Is Saddam Hussein dead, along with Qusay and Biday, his maniac sons? The hellacious big hole left in a suburb of Baghdad yesterday seems to suggest it.
The story goes that the US had solid, eyes-on-the-prize-holy-shit-that’s-him intelligence from more than one source, cross-referenced with other types of intelligence that Sammy, Q-Tip and Bidet were having dinner at a nice restaurant along with the remaining Generals and some Ba’ath party fun types. The restaurant wasn’t really a restaurant, more of an armoured bunker a couple of storeys underground that happened to have a wine list and made a mean Club Sandwich, at the street level.
A bomber parked a pair of 2,000 pound bombs in there and followed it up with two more all designed to pierce through floors, then go off. This effectively cancelled the restaurant’s Michelin Guide ranking of One Star. The bombs did what they were designed to do, leaving a 60 foot crater that went down at least 20 feet or more. Anything in there was turned into fragments of meat, bone, skin and hair mixed with bricks, dirt and pulverized concrete. Talk about a bad rating for a bistro.
The downside, aside from not being able to get a really good Club Sandwich in Baghdad, is that there is no proof.
Benito Mussolini and Carla Petraccia, his mistress, were taken from the palace in Rome at the end of the Italian campaign in WWII, by the citizens. Both were hung on hooks in the courtyard, beaten, stripped and shot to death. Then, more citizens came in, saw the bodies, pissed on them, shot them some more and dragged the corpses around by their heels for a while. The message, although extraordinarily grisly, was simple. The Boss is Dead.
Hitler, having seen the atrocities committed on Mussolini, promised himself that there was no way he’d surrender. Suicide and cremation was his deal. Some scholars believe that the Russians, who got to the Reichstag bunker first in 1945, took the bones away, or kept the bodies, or buried the bodies a number of times, then lost them in 1947, with some parts going into Josef Stalin’s personal collection. Stalin wanted conclusive, totally certain proof that Adolf Hitler was really dead. To this day, there are those who believe Hitler and Eva Braun live in Scarborough Ontario, or Oak Park, Illinois.
The population of Iraq, especially those not educated or wealthy, will never know for sure that Saddam and his sons are really dead. This proof is also important to the US and future governments of Iraq who will have to deal with the whole population.
If someone has terrorized you and your neighbourhood with death squads, disappearances, midnight abductions, executions, poison gas, informers, torture and brutality for nearly thirty years, you want to see the body. You need to see the body.
You want to make sure before you embrace the US troops that anyone even vaguely associated with the previous regime is dead or in jail, so they can’t come back and shoot you in the back of the knees for so much as waving at the troops. The best proof is a body, head on a stick, on parade, despite the utter inhumanity of the act.
Those big bombs may very well have ended the Hussein regime, but there needs to be some kind of conclusive, easily understandable, undeniable proof that everyone in Iraq can get their brains around.
Peasants don’t understand DNA and forensic science. Hell, Judge Lance Ito didn’t understand DNA evidence and he’s a smart guy. Show regular citizens committing a few disgusting acts in his palace, like shitting on his bed, or some atrocities on a body, then the message gets out in a way that even the most disconnected can understand. The Boss is Dead.
RoadDave 