| Saturday, April 5, 2003 |
19:27 - So he is a folk hero
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/01/warab01.xml
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Via The Command Post:
While the fate of Saddam Hussein may already be sealed, there is no doubt that he is creating himself as a legend which is being lapped up by the Arab masses.
Pro-western leaders, such as President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, acceded to the American war plan on the assumption that it would all be over quickly. Mr Mubarak has even complained that the Americans misled him by promising a speedy campaign.
The fact that Saddam has survived for 12 days is seen as a colossal success. Before the conflict, his star was falling in the Arab world, with few takers for his propaganda that he intended to liberate Palestine.
"But we are so desperate for an Arab hero after all our defeats on the battlefield and 50 years of humiliation that we will even turn that old criminal Saddam into a legend," said an Arab banker.
So that's a "hero", huh? Never mind what he's done to the Iraqi people or his Arab neighbors; at least he stands up to the Americans and wants to destroy Israel (unlike those whom we would call heroes-- like Sadat, and like the Iraqi lawyer who saved Pfc Lynch), and that trumps all. That's the highest aspiration and achievement. Tyranny, victimhood, and genocide. Huzzah.
I wonder if the revelations after the war is over-- like how we wiped out the Iraqi leadership on the first night, and have steamrollered over the legions of death squads without our casualties going into triple digits, or even Iraqi civilian deaths exceeding a couple hundred-- will even be noticed in these circles, or whether there will be a whole new generation of poisonous legends spawned from these steaming mounds of fantasy and hatred broadcast by Al-Jazeera and the Information Minister and the highest Muslim leaders.
If these two halves of the world can't be tied together with the restructuring of which the current Iraq campaign is the first phase, then they're just going to drift further and further apart, until we have two parallel and irreconcilable Earths inhabiting the same planet.
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