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Paradise for the Hero Saddam

Strong show of support for Saddam, as they remember their leader:  

DUBAI: Supporters of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein who was executed one year ago have assembled at his grave. Dozens of tribal leaders, clerics and students gathered at the former President’s burial site in Awja — his birthplace in central Iraq.

“We are holding a simple ceremony to remember the President who served and protected Iraq and its people and maintained their dignity,” Ali al-Nida, chief of the Baijat tribe to which Saddam belonged was quoted as saying.

Saddam was taunted by his executioners before he was hanged and photographs of this ungainly incident taken on a mobile phone were circulated all over the world.

The former President’s widely condemned execution is said to have deepened the polarisation in Iraq, which has a majority Shia population.

That’s an interesting claim. I remember nothing at all happening, as the Sunnis stayed home and largely kept their mouths shut. The polarization was a result of mainly dead-ender Baathists, Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda blowing up Shiite pilgrimages and mosques, something they were already engaged in.  Also, those 300,000 dead Shiites in Saddam’s mass graves.  In fact, now that I think of it, the Sunni Awakening was already quietly underway as Saddam took his long drop at the end of a short rope, and only accelerated. Whatever, moving on.

Saddam’s posters appeared overnight and loudspeakers in his home village have been playing verses from the Koran. Civilian volunteers have stood guard at the hall which houses Saddam’s grave. One of the posters in nearby Tikrit read: “There is no life without the sun and no dignity without Saddam.” Another slogan said, “Paradise for the hero Saddam.”

Iraqi security forces were on alert for trouble. But no reports to indicate anyone considers him worth it. VOA reports “small groups” turned out in Tikrit. The Hindu report cites 2,000 turned out in Amman, Jordan, where a lot of exiled Baathists no doubt remember his time fondly.

I remember Saddam, too:  

So now comes the part where a monster, reduced to a ridiculous cranky old man, will have a rope put around his neck and take his drop. For civilized people it is impossible not to feel some empathy with any man’s mortality in the cold moment of execution. In my house we have a joke. Saddam doesn’t like Fruit Loops. More for us. Now, No Fruit Loops guy is going to get it. Even more for us.

We all know the enormity of his crimes, and many of us know men and women who are dead because of him. But the only satisfaction I’ll feel with his death is to know that there is still justice that is carried to termination and not cynically subverted in this world. It is only more death on top of death after that.

I was writing those words above when my buddy Sig called, maybe around 11 p.m. last night. His contractor pals in Iraq figure it’s already happened. Sig, a San Antonio Express-News reporter in the invasion with three or four more trips to Iraq behind him, honored me by calling me first when he wanted to talk about it.

There are some people, unlikely friends, barely known, who are like brothers. You may even argue with them harshly as Sig and I do over this war, getting pissed off at each other, but you love them, and when they call at a time like this, you are glad.

This is because we were there in the beginning. Sig, my friend, who witnessed among other things the miracle of an RPG bouncing harmlessly off a man’s chest plate. Sig, who went back again and again, even though it was destroying him. Sig, who understands the little things, like the quirky weirdness of realizing only years later that you were seconds from death. Sig, with whom I sat in a DC hotel room a year and a half after the fact, just drinking and talking, all of it pouring out, for two days.

It was March 11, 2003, when I got on the bus that was taking us from the Hilton out to the camps in the Kuwaiti desert. Sig got on after. I didn’t know him then, except he introduced himself and took my name, because he was very serious about his copious notes for the definitive Iraq War embed book he was going to write. Then he moved down the aisle, taking names. He needed to know who everyone was, and where everyone was sitting. Like he was going to chart it. Being obsessive about crap like that makes Sig a very good reporter. He notes that it was a dark day, a dust storm hanging over Kuwait. I remember that. He remembers rain, which always fell like mud through the dust. I don’t. He remembers thinking he was committed now, and would be dead soon. I thought that, too.

Two of us on that bus would be dead in three weeks. David Bloom of NBC and Michael Kelly of the Atlantic Monthly. Since then, Sig and I have got to know a few more dead men. Some we saw killed, others as its fallen to us to do the job we don’t want anyone else to do, that of calling the families of the dead.

So last night, Sig and I talked a little about what it was like to be there at the beginning, and what it feels like now that Saddam is maybe even dead already. At his end of the phone in San Antonio, Sig rummaged around until he found a gilt-edged Arab tea glass from one of Saddam’s palaces out by the airport. He filled it with Wild Turkey. I went into the library for the spent .50 cal shell I picked up off the deck of the M113 after the assault on Baghdad. I filled that with some Armenian brandy from a cut-glass bottle shaped like a sword I’ve had on the shelf there for the last six years. I’ve wondered when and for what purpose I was going to break into that. Last night, it turns out. For the death of Saddam. We drank some toasts:

“Death to the motherfucker.”

“To making it home.”

“To those who didn’t make it home.”

It’s an odd thing, to be in your 40s, and yet to feel as though you’ve only just been born. Into this world of war. Saddam means a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, Saddam will always be tied to that kid in the ditch among the date palms at al-Hindiyah. A young soldier with a bullet through the side of his face, his eyes open, staring at nothing.

They were Tikritis, the Nebuchadnazzer Division of the Republican Guard, and they died for Saddam. Saddam didn’t have the decency to die for them, when he crawled out of his hole in December 2003, proclaiming himself the President of Iraq.

I wept about that kid once, long after the firefight at Hindiyah, though I know that if he lived, he would have just gone back to Tikrit to make car bombs. I don’t even need all the open mass graves full of people with bullet holes in the backs of their heads, or the videos of people being thrown off the roof. All I need is one young motherfucker too stupid to give up, because he believed in Saddam.

And the next day, Drink Up

It’s done. Saddam was handed a red card of death, as many of his own victims were, CNN reports, and dropped at 10:05 p.m. EST. AP offers some details of the runup.

So we’re rid of him. Plenty of time later to contemplate the significance, the path forward, what it all means. This is just a moment to contemplate how much death and horror this man brought into the world. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of men, women and children dead because of him.

The reports also indicate the witnesses to his execution danced around his body. CNN reports a witness described “fear on his face.” Good. We already knew he was a coward, and we know how many deaths a coward dies.

I’ve filled my shot brass and raised it. Don’t be shy about raising a glass yourself. The world is a better place rid of this filthy murderer.

Newsweek: “I saw fear, he was afraid.”

Sky News has video and other links here.

My pal Sig’s report at the San Antonio Express-News, with some who suffered at Saddam’s hands.

Topics: Saddam

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:10 pm on Sunday, December 30, 2007

5 Responses to “Paradise for the Hero Saddam”

1. RebeccaH Says:
   December 30th, 2007 at 9:23 pm

   If Saddam were still alive, his homies in the tribe would be kissing his feet and secretly cringing, hoping not to attract his undivided attention. Now that he’s safely dead, they can afford to put together a worshipful hagiography to put a better face on their own cowardice. I’m willing to bet not one of them really wants him back, no matter what they say in public.

2. Don Surber » Blog Archive » Saddam death watch Says:
   December 30th, 2007 at 9:58 pm

   [...] Jules Crittenden also remembers. [...]

3. major john Says:
   December 31st, 2007 at 12:18 am

   I will similarly drink (if I am home from Iraq should it happen this coming year) to Hekmatyar Gulbuddin’s demise.

   I think I know what you mean by “just drinking and talking, all of it pouring out, for two days” - I managed in one night. At least for last deployment…

4. saltydog Says:
   December 31st, 2007 at 1:00 am

   Meeting at Saddam’s grave site ought to be watched. He is an obvious focal point for ruthless politicos who would use him to push for a better dictatorship.

   Someday, Jules, you need to put your notes together and write a book. I’ll be first in line for an autographed copy.

5. Vanguard of the Commentariat Says:
   December 31st, 2007 at 11:51 am

   Gee, I wonder if Kofi and Chirac and Schroeder were there at graveside kissing Saddam’s ass the way they did in real life?

   Oh and Schroeder, socialist “man of the people”? Now an oil exec. I guess that is only sinister if its “Texas oil exec”.

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