Uday, the Devil's Double

I've noticed during the last few weeks the rising number of people who've been referred to my blog by searching "uday hussein". In the last month, according to Blogger stats, "uday hussein" was the top search keyword that resulted in somebody looking at my blog. 76 searches of "uday hussein" with 31 searches of "iraqi mojo" at a distant second. A Google search of "uday hussein" yields one of my posts called "I WAS UDAY HUSSEIN", a Viceland article about Latif Yahia, who was forced to be Uday's double. It was the most viewed post on my blog in the last month, and the second most viewed post all time. For that post, on July 10 David All commented 'Latif's horrifying tale has been made into a movie, "The Devil's Double" that is scheduled to be released in theaters on July 29th. You can read more about it at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270262'. Thanks David All for that comment!

I have seen at least two commercials for the movie, and tonight I found a description of the movie in Wikipedia:

The Devil's Double is a 2011 drama film directed by Lee Tamahori and starring Dominic Cooper, Philip Quast, Ludivine Sagnier and Raad Rawi. It was released on January 22, 2011 at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and will be released in limited theaters on July 29, 2011 by Lionsgate and Herrick Entertainment.[1] Story: Based on a gripping, unbelievable true story of money, power and opulent decadence, Lionsgate's THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE takes a white-knuckle ride deep into the lawless playground of excess and violence known as Baghdad, 1987. Summoned from the frontline to Saddam Hussein's palace, Iraqi army lieutenant 'Latif Yahia' (Dominic Cooper) is thrust into the highest echelons of the "royal family" when he's ordered to become the 'fiday' -- or body double -- to Saddam's son, the notorious "Black Prince" Uday Hussein (also Dominic Cooper), a reckless, sadistic party-boy with a rabid hunger for sex and brutality. With his and his family's lives at stake, Latif must surrender his former self forever as he learns to walk, talk and act like Uday. But nothing could have prepared him for the horror of the Black Prince's psychotic, drug-addled life of fast cars, easy women and impulsive violence. With one wrong move costing him his life, Latif forges an intimate bond with Sarrab (Ludivine Sagnier), Uday's seductive mistress who's haunted by her own secrets. But as war looms with Kuwait and Uday's depraved gangster regime threatens to destroy them all, Latif realizes that escape from the devil's den will only come at the highest possible cost.

So now I know why there have been so many views of the post "I WAS UDAY HUSSEIN". I am looking forward to watching this movie.

Saddam was a monster the World helped create

A few days ago I found and posted an article about the western countries that sold weapons to Saddam.  I called it "Saddam was a monster the West helped create".  Today I thought more about who helped Saddam become powerful and I remembered that Russia also sold weapons to his regime, as did China.  I searched my blog for "Russia" and found some interesting posts, but none about Russian arms sales to Iraq. The discussion about Russian arms sales took place in the comments (haloscan) section, and RhusLancia of IBC wrote a post in January 2007 titled "Where did Saddam get his chemical weapons?"  That was a good post, and in it RhusLancia pointed out the following:

• All told, 52% of Iraq's international chemical weapon equipment was of German origin.
• Around 21% of Iraq’s international chemical weapon equipment was French.
• About 100 tons of mustard gas also came from Brazil.
• The United Kingdom paid for a chlorine factory that was intended to be used for manufacturing mustard gas
• An Austrian company gave Iraq calutrons for enriching uranium. The nation also provided heat exchangers, tanks, condensers, and columns for the Iraqi chemical weapons infrastructure, 16% of the international sales.
• Singapore gave 4,515 tons of precursors for VX, sarin, tabun, and mustard gasses to Iraq.
• The Dutch gave 4,261 tons of precursors for sarin, tabun, mustard, and tear gasses to Iraq.
• Egypt gave 2,400 tons of tabun and sarin precursors to Iraq and 28,500 tons of weapons designed for carrying chemical munitions.
• India gave 2,343 tons of precursors to VX, tabun, Sarin, and mustard gasses.
• Luxemburg gave Iraq 650 tons of mustard gas precursors.
• Spain gave Iraq 57,500 munitions designed for carrying chemical weapons. In addition, they provided reactors, condensers, columns and tanks for Iraq’s chemical warfare program, 4.4% of the international sales.
• China provided 45,000 munitions designed for chemical warfare.

I was surprised to see India and Singapore on the list.  One of the Wikipedia pages that RhusLancia linked to mentions that Saudi Arabia loaned or gave $20 billion to Iraq between 1980 and 1982.  Other Gulf countries also loaned Saddam money in the 80s, including Kuwait.  

Many countries and international companies did business with Saddam, but today the most controversial  support, the support that most people talk about, was the support the US gave Saddam.  In 2005 NPR diplomatic correspondent Mike Shuster answers answered an important question:

CHADWICK: Can you say--is there any sense that the US created Saddam Hussein, that the United States essentially was responsible for the rule of Saddam Hussein?


SHUSTER: Well, certainly not created Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein came to power in the late 1960s in Iraq. He created Iraq's secret police and intelligence, and he became the number one strongman of Iraq in 1979. But after that, the United States did play a key role in all of his actions, military and political, in the Middle East. In effect, the United States chose Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, to be its surrogate for policy in the Persian Gulf region and to counter the actions of Iran, which the United States, the Reagan administration, saw as the biggest threat. And the fact that it supported Saddam Hussein in all these clandestine ways, a man who had been the pariah to the United States in the decade earlier, it seems to me could not have helped encourage Saddam's grandiosity about his role in the Arab world. He was meeting with senior US diplomats. They were looking the other way when he was using chemical weapons and developing other unconventional weapons. He couldn't have helped but to think that the United States was behind him.

The US did not create Saddam, but in the 80s the world's powerful countries helped make him a powerful dictator.  After 8 years of senseless war and a decade of ethnic cleansing, torture, and murder, in 1990 Saddam finally violated the rules of the west by invading Kuwait and thus drew the condemnation of the American President, who drew a line in the sand.  In 1991 the West, along with a few key Arab allies, destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure and its military and forced Saddam to withdraw the Iraqi army from Kuwait.  

After the 1991 Gulf War the West, led by the US, sought to destroy the remainder of Saddam's WMD via UN sanctions and inspections, ensuring that Saddam would not be able to threaten his neighbors.  They did not, however, destroy Saddam's ability to mass murder and imprison innocent Iraqis.  Iraqis not only suffered through another 12 years of murder, torture, and imprisonment, but they endured through sanctions that crippled the country's economy.  As a result of the sanctions and government neglect, ordinary Iraqis struggled to survive as Saddam built 81 palaces in the 90s. I have said many times that Saddam should have been overthrown in 1991, but I was still happy when it happened in 2003. Kan'an Makiya summarized my feelings in a 2006 interview:

It is very sad for me that Europe, which is a bastion of so many of the highest ideals to which I aspire, sat back and was happy to let the Iraqi people live under that inhuman regime of sanctions, which were killing people in vast numbers. And [Europe] allowed this situation of abuse and tyranny of the regime to continue, and did not think it morally necessary -- forget practically, maybe it's not practical -- to get rid of that kind of institutionalized abuse on that kind of scale.

Now, the United States chose to act, for whatever reason. From my point of view as an Iraqi, that decision was a thousand times better, morally speaking, than the inaction of the Europeans. The complicity of so many people in the United Nations, for instance, with the former regime. We now know so much about that because of documents that were discovered inside Iraq after the fall of the regime.

It wasn't just the Europeans who wanted Iraqis to continue to suffer under Saddam.  So did the Arabs. The Arabs who continue to defend Saddam are simply stupid. 

Blaming the Victims

In recent comments the discussion turned to an article written by Madeleine Bunting and published in The Guardian. Bunting writes "thousands of women and children are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet the governments responsible have been returned to power." So the governments in power are responsible for the deaths of women and children and not the suicide bombers and terrorists who intentionally murder innocents in an attempt to defeat those governments. Not only that - apparently WE the people who elected those governments are also responsible, and the media is responsible. I could not read the entire article yesterday, so I should add here that Bunting does make some good points, and she offers this disclaimer about the female suicide bomber she writes about: "That's not to say that her own moral choices were defensible - she blew up herself, her beloved brother, fellow Muslims and plenty of women in the crowd - but the challenge even from such a morally flawed character persists." The "challenge" she refers to is the claim by the bomber that we think that we are innocent, but we are not, because we have "chosen to forget". Really? Chosen to forget? We and the media may have become desensitized to the daily violence in Iraq, but we have not chosen to forget. Her claim is an insult to the well-intentioned bloggers and commentators who have passionately written about the war in Iraq.

Bunting goes on to write about Dahr Jamail and his new book. I have read Jamail before and I have become familiar with his seemingly one-sided view of Iraq. I wanted to give an example of Jamail's bias, so I visited his website and immediately I found a telling sentence on his 'reports' section of his site: "Dahr Jamail was the primary contributor to this report concerning the failure of Bechtel to reconstruct/rehabilitate the water treatment plants it mentioned in its contract." WOW. According to Jamail, Bechtel "failed" to reconstruct/rehabilitate the Iraqi water treatment plants, as if Bechtel was somehow negligent and intentionally breached their contractual obligations. Jamail does not mention that 52 Bechtel employees (many of them Iraqi) were murdered by the glorious "resistance" and other criminals.

Jamail did not include in his report or his website the fact that "Bechtel's hospital site security manager was murdered. The site manager received death threats and resigned. Bechtel's senior Iraqi engineer quit after his daughter was kidnapped. Twelve employees of a subcontractor in charge of the hospital's electricity and plumbing were killed in their offices. Eleven workers of another company supplying the project's concrete also died."

Jamail does worry about the poor people of Iraq and his report states that "if the security threat is too great in some places for Bechtel to carry out its contractual obligations for water service reconstruction, the work must be immediately subcontracted out to Iraqi firms and/or government workers and international aid organizations, or military protection sought." No mention that Bechtel DID subcontract the work to Iraqis. No mention that many of those Iraqis were murdered. Does Jamail realize that insurgents have not allowed reconstruction to happen so that the new Iraq will fail? Is this fact so difficult to acknowledge? Or does Jamail agree with the insurgents and their tactics? His report was written before Bechtel left Iraq. Why hasn't Jamail updated his website to put at least some blame where it actually belongs? If I were one of those Iraqis hired by Bechtel, I would be very angry with Dahr Jamail and people who blame contractors for their "failure" to rehabilitate Iraq.