I hate that something so obvious needs a caveat, but here, for those who aren’t so bright: Saddam bad. k? Alright, let’s move on.
When I was little, during the Gulf War, it was popular to talk about “Saddam Insane.” 10-year-olds didn’t make this up on their own — it was fed to us, via our parents and teachers, by the media as Pentagon organ. The US was raking Saddam’s army with waves of bullets for occupying Kuwait, it must only be because Saddam was a drooling crazy man who wanted to kill Christian babies, right? America only attacks people who are raving lunatics.
I will now not defend anything about Saddam Hussein, but will merely point out a couple of things I noticed just now on the morning carnage search.
The trial of Saddam Hussein took a new twist as prosecutors produced a letter purportedly showing the former Iraqi dictator spared the lives of two Shiites accused over an assassination bid.
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The letter said that the intelligence service found that the two [Saddam assassination attempt plotters] — Ali Jaafar, 50, and Jassem Mohammed, 63 — had been released by mistake and were still alive. Saddam had then been asked how to proceed.
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Saddam wrote back saying: “If luck has saved them, who am I to be tough on them.” The two were not executed. Saddam is believed to have pardoned them considering their old age.
You get that? He pardoned two men who had escaped his execution order. Two men who had plotted to kill him. You know what? That is crazy — I would have had them liquidated anyhow. …if I was into that sort of thing…which I’m not. *cough*
Reading on in the same article:
Four of the victims were added to the list by mistake and executed, the letter also said.
The head of the secret service was sentenced to three years in prison for this mistake, the court was told.
That’s right — the head of the Mukhabarat was put in prison for three years for taking the lives of four innocent men. Is this the behavior of a mass-murdering maniac? In fact, when was the last time anyone got a slap on the wrist in any state in the US for the execution of an innocent man?
Just more obvious proof that all one had to do was not overtly provoke Saddam to be just fine in Ba’athist Iraq. Hell, even if you did you sometimes turned out just fine. Just ask Ali Jaafar and Jassem Mohammed. They might still be alive if they haven’t been killed by the current war.