Month: April 2003

Here’s some amazing satellite photos of Baghdad, with resolutions down to 1m.

Of course, they’re also multi-megabyte, but even the one sliver shown on the linked page is pretty incredible.

From Day 1 of the war, when a “decapitation” strike was launched to try to take out Saddam Hussein from where inside intel had him hunkered down, there have been rumors that he’s dead.

Various videos of him have popped up since then, but most of the analysis I’ve seen about them indicate that it’s canned footage, not live — and how old, nobody can say.

Hussein was supposed to show up on live TV yesterday. He didn’t. The message was instead read by the Information Minister.

So, is he actually dead? Is he fled? Or is he just gravely wounded?

And why haven’t we heard anything about his sons, the ever-popular Qusay and Uday?

On NPR yesterday, someone noted that the Official Iraqi Proclamations, not to mention answers to press questions, have spent a lot less time on Saddam than they used to. There have been exhortations to the defense of Iraq, etc., etc., etc., but the constant cult-of-personality references have dropped way, way off.

If he were merely wounded, or healthy, I cannot imagine he wouldn’t be out there, rallying the cause, getting more hordes of folks to chant their eternal, self-sacrificing love of Saddam.

Except … he’s gotta be scared out of his wits as to (a) our inside information, and (b) our penetration of his telecommunications system. If he goes live before a camera, is he putting his skin at risk? Quite possibly — and, in his mind, quite probably.

But even so, if he were able to, I think he’d at least be issuing video tapes that clearly showed he was alive. It’s got to be a bit worrisome to folks over the short wave that there’s so much serious speculation outside of the Information Ministry as to Saddam’s whereabouts. Unless he’s saving it for a last-second rally when the Battle for Baghdad begins, I have to think he’s unable to go before the camera.

If it were a matter just of his being badly injured, I think either he would still go on-screen (the brave warrior, escaping death, bloodied but unbowed), or a double would be put on (if it were seen as important that he not be considered vulnerable).

He might even be incapacitated or out of touch in some other way (I wouldn’t put it past him to have ducked out into hiding somewhere else. Maybe.). Those comments about the reduced references to Saddam really sound like folks in the regime are trying to lay the groundwork for weaning the people away from Hussein and into general support for Iraq (i.e., the Baathist regime). Saddam would never go for that.

What that means, though, is that they plan on going on fighting, at least for a while longer. If Saddam were really fully out of the picture — even just incapacitated — then if it were just about him, the government would have surrendered, or at least changed their tone. Yeah, there’s face, and machismo, and all that stuff, but if there were real interest in ending things, you’d be hearing a different, still resolute but less aggressive, message.

Which makes me think that the regime realizes it can’t surrender. Too many folks are going down — thrown out of power, if they’re lucky, hauled before tribunals if they’re not, tossed to the people if they’re really unlucky. They have to keep fighting, hoping for a miracle. They either can’t conjure up Saddam for a speech, or they’ve decided to try to ease him out of the limelight (including his doubles) in the hope that they can dodge the war crimes bullet if things go as badly as it looks.

I think. Who knows? Another mystery that will hopefully be cleared up when the dust settles.

The LA Weekly, which sits pretty left of center in its editorial policy, suggests that the anti-war movement — between gloating over slow-downs in the war and staging counter-productive protests — is hurting itself more than the Bush Administration.

Already, “progressive” anti-war Web sites like Commondreams.org are more or less gloating over these troubles, running every report they can suggesting that George W. Bush is about to bog down in a quagmire. But this hope, if you can call it that, is radically ill-placed. Just as a dozen years of draconian American sanctions against Iraq battered everyone except Saddam Hussein, this war going off the tracks would devastate just about everyone except George Bush.
A prolonged siege of Baghdad would provoke a humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions, running the Iraqi civilian population through a meat grinder of hunger and death. Military casualties on both sides would soar. And the already inflamed passions of much of the Arab world — and not only Arabs — could explode. It would be much worse even than the disaster we%u2019re currently seeing in Basra. The consequences of a short war in Iraq are going to be bad enough. Only an idiot could hope for a prolonged conflict. That’s why the best we can now hope for is a swift and definitive conclusion of the war.

and

Blocking traffic when 74 percent of the American people support the war, or endlessly whining about CNN’s coverage, or grandstanding as Michael Moore did at the Oscars telling America that a president who currently enjoys (for all the sordid reasons we know) stratospheric popularity ratings is “fictitious,” has much more to do with personal therapy than with effective politics. Continue on that tack and you can pretty much count on another four years of Bush, no matter how ugly the war turns.

Some other interesting points (some of which I agree with, others not) are also made.

(via Volokh)

It’s all about oil.

Economic interests, as well as jealousy of power, color the picture. According to the International Herald Tribune, French interests have signed with Iraq drilling contracts worth as much as $50 billion. The contracts are so lopsidedly favorable to the French firms that no successor regime to Saddam will be able to respect them.
The French fan dance with Iraq dates to the 1970s, when Chirac was the point man in selling nuclear reactors to Iraq, including the Osirak plant bombed by Israel in 1981. (The plant, incidentally, was known as the O’Chirac reactor.) It was Chirac who signed the treaty with Iraq allowing for the transfer of French nuclear technology and specialists. It was this same Chirac who lavished praise on Saddam as a “personal friend,” a “great statesman,” and who invited him to his home. And, yes, it was the very same Chirac who has led the French efforts to sell arms to Iraq, some $20 billion worth. Today, France remains Iraq’s biggest European trading partner. Those who believe the United States went to war against Iraq inspired by oil are looking in the wrong direction. Try Paris.

(via InstaPundit)