While Iraqi troops fight US and British forces in the field, the Baghdad Government is digging deep in the lexicon of Arabic insults for verbal salvos to lob at the "evil invaders".
Iraqi officials from President Saddam Hussein to Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf have regularly taken to the airwaves to lambast their US and British foes with fiery rhetoric and vitriolic broadsides.
The leaders of the US and Britain have been branded "an international gang of criminal bastards", "blood-sucking bastards", "ignorant imperialists", losers and fools.
The US and British forces invading Iraq have not been spared. In briefings by Sahaf, the troops are often referred to as "flocks of sheep doomed to die in Iraq" or as "a snake slithering through the desert".
Hurling insults at the enemy is common in the Arab world but the practice is vintage Saddam, who portrays himself as a valiant Arab crusader fighting off an evil empire.
Saddam's jingoism has even made its way into the American and British lexicon.
He called the 1991 Gulf War the "mother of all battles" and the US military has adopted the term to describe its massive air ordnance bomb as the "mother of all bombs".
Armchair generals enjoy Saddam TV mania |
