free republic photos of saddam hussein capture

FREE REPUBLIC PHOTOS OF SADDAM HUSSEIN CAPTURE TRIAL

His picture was so widespread that a joke quietly circulating among his detractors in 1988 put the country’s population at 34 million - 17 million people and 17 million portraits of Saddam. Hussein was in power, his statue guarded the entrance to every village, his portrait watched over each government office and he peered down from at least one wall in every home. At the January 2003 inauguration of a recreational lake in Baghdad, poets spouted spontaneous verse and the official translators struggled to keep up with lines like, “We will stimulate ourselves by saying your name, Saddam Hussein, when we say Saddam Hussein, we stimulate ourselves.”

The entertainment at public events often consisted of outpourings of praise for Mr. His rule was paramount, and sustaining it was his main goal behind all the talk of developing Iraq by harnessing its considerable wealth and manpower. He was trying to be a tribal leader on a grand scale. Hussein held onto the ethos of a village peasant who believed that the strongman was everything. Ultimately, underneath all the socialist oratory, underneath the Koranic references, the tailored suits and the invocations of Iraq’s glorious history, Mr. Hussein’s former confidants told The Atlantic Monthly that he never disguised his. Some urbanized Iraqis removed or at least bleached theirs, but Mr. Hussein’s right wrist was tattooed with a line of three dark blue dots, commonly given to children in rural, tribal areas. If a man’s life can be boiled down to one physical mark, Mr. The outburst underscored the boundless egotism and self-delusion of a man who fostered such a fierce personality cult during the decades that he ran the Middle Eastern nation that joking about him or criticizing him in public could bring a death sentence. “I didn’t say ‘former president,’ I said ‘president,’ and I have rights according to the Constitution, among them immunity from prosecution,” he growled from the docket.

FREE REPUBLIC PHOTOS OF SADDAM HUSSEIN CAPTURE TRIAL

But he heaped scorn on the Iraqi judge who referred to him as the “former” president after asking him to identify himself on the first day of his trial for crimes against humanity, which ultimately lead to his execution. Hussein became the American military’s High Value Detainee No. After eluding capture for eight months, Mr.

Free republic photos of saddam hussein capture