Saddam the Un-Martyr
No "Vietnam" for Iraq
December 16, 2003
By Toby Westerman
Copyright 2003 International News Analysis Today
www.inatoday.com
The legend of "Saddam the Martyr" is now forever dead, unlike Saddam himself who was captured while hiding underground, "like a rat" as many Americans observed. One woman grocery shopper on a cell told a friend, "yeah, he (Saddam) was found in a hole."
The turn of events comes as a profound shock to his biographer, Said Aburish, and many others who revered the former Iraqi strongman, a tyrant who fancied himself the successor to the kings of Babylon and Assyria.
"Saddam is not afraid to die," declared Aburish in an interview with the Italian news daily La Stamp, and reported in early July by International News Analysis Today as U.S. troops closed in on the last resistance offered by the Saddam's military forces.
"There is no one more preoccupied with what sort of page he will occupy in the history of his country than Saddam. He will go down with the ship fighting, he will be recorded in Arab history as a martyr," Aburish confidently stated.
Saddam the fraud betrayed Aburish's hopes for an Arab "martyr" as he betrayed everyone else around him. He urged thousands to die for Iraq, but he did not. He sought to rally Islam against the U.S., and is known to have "an attitude of profound irreverence toward religion," according to Aburish.
Moscow, which had been Saddam's closest ally since the era of the Soviet Union, had the good sense to let the madman destroy himself. Before the beginning of Gulf War II, Yevgeny Premikov, former KGB spymaster, expert in Near Eastern affairs, and friend of Saddam, had gone to Baghdad to warn Saddam of the mounting peril, but to no avail. After Primakov's visit, Saddam was on his own.
Saddam miscalculated in his negotiations with U.S. President George W. Bush, and encountered disaster.
Unfortunately for himself -- and the Iraqi people - Saddam believed that he and his still-loyal forces could outlast the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Vietnamese military leaders had expressed the opinion that Iraqi guerrillas could wage a successful campaign against U.S. forces, skillfully using the country's natural topography, employing underground hiding places as part of the general insurgent strategy.
It was in one of these underground locations, a so-called "spider hole," where Saddam surrendered to U.S. forces. He did not die fighting as his sons did, although he ordered thousands of his countrymen to their deaths.
The right-of-center French news daily, Le Figaro, referred to the circumstances of Saddam's capture as "pitiful," and quoted an old colonel of the Iraqi armed forces, who described Saddam as having never faced battle, and now is "really beaten."
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