Miss Nomer,
Re: the lies and exaggerations Bushies told us
about the danger of Saddam.
Would you believe the NYT?
Top Stories - The New York Times
story.news.yahoo.com
Last, Desperate Days of a Brutal Reign
Sun Apr 20, 9:05 AM ET
By JOHN F. BURNS The New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq (news - web sites), April 19 On the gilded marble tablets
posted at the gateways of a score of presidential palaces, it was known as
"The Era of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)."
Yet in the 26 days of American warfare it took
to bring that era down, the hallmark of Mr.
Hussein's rule was revealed not as one of
grandeur, but of gangsterism and thuggery. On
the pediments of his palaces, Mr. Hussein
mounted 30-foot bronze busts of himself as
Saladin, the Mesopotamian warrior who
conquered Jerusalem with his Islamic army in
the 12th century. But Mr. Hussein's legacy,
revealed with merciless clarity in his last,
desperate weeks in power and in the looting of
those palaces that followed, was not one of
historical accomplishment, as he claimed, but
a chronicle of terror, greed and delusion writ
large.
In effect, Mr. Hussein and his entourage
inverted what was said of the dying dignity of a
17th-century English king, that nothing so
became him in life as the leaving of it. Of Mr.
Hussein, who may yet be alive, perhaps hiding
somewhere in Baghdad with the last of his
loyalists, a truer epitaph would record that
nothing characterized the way he ruled Iraq, for
nearly 24 years, so much as the bullying,
mendacious and cowardly way in which he and
his associates behaved as their power
collapsed.
In the end, some of the closest witnesses to
those last days were 150 Western reporters,
photographers and broadcast technicians who
were sequestered throughout the war in the
Palestine and Sheraton hotels on the eastern
bank of the Tigris River in the heart of Baghdad,
and taken from there by Iraqi officials on closely
guided tours of the city.
From the hotels' upper floors, they had a
panoramic view across the muddy-green river to
the government quarter, and the palaces,
ministries and security headquarters that
symbolized Mr. Hussein's grip on power.
The reporters had a grandstand seat as
American bombs and cruise missiles pulverized
Mr. Hussein's heavily guarded compounds,
encompassing whole districts of Baghdad, where he and his family enjoyed
the gilded privileges of ancient caliphs. In the war's closing stages, the
hotels' balconies gave an unimpeded view as American tanks blasted their
way from their first foothold in Baghdad, the former Saddam International
Airport, into the Republican Palace presidential compound that was the
White House of Mr. Hussein's Iraq.
But what the reporters saw was more than the power of America's arsenal,
and the inability, for all their boasts about America finding the graveyard of
its imperial ambition in Iraq, of Mr. Hussein and his cronies to mount more
than a delaying action on the road to their downfall.
Mr. Hussein himself remained remains, if still alive the furtive, vainglorious
figure he ever was, proclaiming from secret sanctuaries his solidarity with
his people in their hour of trial, the certain defeat of the enemy, and his
unshakable belief in Iraq.
But there were no Churchillian scenes of Mr. Hussein visiting the wounded,
or clambering atop rubble left by airstrikes. Instead, the 65-year-old Iraqi
leader appeared on television, until cruise missiles knocked it off the air, in
videotapes recorded from a small, low-ceilinged room, white sheet against
the wall, like a leader of an underground group taunting those hunting him
down. Twice in the last days before American troops seized Baghdad, Iraqi
television showed him on the streets, surrounded, as ever, by adoring
crowds the leader revered by his people, but doing nothing, at least nothing
that was visible, to help them.
Even at the last, Mr. Hussein's priority was only himself. In the late
afternoon of Wednesday, April 9, Marine Corps tanks entered eastern
Baghdad from the south and took control of the district by the river that
encompasses the Palestine and Sheraton hotels. Within three hours, after
attempts by Iraqi men with sledgehammers and ropes had failed, the
marines brought up an M-80 recovery tank with a long boom to assist in
hauling down a 30-foot cast-iron statue of Mr. Hussein in Firdos Square,
behind the hotels.
If any one moment marked the end of Mr. Hussein's rule, it was the sight of
the statue's legs cracking, its torso tumbling, and the severed head and
body being pelted with garbage and shoes the ultimate Arab insult by the
hundreds of Iraqis who had gathered to celebrate their freedom.
To be in the square at that moment was to know, beyond doubt, that Iraqis
in their millions hated Mr. Hussein, that the truth about Iraq was the
diametric opposite of all that he and his acolytes had maintained, and that
all else that was said about him in the years that went before was the
product of relentless terror.
"Good, good, Bush!" the crowds chanted. "Down, down, Saddam!" Men and
women wept, and reached out to shake the hands of the marines, or simply
touch their uniforms. "Thank you, mister!" they cried, again and again.
Hours later, the crowds still milled about the fallen idol, spitting and
mocking.
Yet during the whole sequence, it now appears, Mr. Hussein was barely five
miles farther north in the district of Adhamiya, one of the last safe
strongholds for him in Baghdad, in the neighborhood of Al Safina beside the
Abu Hanifa mosque.
Almost all who live there are, like Mr. Hussein, Sunni Muslims, in a country
with a 60 percent Shiite Muslim majority. Adhamiya has been, for 50 years,
a bastion of the Baath Party, whose coattails Mr. Hussein rode to power.
Witnesses' accounts in the days that followed, and a videotape released by
Abu Dhabi television on Friday, showed Mr. Hussein atop his car before the
mosque, slapping supporters' hands, pumping his arm, as always, in the
gesture of an emperor acknowledging his subjects' fealty.
Residents of Adhamiya, and old associates of Mr. Hussein from the 1950's,
said they had heard that he went from the mosque to a simple house,
probably the one from which he made his broadcasts earlier in the war
against a background of a white sheet, and stayed there, with his closest
companions, until sometime early on April 10.
Then, just ahead of American airstrikes and advancing American ground
troops who stormed the mosque, he slipped away, so one old Baath Party
member said, without telling many of the men who had guarded and
accompanied him throughout the war. Several of these, local residents said,
died in the American attacks that followed.
Delusions of Dominance
Apparently convinced that he could use the Western news media to
foment protests against the American attacks, and to save himself by
forcing President Bush (news - web sites) to call a standstill before
American troops overran Baghdad, Mr. Hussein sent his inner coterie out
to hold news conferences.
These became forums for illusion of an almost comical cast, and, in the
language used by many top officials, who spoke of Mr. Bush as a "mad
dog" and "garbage" and "a stupid, ignorant man," for a street-corner
vulgarity that made for a stark contrast with the officials' frequent
invocation of the "Arab and Islamic civilization" they claimed to represent.
Almost all of these high officials seemed divorced from the reality that
was known to the simplest Iraqi with access to a shortwave radio or to
neighborhood gossip that Iraqi troops were falling back almost
everywhere, and that the Americans would be at the gates of Baghdad in
a matter of days.
Listening to these officials, it was as though they had been immersed so
long in a parallel world where truth was routinely walled out that, even
now, they could not grasp the facts about to overwhelm them.
As members of the Revolutionary Command Council and the Council of
Ministers made their way to the microphones, none of them appeared to
have the courage, or even the instinct, to say anything that might earn
them the opprobrium of Mr. Hussein, and, perhaps, the cruel punishment
commonly, execution meted out to anyone who remotely challenged the
Iraqi leader.
In this, the men of the leadership were ultimately the prisoners of the
repressive political system they had helped to create.
Day after day, a Westerner waited in vain for any sense that their vision
of Iraq and its future extended beyond the personality of Mr. Hussein
and his family, particularly his sons, Uday and Qusay. The Iraqi people,
incessantly invoked, appeared in this tableau to have little significance. It
was as if Mr. Hussein's cult of personality the portraits and the statues,
the parades, the hagiographic books and songs, the tapes of the leader
being cheered by his people had become, at the end, synonymous with
Iraq; as if a country with a history of civilization dating back nearly 7,000
years had been reduced to no more than a cardboard backdrop for Mr.
Hussein.
The apotheosis came with the appearance, a few days into the war, of
the interior minister, Muhammad Diab al-Ahmed. His job established him
as one of the more sinister figures in the regime, responsible for many of
its detention centers and prisons, and thus for many of the outrages now
open to investigation.
With a worldwide television audience, Mr. Ahmed might have been
expected to favor a style that was at least somewhat benign. Instead, he
showed up waving a Kalashnikov rifle ominously in the direction of the
reporters, his finger rarely off the trigger. In his combat vest, he carried
four magazines of bullets; at his belt, a hunting knife.
His message? That he was ready to fight for Iraq, for its independence,
for its long history of resisting foreign invaders? No. "If you are asking me
why I am here with my machine gun," he said, "it is to show that the Iraqi
people are committed to fighting to the last, that we are ready to sacrifice
ourselves; I myself have an 18-year-old son, and he, too, stands ready to
die, like me, for President Saddam Hussein and his family."
Days later, a man who had left the Baath Party many years ago, Wamidh
Ladhmi, a professor of political science at the University of Baghdad,
said that watching Mr. Ahmed that day was, for him, the final nail in the
political coffin of Mr. Hussein. "On that day, we saw what it had all come
down to nothing to do with Iraq, nothing to do with the people, only the
cult of the leader, and of his two miserable sons," he said. "We knew
then that the entire system was bankrupt, that there was nothing that in
any way could save it."
Much the most frequent of the visitors to the Palestine Hotel was the
information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, whose performances
were so far removed from reality that reporters flocked to see if he could
top his own extravagant inventions with yet more fantastical accounts of
Iraqi battlefield triumphs. The more dire the situation facing the Iraqi
forces, the more triumphalist Mr. Sahhaf became.
Even when the combat moved into the Iraqi capital, and could be seen
from the Palestine Hotel, the minister, in battle dress and beret, stuck to
his rose-tinted versions, giving a spectacular new dimension to the spin
doctor's art. To reporters who suggested that his accounts were at odds
with known American successes, his answer, in effect, was that they
were hallucinating.
By the early morning of April 7, American tanks could be seen parked
on the Tigris embankment two-thirds of a mile away, with American
infantrymen firing at fleeing Iraqi fighters dressed only in boxer shorts
who plunged into the river and swam away upstream. Mr. Sahhaf
hastened to the hotel to renew his assurances that American troops were
everywhere in headlong flight, and that those who had seized the airport
on Friday, April 4, had been driven out.
The following day, acknowledging that Americans were indeed at the
airport, he offered a new spin. "I can say, and I am responsible for what I
am saying, that they have started to commit suicide under the walls of
Baghdad."
By the time American tanks were in plain view from where he spoke to
reporters, he had resorted to a sort of magician's art, of now you see it,
now you don't. "I am here to inform you that you are too far from reality,"
he said.
But perhaps the most revealing of his statements had to do with truth, a
commodity always in short supply under Mr. Hussein. At the Information
Ministry, destroyed by American cruise missiles about halfway through
the war, the most mendacious and corrupt officials were often the ones
most intent on offering lectures about truth. Come the war, and Mr.
Sahhaf was the unquestioned champion. "Lying is forbidden in Iraq," he
said at one news conference. "President Saddam Hussein will tolerate
nothing but truthfulness, as he is a man of great honor and integrity."
Mr. Sahhaf, like most top government officials, disappeared on the day
American troops closed in on the Palestine hotel. Along with his
burnished, almost cherubic optimism, there was much about him that was
chilling. One theory was that, as an information minister in a totalitarian
regime, his job, by definition, was always to construct alternate versions
of the truth.
In this view, the moment when the whole edifice of power was crumbling
presented him with his greatest challenge the opportunity to tell the
biggest lies of all. Doing this before a television audience of millions, he
radiated the satisfaction of a performer who had finally made the big time,
a small-time vaudevillian who found himself, for a brief season, on a
global stage, with an immediate audience of western reporters who
captive as any audience as could be were not disposed to challenge him
too abruptly on his excursions from the truth.
Could Hussein Really Vanish?
Ordinary Iraqis, in the main, never had the difficulty of distinguishing fact
from fiction that became a hallmark of their rulers. For all the secrecy of
the regime, for all the cruel punishments Mr. Hussein and his security
agencies inflicted, anybody who spent a few weeks or months in Iraq in
recent years understood that here, as in the former Soviet Union, China
and other countries subjected to totalitarian repression, the truth about
the horrors of the system lay just beneath the surface. Getting to know
any Iraqi enough to establish a basis for trust meant that some of this truth
would eventually begin seeping out.
From this, many Westerners who knew Iraq assumed that American
forces, once the war began, would be helped by local uprisings, or at
least by mass defections from the Iraqi forces, and that this would help
bring a speedy American victory.
King Abdullah II of Jordan, who came to Iraq as a young man with his
father, King Hussein, told a group of American reporters a few weeks
before the war began that the conflict could be over in seven days. In the
end, it took nearly four times that long, and American troops, at almost
every step of their 350-mile drive from Kuwait, met resistance from
Hussein loyalists, and reluctance to assist on the part of Shiites who felt
betrayed by the lack of American support for their uprising in 1991.
Partly, the explanation for the stronger-than expected Iraqi defenses lay
in Mr. Hussein's decision to rely on paramilitary formations largely
recruited from the families of regime hard-liners. Meeting reporters, Iraqi
political and military leaders made only passing reference to the Iraqi
Army, and not much to the supposed crack troops, the Republican
Guard. Even the defense minister, Sultan Hashem Ahmed, spoke of Iraqi
defenses being led by the Fedayeen Saddam, the militias of the Baath
Party, tribal units and other volunteers.
The Iraqi leaders' judgment seemed to be that when the critical moment
came, the army and Republican Guard would surrender or desert.
Indeed, on April 9, the day that most of Baghdad fell to the Americans,
the highways into the capital from the south were littered with abandoned
Republican Guard tanks and artillery guns, along with camouflage
uniforms and combat boots hastily abandoned along the roads.
But of popular resistance to Mr. Hussein, until the end, there was virtually
no sign. Reporters taken out to see American bombing targets found
crowds gathered beside blasted telephone exchanges, in neighborhoods
where bunker-busting bombs had left 60-foot craters, and at two
marketplaces where dozens of civilians died. At a marketplace in the
western Shuala district of Baghdad, where officials said 62 ppeople were
killed, many of them women and children, there were signs that the
weapon might have been an Iraqi antiaircraft missile gone astray, or an
American missile lured by placing an Iraqi air defense radar nearby.
In these places, there was genuine anger against the Americans who
inflicted casualties, even if at least some of the ire was orchestrated by
Baath Party officials who organized chants of "Saddam, Saddam!"
Moving among the crowds, almost no ordinary Iraqis, unless prompted
by direct questioning about Mr. Hussein, had anything to say about him.
And among those who did, there was barely a whisper of dissent. Fear
of retribution remained pervasive.
The change came on April 9, and it was a tidal wave. That morning,
reporters left the Palestine Hotel for the eastern suburbs, where Marine
units had been reported on the move overnight. At the Canal
Expressway, they found themselves staring at the barrel of an M1/A1
Abrams tank. Marines dismounting from the tanks and Bradley fighting
vehicles moved quickly into abandoned Iraqi bunkers. Told there were
no Iraqi military units anywhere between them and the city center, they
relaxed. "Love it!" said Lt. Geoff Orazem, a Marine company
commander.
"Yes, love it! Love it! Love it!" replied youths streaming past the tank.
Cont'd |
