Well, Hussein is dead, according to reports. In the book Heart of Darkness, to which the title of this post alludes, the death of the madman Kurtz is a turning point, at which the boat of the story turns back toward civilization. Maybe that’s a metaphor for Iraq. But it illuminates the irrelevance of Hussein’s death to us in America. The boat of our story – of the western world – is apt to make no such turning toward sanity. We go on into darkness because Hussein was not the madman we go upriver, at our manifest peril, to find.
Metaphor
Surely some revelation is at hand.
Metaphor 
Yeah, I felt that way about Richard Allen Davis. [http://www.cnn.com/US/9609/26/davis.klass/]I thought they should take him out in the courthouse parking lot, spread out a big plastic tarp, shoot him in the head, wrap him in the tarp, and pack him off to the nearest landfill.I just think that would have been more dignified than what Saddam got. Those guys went beyond righteous extermination.
Gotta agree with you here, Mr. K. Like, too, what Erik posted above as well. Still, I'm glad Saddam has been dispatched to his just and virginless reward, nonetheless. Barbaric and Hun-like? Most certainly. By whatever means necessary, there are just some folk who desperately need killin'.
You got that right. I think Conrad was telling us that Kurtz represented the evil that abides in some (all?) of us at a base level, which, when unleashed by the absence of societal constraint, becomes an obsession, a mania. In "Darkness," Kurtz personifies this. In the District of Columbia, there are several candidates, but I vote for Cheney, who even looks a bit like Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now."