands have died and millions still live in fear.

Saddam’s death is timely only for those who have inconvenient truths to bury – truths that reveal what a destructive and inhuman machine we have built out of international politics and our petty attempts to build empires and buy influence.

Saddam’s Ba’ath party was brought to power in Iraq in a 1963 revolution against the communist-sympathising incumbent with support from the CIA.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Ba’ath régime provided the West with a useful bulwark against Soviet and Islamist influence in the Middle East. During his invasion of Iran in 1980 and the protracted aftermath, Saddam Hussein was given material and intelligence support by numerous Western countries, notably the United Kingdom, France and the United States. And it could be argued that this tacit support from Western backers gave Saddam the false impression that he would be able to annex Kuwait in 1990 – the single deluded act that ultimately led to Saddam’s downfall and greater suffering for the people of Iraq.

Saddam was tried, convicted and executed for his role in just one specific crime: a massacre of Shi’a villagers in Dujail in 1982.

At this stage we don’t know what pressure (if any) was put on the Iraqi courts to choose which of Saddam’s crimes to try first. But Dujail seems a convenient, clear-cut story of internal repression: an easy “gotcha” that would clear Mr Hussein from the decks and minimise embarassment to Western nations who are implicated in his other crimes against humanity.

Although the chief defendent is now dead, Saddam’s trial for the killing of 5,000 people in a 1998 gas attack on the village of Halabja in Kurdistan continues. The Halabja massacre was carried out using gas likely created from precursor chemicals supplied by Western companies, and dropped from Mirage jet fighters supplied by France.

So this morning at dawn, yet another Iraqi has died. But it is all of us who should be hanging our heads in shame. We allow the dirty business of power projection to continue. Geopolitics has always been messy and destructive, but surely there must be another way? We are only hurting ourselves and others.

Let’s make 2007 a year when we humans try to find common ground and work towards a world where we can abandon brute strength and the cynical exertion of force on others. It’s got to start sometime.

Le Monde carries good coverage today of the liberation of the journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot after 124 days as hostages of the Islamic Army insurgent group in Iraq. Since the kidnapping on August 20th, this is a story that never died in France – every night French TV news ended their bulletins with a note of how long Chesnot and Malbrunot had been in captivity. There was also a rare show of unity across the political spectrum in the French media, with Edwy Plenel, the editor of Le Monde expressing his solidarity with the staff of Le Figaro, for whom Malbrunot was a correspondent.

Indeed the unity of outrage around the world about the victimisation of journalists in the Iraq conflict has been remarkable. While I don’t want to idealise the job of a journalist, the deliberate targeting of the media by terrorist or insurgent groups seems, at best, counter-productive. And the fact that Malbrunot and Chesnot were French, spoke Arabic and had many years of experience in Middle East reporting makes their kidnapping even more bizarre.

As Chesnot’s brother, Thierry, said today, “C’est un magnifique cadeau de Noël” .

It is tragic that the same edition of Le Monde also has to detail the assassination of Gambian journalist Deida Hydara.

US forces are mounting an attack to retake Samara in northern Iraq. Perhaps I’m naive in military matters, but this is beginning to sound more like a territorial war, rather than a battle against hit-and-run insurgents.

Down the rabbit-hole we go.