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The party seized control in 1968, and Saddam immediately became the real power behind his cousin Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, the president and chairman of the new Revolutionary Command Council. Al-Ali was a member of that council. He was responsible for the north-central part of Iraq, including his home village. It was in Tikrit that he started to see Saddam's larger plan unfold. Saddam's relatives in al-Awja were throwing their newly ascendant kinsman's name around, seizing farms, ordering people off their land. That was how things worked in the villages. If a family was lucky, it produced a strongman, a patriarch, who by guile, strength, or violence accumulated riches for his clan. Saddam was now a strongman, and his family was moving to claim the spoils. This was all ancient stuff. The Baath philosophy was far more egalitarian. It emphasized working with Arabs in other countries to rebuild the entire region, sharing property and wealth, seeking a better life for all. In this political climate Saddam's family was a throwback. The local party chiefs complained bitterly, and al-Ali took their complaints to his powerful young friend. "It's a small problem," Saddam said. "These are simple people. They don't understand our larger aims. I'll take care of it." Two, three, four times al-Ali went to Saddam, because the problem didn't go away. Every time it was the same: "I'll take care of it."

It finally occurred to al-Ali that the al-Khatab family was doing exactly what Saddam wanted them to do. This seemingly modern, educated young villager was not primarily interested in helping the party achieve its idealistic aims; rather, he was using the party to help him achieve his. Suddenly al-Ali saw that the polish, the fine suits, the urbane tastes, civilized manner, and the socialist rhetoric were a pose. The real story of Saddam was right there in the tattoo on his right hand. He was a true son of Tikrit, a clever al-Khatab, and he was now much more than the patriarch of his clan.

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How many tyrans are there, let us say in the ARab world ? All to the excption perhaps of Lebanon's leader.

Why is Saddam Hussein the one to whom the western finger points ? Because unlike his brethren -Arab and Muslim leaders- he is not a "friend of the West" -or more preciesely he ceased to be one. Read not that he is no friend of the peoples of the West but no friend of imperialism, unharnessed capitalism and globalization -that is open everything in your country for privatization and ownership by Western corporations).

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This boogeyman is no different than any other, but the tools of propaganda for chiefly corporate America and its spoiled child, Israel,
are of course at work..

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You should check out the discussion here for more on this.

[ April 30, 2002: Message edited by: Arch Stanton ]

I guess the fact that Hussein is "anti-American" (something that could probably be said about every major world leader) more than makes up for the fact he likes to drop poison gas on his own people, brutalizes minority Kurds, initiates invasions of sovereign nations such as Kuwait, rules his country with an iron fist and tolerates zero dissent.

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What's the matter, clock', you don't like The Atlantic Monthly?

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The story of Saddam Hussein is more fascinating than your run-of-the-mill dictator tale.

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To Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq War, this is highly alarming. "There is to this day the belief—and I'm not the only one who holds it—that things didn't happen in Halabja the way Goldberg wrote it," he told the Voice. "And it's an especially crucial issue right now. We say Saddam is a monster, a maniac who gassed his own people, and the world shouldn't tolerate him. But why? Because that's the last argument the U.S. has for going to war with Iraq."

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What about the Turks?

Are there any studies on comparative genocide against the Kurds? What's the score? Who has done the most damage to the Kurds; the Turks, the Iraqis or the Iranians?

As I recall, the NAtional Post in particular went Postal over this meeting, calling it the "smoking gun" etc.

Today's Washington Post reports that the fellah who met with the Iraqi Secret Service representative was not Atta. It seems that someone from the Czech secret service "recognized"
Atta's photo on September 11, FIVE months after the meeting allegedly occurred.

Now, it appears he made a mistake on identity.

And the FBI has concluded that Atta never left the US during the relevant period.

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I guess we're lucky we didn't declare war based on that meeting!

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The hardest thing was to try to sort out the truth from fantasy. There have been a number of books written about Saddam, several of them by Iraqi expatriates, and one by the British journalists Alexander and Leslie Cockburn. But the problem with those books is that they repeat a lot of rumors about him. Given that he is such a despised figure in his own country and around the world, anything bad that's said about Saddam is repeated and written down as though it were definitely true. My hunch going in was that if I were trying to write about the intimate details of his personal life, it was going to be difficult to sort out the tall tales from the truth. The only way to try to get at the truth was by finding people who had personal relationships with him and getting them to talk about their experiences. In my reporting, I try to get first-hand stories because I have the best shot at getting reliable information that way.

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