This month marks the ninth anniversary of the capture of misunderstood Iraqi Dictator Sadaam Hussein.  In December 2003, Sadaam Hussein was discovered in his infamous “spider-hole,” in the town of ad-Dawr, Iraq, a small agricultural town renowned for its lush orchards of date palms, orange and pear trees.

The U.S. Military Industrial Complex, the neocons, and FOX News may want to keep alive the memory of Sadaam’s so-called “capture” for their own propaganda purposes—but I assure you, people, Big Chocolate hopes you’ll forget.

Sadaam Hussein, an involuntary ascetic at the end, had pared down his belongings to only that which was essential to his survival on the run:  an AK-47 assault rifle, a pistol, $750,000 in cash, and …oh, by the way, a stash of ”7th Heaven” candy bars, the flagship offering of the Prock Chocolate Corporation.

This, people, is not the kind of “product placement” Big Chocolate wants you to see.

One has to wonder the degree to which the Prock Chocolate Corporation knowingly supplied its products to the brutal dictator over the course of his 24-year reign of terror.

Surely the dictator didn’t stroll down the road from his palace in Baghdad to the city’s Mansour district, heart of the junk-food market scene, and load a couple dozen bars into a burlap sack, did he?

No, the more likely scenario is a corporate-owned truck, festooned with candy bar logos, rolling through the gates of Sadaam’s palace—or one of the other more than 75 palaces and VIP complexes nationwide—to rack up profits and secure the strongman’s favor.

Big Chocolate has been a favortie of dictators for centuries.  Napoleon’s favorite dessert:  profiteroles made with chocolate and cream; Hitler loved his chocolate éclairs decorated with little swastikas.  Someone supplied chocolate to these evil men—or conveniently looked the other way as so-called “independent contractors” within Big Chocolate’s purposefully deregulated supply chain (deniability, people!) furnished product.

Interestingly—or perhaps instructively—among the approximately 600 assassination attempts the CIA is believed to have set in motion against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, one infamous failure called for covert agents to insert poison into El Presidente’s daily chocolate shake.  And while they succeeded in getting the poison into the beverage, an overeager servant inadvertently foiled the plan by putting the shake in a freezer to keep it cold; it froze, and the temperamental dictator demanded a new one.

Remember 1954, when the United Fruit Company, in cahoots with the CIA, overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala after the banana crops were nationalized?  It makes one wonder: Back in Cuba in 1963, might Big Chocolate have been in similar cahoots with the CIA over “Operation Chocolate Shake,” the botched Castro assassination?  Given that Castro had daringly rebuked American hegemony by nationalizing all the sugar plantations in the country—a move that must have surely displeased Big Chocolate—it’s not beyond the realm of imagination.

2013 New Year’s Resolution for Big Chocolate: Keep chocolate out of dictators’ hands!