Should I have been surprised that television news media - liberal or conservative - would begin this morning crooning a sonnet to impatience, decrying the fact that between sixteen and twenty hours seems to not have been enough time to catheterize from every last Iraqi his shock, doubt or ingrained fear of Qusai and Udai, whose father's historical insuperability won him the nickname of "The Vampire"? Amazingly, some commentators' complaints practically share the same sentence as reports identifying major Iraqi newspapers as without time to even carry the image in yesterday's editions - let alone the fact that some portions of the country may not even have received word.

"Nearsighted" is too complimentarily academic for this; "silly" and "foolish" are more apt. In addition to the unrealistic expectation of countrywide, societal events to complete themselves on a single daily news cycle, a variety of illogical cynics' counterpoints have popped up within a short time in an attempt to grapple with the painfully obvious.

The brothers had reconstructive surgery. The Cossack beards weren't enough? This seems far more like urban myth irresponsibly repeated by news personalities. Minor cosmetic surgery requires less than a month to heal - but by whom under a shattered Ba'athist rule, and if so, to what end as far as witnesses are concerned? The faces of the bodies look like men as if they'd received, by the disfigurement of injury and the bloat of death, a grim cosmetic alteration from the Allies themselves. Still, the likeness is there. At my amateur's glance, Qusai's profile and Udai's characteristically stubbly hairline are both matches. A forensic expert, if called upon, could easily correlate more features, accounting for pathological disformation.

The United States is hypocritical to broadcast photos of the dead when it chastised al Jazeera for airing tapes of American dead in March. I'm a legal layman, but one only needs to spend a few minutes sorting out the facts separating the two circumstances. Laymen need not be careless or, by vocally accusing the administration of a double-standard, idiotic. Al Jazeera, as some media voices have conveniently forgotten, accepted Iraqi footage of soldiers after being taken as prisoners of war, while under interrogation, and then, presumably, after subsequent (and illegal) execution - clear violations of the Geneva Convention, which is what the United States objected to. Udai and Qusai, as Eugene Volokh has deftly examined, are quite arguably understood between common rules of war and American executive order as enemy combatants. These enemy combatants, of course, resisted capture and fought against uniformed soldiers until death - they were never POWs. The public display of killed enemy combatants, to the best of my knowledge, does in no way violate any international treaty. Shorthand? Two completely different situations. Furthermore, the justification for Allied release of post-mortem photography is quite substantial: with presumably hundreds of bodies of Iraqi fighters accumulated in the weeks of fighting, only Udai and Qusai's bodies have been publicized (whereas the Ba'athists trumpeted every last killing they could), the evidence of the death of these two men vital to completing societal restoration in Iraq.

Udai and Qusai would have been of more use to the Allies alive than dead: This is purely speculative and not worth much in factual argumentation, introducing a bit of wishful thinking into the reality of how helpful any hardened Ba'athist would be to authorities, let alone the second and third most powerful. Nothing we have learned from the Pentagon or the military over the past three months indicates any pattern of capitulatory success with high-ranking regime officials. But this sidesteps what actually happened: the 101st was attacked by the brothers, who left no option but combative defeat. Only time-travel and daydream second-guessing can manage any further pursuit of alternative outcomes. This a line of reasoning makes for contrarian politics and little else.

Like any man who hopes to remain both patient and sane, I'll wait for the Husseins' elimination to settle. Weeks will be necessary to observe any noticeable change in behavior from Ba'athist holdouts and acceptance from law-abiding Iraqis. In the meantime, use this and other reasoned cautionaries you find among blogs to ward off emotional panic instigated by the media.

And stay away from daytime cable television news. Lord, to what lengths they must go to fill the hours.

UPDATE: No, the Hussein boys weren't coming out alive. Jonathan Foreman elucidates us on both the situation and its expert handling by American troops:

Whether the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein were self-inflicted or not, the military operation to capture them was immaculate. There were no American deaths, 10 minutes of warnings were given over loudspeakers, and it was the Iraqis who opened fire. So sensitive was the American approach, they even rang the bell of the house before entering.

The neat operation fits squarely with the tenor of the whole American campaign, contrary to the popular negative depiction of its armed forces: that they are spoilt, well-equipped, steroid-pumped, crudely patriotic yokels who are trigger-happy yet cowardly in their application of overwhelming force.

They rang the doorbell. Udai and Qusai might have even found their way into a miraculous lifetime detention, depending upon whichever philosophical side of the Atlantic Iraqi authorities, who would presumably try them, fell.

Read the article - it's tonic to a good soul peturbed by relentless, faithless attacks on American integrity and intentions (From Instapundit).