Return with me now, my fellow Americans, to that time long ago when any of us gave a fiddler's shit about Saddam Hussein. The announcement today that he will be executed within 30 days seems almost comical.

You mean he's not dead YET? Everyone else in Iraq seems to be. How many dead yesterday? How many the day before?

Of dead Americans, we're closing in on 3,000 since we decided to impose regime change. I say "we" because the president of the United States is the decider of who is "us" in such matters. As a result of our invasion and failed occupation of Iraq, more innocent Iraqis have died by random terror than by any deliberate campaign of extermination of his own people launched by Saddam Hussein. Ever.

Once again the world learns, leave it to the United States.

We'll kill you with love.

Let us remind ourselves that it wasn't compassion for oppressed Iraqi people that motivated our support for an American invasion of a soveriegn nation half a world away. We were afraid. We were very afraid of Saddam Hussein because our president -- and in retrospect it seems so comical, doesn't it? -- told us we needed to be afraid. And even if we didn't believe George Bush, we believed in the intelligence of the office of the president. He must know. Why would he lie about that?

God, we were still innocent. We recognized none of the classic Shakespearean patterns of the dimwit son of a noble king defending his father's honor by vanquishing his father's foe, an act of unnecessary vindication that only drew the kingdom into endless violence, doubt and misery. And all the while his advisors nodded.

It's not like we ever trusted these guys. But, wow, haven't we been screwed big time by these fools. I don't care if they're criminals, they're guilty. America was pulled into war like a big horned bull with a ring through its nose. The beast was willing to follow the tug because we trusted the tugger. God bless him, he is our president. And for that he will pay in hell. Along with us. And along with that name that still matters to us, you know. . . America.

We. Americans. Know. We can't leave now. We can't bail on Iraq. That would be sillier and more monstrous than what we've already done. We are responsible for this mess. We will kill ourselves cleaning it up, but we will try. So far the number of dead Americans in Iraq just about equals the American dead on 9/11. Around 3,000.

That's a lot of people. Nearly 3,000 of us killed in Iraq fighting a country that had nothing to do with the dead of 9/11. And we declared war on this foreign country in a deliberate way after long diplomacy that lasted until March 2003 when our president lied our way into supporting a war that was declared "mission accomplished" in May of the same year. Such lies we've witnessed. Such lies we've swallowed.

There are three kinds of lies, Mark Twain once said, famously, "Lies. Damn lies. And statistics." America was in direct danger from Iraq. America won the war in May of 2003. Three thousand Americans have died so far. No wonder we hate statistics more than liars.

And so now we face the decision by The Decider's generals of whether a surge will do it. A surge will do something at least. Stall the bad boys for awhile, at least until the crypto bad boys can fake it long enough for us to leave. Surge talk is harmless. The threat of boots on the ground never hurt an army as much as actual boots.

I'll tell you what I think. I think this is all a bad dream brought on by indigestion. I think botulism might be involved. In a regular nightmare you couldn't imagine the stuff we've been asked to swallow. A cartoon despot like Saddam Hussein was worth all this? It was like hunting down Dracula and driving a stake through his heart in a country full of flesh eating zombies. Like taking out the big guy would change the culture or the appetites of the infected.

When I heard that American generals are considering the surge of 20 or 30 thousand troops to tidy up Baghdad, I couldn't help but think of a George Romero moment in a sequel to Night of the Living Dead. I believe it was called Return of the Living Dead. This is not a Vietnam metaphor. This is a horror movie. In Return of the Living Dead, which takes place in Kentucky, the hungry brain-eating undead from the cemetary next door besiege a group of people barricaded inside a building. "Brains!" the zombies chant. "We want brains."

Finally a phone is found and the cops are called. Man with a gun; people shot. About seven cop cars pull up the driveway to the front door. There are four cops in every car. As the four doors open as one on every car, a thousand zombies jump out from behind the bushes and eat the cops brains. An ambulance pulls up. Two fire medics walk past the empty cop cars with open doors. Behind them a zombie sprawled across the front seat of a patrol car presses down on the police radio button and whispers, "Send more cops."

This is not an Iraq metaphor. But to speak for the living, I must sound like a zombie. "Brains. We want brains."