I have just purchased "The Threatening Storm, The Case for Invading Iraq" by Kenneth M. Pollack. Just starting reading it this weekend. So, I have read only about a fifth of the book. Very interesting so far, informational on the mindset of Saddam Hussein.
For example, Saddam Hussein was born in a small village on April 28, 1937. His name, which is an unusual one, means "he who confronts." Appropriate, huh. His father died before Saddam was born. His mother remarried quickly, to a man who was known as "Hassan the Liar." His stepfather and his family reportedly made their living as local bullies and petty thieves. Various sources claim that Hassan often beat Saddam with an asphalt-coated stick and kept him busy stealing with his own sons and their cousins. Saddam was a loner. He was famous for carrying an iron bar wherever he went that he would heat until it was white hot and then use to impale unwary animals-dogs, cats, whatever he could get his hands on. This all before the age of 10. At 10 years of age, Saddam was sent to live with his uncle, a former army officer who was a character himself. His uncle was jailed for playing a role in the 1941 pro-Nazi coup attempt. Later, his uncle wrote a book, "Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies." What a beginning for any child!!!!
Advance to July 1976 to when Saddam Hussein assumes presidency of Iraq. Like his idol, Josef Stalin, immediately after assuming the presidency, he quickly set out to purge the party and government of any but his most devoted and nonthreatening adherents. Saddam convenes a meeting of the senior members of the party on July 22. When the secretary general arrives at this meeting, it is apparent that he was physically paying a price for his opposition to Saddam. In a broken voice, he read a long, contrived confession regarding a plot against the nation he had led. Saddam then took to the podium and named fifty-four additional conspirators----all of them sitting in the room!!! As each one's name was read out--armed guards walked down to him and led him out to meet his fate. Many broke down in tears and had to be dragged out by guards. Others began to sob uncontrollably as Saddam read the list of names. That same day, Saddam convened a kangaroo court of high level officials to try and sentence the guilty. He then ordered all of the other high party officials whose names had not been called to participate in the firing squads that dispatched the victims. With this act, the party leadership was being forced to invest its future in Saddam.
In March of 1987, Saddam appointed his cousin governor of Northern Iraq. Saddam gave orders to his cousin to get control over the Kurds any way he could. So, this murderous sludge employed chemical warfare to wipe out several towns. Iraqi forces began clearing areas of Kurdish residence with massive bombardments fo chemical weapons and high explosives, followed by army sweeps that often killed anyone left alive and razed to the ground anything left standing. On March 15, this scumbucket swamped the Kurdish town of Halabja with several varieties of chemical weapons and killing at least five thousand Kurdish civilians. When the campaign ended in 1989, some two hundred thousand Kurds were dead, roughly 1.5 million had been forcibly resettled, huge tracts of land had been scorched by chemical warfare, and four thousand towns had been razed.
On top of the horror of reading this unimaginable horror Saddam has inflicted on so many of his own people, I am learning alot about what our own country has turned a blind eye to. For instance, after the above written horror, the US Senate passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq, but the Reagan administration prevailed upon the Congress to drop the matter!!!!!!
I am only at the point of the Persian Gulf War in the book. But, so far, with Saddam's history of brutal and ruthless acts toward anything that seems to get in his way, animals or men, this is one bad nut that needs to go, and fast!
Just my opinion, of course.
Mrs. Shakita
