Little Saddam
From a Michael Totten report:
“When you came and liberated this country,” he continued, “Iraq had 25 million Saddams. America is turning us back into human beings.
The quote makes me think, in rabbit-trail fashion, of an evening I enjoyed with a few Iraqi Army soldiers a few months ago. All three were officers- drawn from two different divisions to train new Iraqi soldiers to fight. I went up to Ali while he was smoking and said hello. He introduced himself, and invited me to join him and his friends for a movie. Partway through Apocalypto, he looked up from the scene of mass murder and brutality and exclaimed “See! It is like Saddam!”
Ali and one of the others laughed. The third soldier scowled, then laughed when Ali punched him in the arm. That was when I got introduced to the rest of the group. The other laughing soldier was Sayeed, the scowler, Saddam. Saddam was from Tikrit, and quite likely a relative of the “Big Saddam”, although I didn’t ask. His name is prominent among Sunnis- Saddam was a hero for a lot of years, after all. We talked for a while after the movie; Sayeed had been in the Iraqi Army for quite some time, Ali for a while as well. Saddam had joined more recently- he wanted to help Iraq become what it had been once. He told me that he wanted to try to help change Iraqis minds about Americans and the Iraqi Government, and give them something to do other than fight with each other.
When tribes stop fighting Americans and each other, when the citizens of two of the most strife-ridden cities in Iraq start to contemplate tomorrow, when a man from Tikrit named Saddam steps up to help Iraq…
That’s when I start to feel just a little bit of hope for this place.
(crossposted at Acute Politics)
Topics: GWOT, Iraq, Uncategorized, blogs, middle east
Posted by Teflon Don at 2:19 pm on Sunday, August 26, 2007
10 Responses to “Little Saddam”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
August 26th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
I think one of the things people have trouble considering is that this is a process that operates one person at a time. We have forgotten, even in this country, the importance of the individual.
August 26th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Some have forgotten, Salty. The left, for instance, adulates the collective and reviles the individual, which is why they just don’t get this whole Iraq thing.
August 26th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
2007.08.26 Politics and National Defense Roundup
Burning Another Beauchamp Confederate Yankee If we’re to make any sort of sense of the Iraq War at all, we need to know that those who are providing us information on the conflict are being as honest in their reporting as inherent human biases allow. …
August 26th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Bah! Insolent offspring of a diseased yak!
You sound like this badger-person - obviously a person of no consequence. Anyone who knows anything about Iraq has never set foot in the place.
Just ask anyone on your Capitol Hill - the place is full of ‘experts’.
August 26th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Well I’ll be…I thought “Little Saddam” was…well, you know..like the aaaa, sword of Cid….you know…huh?
August 26th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
El Cid:
You mean the Little Saddam that should wear a rain coat when it goes out to jihad?
August 26th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
“I think one of the things people have trouble considering is that this is a process that operates one person at a time. We have forgotten, even in this country, the importance of the individual.”
That’s exactly right, Cousin Salty. That’s why you have to look at the individuals quoted here and see where they’re coming from. They’re formerly from Saddam’s army and now are trying to curry favor with the Americans.
On the other hand, 65 of Iraqis (the “collective” that I guess Becca thinks should be ignored) think conditons are the same or worse than they were under Saddam. 78 percent want the Americans to leave. 79 percent think American troops are having no effect or making things worse.
August 26th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Some people see a problem, and think that the glass is half full. Other people see the same problem as a half empty glass.
Then along comes corndog, who sees the very problem, and immediately asks, “Who pee’d in the pitcher?”
August 27th, 2007 at 7:38 am
Curiously, I recall the decision to disband the Iraqi Army immediately after the invasion as being one of the foulups decried by war opponents.
So I’m looking back over the post, and I can’t quite find where I said that Ali, Saddam, or Sayeed were ever in Saddam’s army.
Two swings, two misses, and an uncited statistic.
corndog is looking more like the pitcher pisser all the time.
August 27th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
A lot of folk do like to pretend that just because something didn’t turn out all pristine, pretty and perfectly simple, that it was therefore, necessarily, all fubar in the decision phase.
Keeping the Iraqi police and military (only standing military was the Rep Guard) would have made even less sense that keeping the SS and Gestapo intact and operational during the reconstruction of germany.
The Iraqi police and the Rep Guard were nearly exact mirrors. There was almost no separation between the Iraqi police and the “internal intelligence apparatus”. And both police and military were the operational units behind every mass slaughter of Iraqis under Saddam.