We learn today that Saddam Hussein’s two eldest sons, Husay and Qusay, have been killed.

They’re dead. Gone forever.

And much as I hate death in all its forms, that’s good news. Very good news. I am not ashamed to say that.

Yes, it’s good news for the Bush administration’s heretofore thoroughly bumbling post-“Mission Accomplished” military campaign. But it’s also good news for both the Iraqi populace and for American soldiers charged with the almost hopeless task of preserving “the peace” in Iraq.

And it’s good news for everyone, including me and everyone else who opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and who continue to raise questions about our actions in that country.

I know the well paid dregs of our punditcracy, among them the likes of Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by trade, Mark Steyn, the theater critic, and William “The Wacky Necromancer” Safire, the Nixonian ass-kisser, among many others, together with the mindless Sharon-echoing segment of the blogosphere, think “leftists,” a group that I’m told, by way of the more psychotic of messages that land in my e-mail box each morning -- many induced by the ignorance of right-wing, rabidly bigoted “anti-Islamists,” Likudniks, and self-styled über-bloggers on the same subject, those whose priorities are sickeningly skewed away from our own national interest -- includes me, are allegedly saddened by this development.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Let me ungraciously interrupt the collective wet dreams of the demented right wing to say, without equivocation, that I’m pleased to learn these little cretins are dead, gone forever, and that I hope our otherwise admirable military forces will prove similarly successful with respect to Saddam and the altogether thoroughly forgotten, yet truth be told, more threatening menace to the U.S., Osama bin Laden.

That does not mean, however, that I’m signing on to the Bush administration’s unconscionably dangerous policy in Iraq, a “policy” that continues to result in the needless deaths of at least one American soldier a day, a “policy” that, based on the Bush administration’s own forward projections, will keep our supposedly supremely mobile military forces bogged down for years to come, a “policy” that, I have no doubt, serves primarily the interests not of the American people but of a small coterie of Americans who are all too eager to move on, without any provocation or justification whatsoever, to waging war upon such “threatening” -- to the U.S. -- states as Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

What a mess.

God help us, every one.