Crazy Like A Saddam

On Sunday I was watching the Fox News Channel and Dan Rather was being interviewed. The relevance of a Q & A session with Mr. Rather was that he was the last American journalist to have chatted with Saddam Hussein. Rather came off as being extremely arrogant and very angry. He stated several times that "The Butcher of Bagdhad" was not crazy, but very calculated. Repeatedly he said that Saddam was a cold-hearted killer, but in no way was he crazy.

So that leads me to ask if Saddam isn't/wasn't crazy then who is?

Rather also said that he felt Mr. Hussein was a brilliant man, but not crazy.

William Shakespeare, Albert Einstein, and William Butler Yeats are some folks that I equate with brilliance, not the former Baathist party leader.

Is the media so politically slanted that they now won't even refer to Saddam as being a raving lunatic. I don't even see Saddam Hussein as militarily being a smart cookie. Nothing was gained by him invading Iran in 1980, and he only incurred the wrath of the United States by invading Kuwait in 1990, and for that matter kicking out the United Nations' weapons inspectors which led to his removal as Iraqi President by the U.S. in 2003.

The European Union urges that Saddam's life be spared, The New York Times wants the whole thing put off for a while, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair doesn't think Saddam or anyone is deserving of the death penalty, well at least Blair is consistent.

I know that the Iraq war is not very popular to many people, but to elevate Saddam into some realm of genius or that Iraq would be better off with him still in power is asinine. Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis were killed and placed in mass graves. Meanwhile, British P.M. Blair says the number is closer to 400,000 bodies that have been recovered from the mass graves since the ouster of Saddam. According to USAID:Assistance for Iraq, if these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994 where about 800,000 people were killed; Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s which led to the deaths of two million people by starvation, torture, or execution; and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II which resulted in the deaths of six million people, the vast majority of which were overwhelmingly Jews.

In fact, currently it is estimated that 400,000 people have been killed by the Islamic mercenaries known as the Janjaweed, in Darfur, causing two million people to flee The Sudan to neighboring countries such as Chad. Many Democrats have stated that the U.S. should send troops to The Sudan, but how come some of these same people did not support the Iraq war? Genocide is genocide, is it not?

In Iraq, there have even been some cases of dead girls being found clutching their dolls inside these graves. But for some unknown reason the media fails on a regular basis to acknowledge the shear brutality of the Saddam regime. Why?

Several years ago I read a book called The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein by Sandra Mackey. She described how during the Iran-Iraq war Saddam would invite the widows of fallen Iraqi soldiers to his palaces where he would rape them and quite often would then murder these grieving women.

Saddam was an ego maniac who abused his people at every turn. While, many in Iraq lived in substandard conditions, Hussein tried to rebuild the great palaces in Babylon which belonged to King Nebuchadnezzar during his reign, 605-562 B.C. In an odd twist of fate, Nebuchadnezzar was found at the end of his reign wondering in Babylon's wilderness, talking to himself while looking quite disheveled. Sounds eerily similar to when U.S. troops found Saddam in that spider hole, does it not?

The current American media, Dan Rather included, the far left wing of the Democratic party, and the anti-Americans throughout Europe and elsewhere can paint Saddam any way they want. But history will show these folks to be moronic and short sighted. The world and most importantly the Iraqi people are much better off now that Saddam Hussein won't be hanging around much longer.