OK, you read it here first...

Don't cheer so loudly, dear right-wing bloggers. Saddam is not dead.

You may remember that the man had a slew of doubles. This was one of them, the one who drew the short straw. Why is the real Saddam being kept alive, you might wonder. Better you should ask, "Did they ever have the real Saddam in custody?"

No, they did not. Don't believe a word of it. He's holed up in comfort somewhere, with his Scotch and his torture videos. There is a geopolitical game plan here, of stunning boldness, hatched in the glory days of Donald Rumsfeld and fledged by his successor. But to understand it, you first need to know about the invisible imam. To quote the linked article,

[The] Twelfth Imam, Muhammed al-Mahdi...died, or vanished, at age five in the ninth century. The Twelfth, or Invisible, Imam is prophesied to return in times of extreme ruin to lead the faithful to paradise.

Now, there's a problem. It would appear that, at least in some quarters, the ever-elusive Osama bin Laden is seen as precisely that imam. Not good news for the US State Department. Such rallying-points keep Islamofascism on the boil.

But Christianity offers a way out, or at least the history of Christianity. What do you do if someone you don't like becomes Pope? Why, if you have organizing skills and a geographic base, create--an anti-Pope. Or, more properly, create a Pope of your own, and call the other fellow the anti-Pope.

As everybody knows, Saddam was useful to the US over quite a period of time--in fact you could almost call him their made guy. Suddenly, though, he was supposedly in their bad books. Two wars twelve years apart it took to "topple" him, and in between, sanctions made him fabulously rich. Now the US is sitting on the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and Saddam has been turned into the Hanged Man, that archetypal symbol of divinity and sacrifice. As Tarot-fanciers know, the Hanged Man is not really dead. This image, residing deep in the unconscious, is being deliberately used by the US to resonate in the hearts and minds of Muslims.

We may never know what Saddam was offered to play his upcoming role of Mahdi. Perhaps he'll get Iraq back, but as the Twelfth Imam he would be far more powerful than a mere dictator in any case. And, to paraphrase a former US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, he may be a Twelfth Imam, but he's our Twelfth Imam.

When will he appear in his new guise? My bet is this year, 2007, just in time to extricate the US from the deepening Iraqi quagmire and cut Osama off at the knees at the same time, not to mention establish George W. Bush's legacy. Mind you, I'm not sure how the President is going to explain this to his fellow-citizens, but he won't have to bust a gut over it. Those people will believe anything.