Before he became President, Saddam was in charge of State Security. He sent his people to East Germany to learn from the Stasi how to do it.
East Germany's Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, was the most overwhelmingly intrusive apparatus of the Cold War. Among the population of 16 million, there were 400,000 active participants and apparently 6 million files.
This was the prototype for Saddam's secret police. When Saddam threw out the old President and assumed his mantle, he had this Iraqi Stasi in place. As it was we know he kept his silhouette low and used doubles.
In his position, it was important to surround himself with people who sink or swim with the leader. Such people can be found from the highest levels down to the street thugs - Saddam's Fidayi. These last reported directly to Saddam and were apparently cruel and swaggering yobbos, not above executing women in the street by decapitation (as I noted in a previous post). When they fight "patriotically" they are really fighting for their coercive way of life.
So the entire inner circle down to the streets had every incentive for keeping Saddam alive. If he went, so would they. But, while he was alive they could be the masters of the neighborhoods. As Saddam made a habit of killing off the families of those who he deemed dangerous, I wonder how many women and children were, tortured, raped, and killed - quite apart from the umpteen thousands of civilians who suffered "collateral damage".
So, maybe that has come to an end. We can hope so. Without doubt, many women and children are going to be hurt in the process, but it seems as if the number will be mercifully few - even though certainly inflated by the Iraqis. (I note that the first bodies reported found by the Iraqis in the wreckage of Saddam's restaurant foray, were a child, a woman, and an old man - three categories that make great propaganda.
Also, crowded hospitals are not something found only in Baghdad. It is the nature of modern hospitals to be using nearly every bed. So, I am hoping the eventual harm to civilians will be lighter than we've been told.
But propaganda rules. About a dozen women and children are jammed into the back of a small van, while a male driver runs them through a check point.
Some of them are killed, others are wounded. The American troops were horrified. You were horrified. The propaganda wheels turn. Was everybody so intent on condemning that no-one thought to wonder why these women had left their families to cram into a van and then go charging through a battle zone? Where were their husbands?
According to a cleric, their husbands and families were held hostage with the threat of death if they refused to climb into the van. The driver's family was also held hostage. So, a hail of bullets hit them.
I bet the Fidayi were roaring with laughter.
Yet, you are quite right. None of it would have happened if there had been no war.
But if the Brits were to stop driving their cars, 5,000 of them would be alive every year who are presently killed in accidents. The figure for the US is between 40,000 and 50,000.
The difference of course is that we choose to take the risk. The kid in hospital with her leg blown off did not choose. We must hope that her loss will be compensated for by the improved lives of hundreds of thousands of kids in a new Iraq.
We'll keep our fingers crossed.
The prognostications of doom are continuing.
You'll recall that I called Devorah's post propaganda. Remember it?
"CBS news is reporting that great swaths of residential neighborhoods within Baghdad have been engulfed in flames. One can trust, perhaps, the ability of a cruise missile to hit a bullseye from many miles away. One cannot be so precise in predicting which way the resulting fires will blow."
AND
"In the great earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, people were not killed so much by the shaking. They were killed by the firestorm that sucked the air from their lungs and reduced them to ash before they could flee. So it seems to be today in Baghdad."
AND
"Baghdad is a city of 5 million people, half of whom are under the age of fifteen, most of whom are too poor to flee. Now, a great many of those people are dead, burned in their homes and on their streets."
AND
"Hundreds of massive missiles have rained down on a city far away, killing indiscriminately among the young, the infirm, the old and the innocent."
AND
"The poverty of the Iraqi people leaves them bound, unable to escape the wave of steel. We have blown their brains out. We have incinerated them in place."
A trifle inflammatory perhaps? Certainly untrue. But that's the way it goes.
Harry
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Keith wrote:
Arthur,
Thanks for posting this story.
It makes one ask again: Why, when the enormous cruelties of Saddam was very widely known (see Jordan's article below), didn't someone assassinate him?
The only conclusion I can draw is that anybody who was in a position to assassinate Saddam and sons successfully would know that holding the country together again afterwards would prove impossible. It would break into various divides -- ethnic, religious and tribal -- just as Afghanistan has done twice within the last two decades. Well, we appear to be at the beginning of active tribalisation again via the criminal gangs that have suddenly appeared in the streets of Baghdad.
I don't see how America (or the UN or the EU) can bring about successful "democratisation" of Iraq anymore successfully than they have done in Afghanistan.
Most western democracies have only evolved to some sort of unitary governance via centuries of tribal warfare, usually culminating in total civil war which finally unites the country either geographically or culturally. It doesn't always happen in this way, nor should we passively expect this to happen in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran, and Saudi Arabaia, etc). Nevertheless, the lesson of history seems to be that western-type standard of living (which is what young people all round the world want) can only arise from internal evolution/revolution, and cannot be imposed from the outside.
Wow! What*is* going to happen? Shortly, General Franks and the American public are going to insist on American troops being withdrawn from Iraq for their own safety. Yet, at the same time, America cannot leave the oilfields of Iraq to their own devices, particularly that the probability of a similar religious/tribal uprisings in Saudi Arabia is now all the more likely.
So, I foresee a situation in Iraq in which small numbers of high-tech American troops will quarantine the oilfields of Iraq and endeavour to oversee production contracts with France, Russia and China that have already been negotiated with Saddam (and, of course, bring about new contracts with Anglo-American corporations) and, at the same time, leave the remainder of the country to the attentions of the UN, EU and the humanitarian agencies.
There is a great danger that America will be drawn into major conflicts with Syria (because of the pipeline that runs through Syria), Iran and Saudi Arabia (because their oilfields will also need to be quarantined from civil unrest) as well as being involved in further repercussions in other Muslim countries that cannot possibly be foreseen.
Keith Hudson
At 16:01 11/04/03 -0400, you wrote: CNN: The News We Kept to Ourselves By EASON JORDAN The New York Times 11 April 2003 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html ATLANTA - Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard - awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff. For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk. Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers. We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails). Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed. I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us. Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad. Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home. I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely. Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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