Suggest you read "The Threatening Storm" by Kevin Pollack.
The New Yorker magazine recommended it, and I went to B&N and bought it. All questions about US and Iran/Iraq War are addressed (warts and all). All sanction scenarios discussed. Containment discussed. Very thorough job.
How is Saddam like Hitler (actually, he is a bigger admirer of Stalin)?
Excerpt from the book (page 149)
"Saddam Hussein is a man of grand ambitions. "Saddam's pursuit of power for himself and Iraq is boundless. In fact, in his mind, the destiny Saddam and Iraq are one and indistinguishable, " in the words of Jerrold M. Post, a psychologist who formerly worked for the U.S. intelligence community and has written extensively on Saddam's personality and leadership. Saddam calls himself "al=qa'id ad-darura', which means "the indispensible leader." The connotation of the title is that he was "meant" to rule Iraq in some kind of eschatological sense. Indeed, Saddam thinks of himself as a great man of history, someone marked to accomplish great deeds. In his vast personality cult he is constantly compared to great figures of Iraq's past. He is the new Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who conquered biblical Israel, sacked Jerusalem, and took the Jews into captivity. He al-Mansur, the caliph who built Baghdad and conquered new lands for Islam.
... the new Saladin" (tired of typing here...gonna skip)
self-bestowed appellations:
al-qa'id al umma >>the leader of the Arab nation
al-ayyam al-tawila >> the man of the long days (the leader of the days of Arab glory).
Saddam > "No great power has ever reached security "without moving along the road of force.""
That is enough from that section. Read it in the store if you don't buy the book. The security apparatus, the torture, the deaths in Iraq. They all match Hitler's horrors except in numbers.
Read about it in the book. |
