Fact, Fable, Fiction
Alex, first thanks for joining us here this week to discuss the series. I have a number of questions. But the first one comes out of my own reporting on Saddam from the earlier part of this decade. I started reporting on Iraq in earnest in early 2002 in Washington, DC. And that was of course quite a hot house atmosphere, hitting think tank meetings about Iraq, listening to emigres tell their stories, hearing the various advocates of regime change, etc.
What became very obvious was that the terribleness and brutality of Saddam's regime had become overlaid with a coating of clearly fantastic, sometimes bizarre or even campish tales meant to appeal to the lurid fascination of Westerners, particularly Americans. To some degree, virtually everything we heard about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the lead up to the war fell into this category. But I also remember various stories about people being fed to Zoo animals, various kinds of torture (some of which I'm sure happened), etc.
You hint at this at a couple points in your post. But I'm wondering if my impression strikes a chord with you in what you found researching the series and how you went about chiseling away some of this accretion of lurid tales to get to as real a picture as we can ever get of what really happened, who this man and his circle was?
Everybody talks about the missing WMDs in Iraq. But what about the mass graves? Where are the hundreds of thousands, even a million bodies we were assured were going to be dug up? You would think that if they were there to be found the Bush administration would have put more effort into producing them, to help make their postwar case.
December 3, 2008 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
If I were Pakistani, I would say this: When Pakistiani terrorists kill as many innocent people as the US military has since 2001, then Americans can talk to us about their outrage.
December 3, 2008 1:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
to get to as real a picture as we can ever get of ... who this man was
while we await alex holmes, mark bowden's Tales of the Tyrant for may 2002's atlantic is still a good read and still online.
see also: bowden's interview It's Not Easy Being Mean on the above.
December 3, 2008 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tales of the Tyrant is a fantastic article. It was actually one of our starting points for research into the series. Thanks for linking to it.
December 3, 2008 3:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
What became very obvious was that the terribleness and brutality of Saddam's regime had become overlaid with a coating of clearly fantastic, sometimes bizarre or even campish tales
As the WWI Huns "tossed babies into the air and caught them on their bayonets", so did hired PR guns perpetrate the fallacy about Iraqis "turning off the incubators" on Capitol Hill durign the first Gulf War.
Nice to know we've become so much less gullible than that.
December 3, 2008 2:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I always saw w's administration as Nixon II, not Bush II. Rummy & Dicky came from that cesspool in the seventies. But Nixon was real politique. The Japanese had killed millions of Chinese in WWII but Mao was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. To Nixon, the issue was not sin, it was: How can we benefit from a relationship with China and use it in the chess game with the Ruskies. Making all his political capital on being the anti-commie, he had ability to play these games and not lose his base or the moderates.
Iraq had been used for 20 years as a buffer against Iran. Sometimes we even funded Sadaam in his war against Iran. I will never forget the pictures of the new leader of Iraq under U.S. dominance, hugging and kissing the president of Iran. Several pictures taken at different times.
w was correct in one thing he said this week. We cannot do a do-over.
But, we can do a rating on competency. Ironically, w and his team have made Nixon look a lot better.
December 3, 2008 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink