Most of you have probably heard that the government of Iraq executed Saddam Hussein's half-brother and a judge yesterday. You've probably also heard that they botched they hanging of Saddam's half-brother and accidentally decapitated him. I don't know. Maybe I am growing accustomed to beheadings, but if you're dead, you're dead. Who needs an attached head when you're dead? The main effect of a beheading is on the living. It's inspires terror. It also inspires closed caskets.

Iraqi officials were keen to reassure people that they did not intend to detach the head of Mr. Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. Ibrahim was Hussein’s secret police chief, so there is a lot of suspicion. A number of people, including New York Times reporter John Burns, were allowed to watch video of the hanging. If you are not into the macabre stop reading now.

An official video played to a small group of Iraqi and Western reporters more than 13 hours after the hanging showed Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of Mr. Hussein’s secret police, standing nervously on the trapdoor in a flame-orange jumpsuit of the kind used at the American detention center at Guantánamo, his head and moustache shaved...

After executioners in full-face balaclavas pulled black hoods over the two men’s heads, tightened nooses around their necks and pulled the lever opening the trapdoors, both fell like weights. But the hangmen’s calculations of weight, gravity and the momentum needed to snap their necks — a grim science that has produced detailed “drop charts” used for decades in hangings around the world — appeared, in Mr. Ibrahim’s case, to have gone seriously awry...

Iraqi officials who attended the hanging said the calculation in the case of Mr. Ibrahim , 55-year-old of medium height and build, had allowed for a “drop” of eight feet — too much, according to at least one United States Army manual — and about that amount of thick yellow rope could be seen coiled at Mr. Ibrahim’s feet before the hanging.

The video showed his head being snapped off as the rope went taut, and ending up, still inside the hood, lying in the pit of the gallows about five feet from his headless body.

Mr. Bandar could be seen dangling from the rope above Mr. Ibrahim, whose body was lying on its chest on the floor of the dark, dank pit, blood pooling beside his severed neck. The silent, three-minute video then ended abruptly, with officials saying they would run it only once, and not show it in public again.

According to Burns, under Saddam's rule the ropes were intentionally left too short so that the condemned would die slowly of asphyxiation over the course of fifteen or twenty minutes. The Iraqi government claims they were trying avoid such an outcome and overcompensated.

I don't really care. The end result is a revolting display of barbarism, horror, incompetence, farce, and public relations disaster. It's a perfect metaphor for the whole country of Iraq and for this whole war.