Regards, Ivan
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Posted on 04/11/2003 4:23:05 PM PDT by MadIvan
FOR SALE: riverside residence, slightly looted. One careful Christian Baathist owner, whereabouts unknown. Likely to be finding alternative accommodation shortly. Times reader. Seeking long lease.
You do not have to look far inside the shattered doors of the house of Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, to work out who it belonged to.
Behind the high walls of the palatial villa in Baghdad’s affluent al-Jadariyah district, the white window latticework combining the eight-pointed Baath party star with the Christian cross immediately points to Mr Aziz, one of the most durable survivors of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
In a charred heap outside the front door lies a biography of Colin Powell, and an Arabic-language Bible. At the top of the steps, marble of course, is an empty box of the veteran diplomat’s favourite Romeo y Julieta “Churchill” cigars.
US Marines have already removed most of the sensitive contents of the house, after blowing the safes on Wednesday night to take away files and bundles of paper for analysis. But plenty remains within the now devastated three- storey building — which, according to documents inside, cost him 217,447 Iraqi dinars in 1987 — to glean clues to the man.
For a former Foreign Minister accustomed to haranguing the United States and weapons inspectors, the 66-year-old Mosul-born graduate of Baghdad University certainly got to know his boss, and his enemies. Alongside biographies of Saddam, the library, the contents of which now lie strewn around a ground-floor room, includes countless profiles in English of US Presidents and leading politicians, including Jimmy Carter, Cyrus Vance, Nixon, Reagan and Kissinger and a BBC Panorama documentary Inside Iran.
But there are also volumes of analysis that suggest a man who considered himself a deep thinker on political affairs. Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management lies on top of one pile.
Victory without War, by Richard Nixon, seems an hopeful if somewhat outdated choice near the south-facing window.
Mr Aziz’s videos are even more interesting. Anthony Hopkins as Nixon, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest — a clue to his whereabouts perhaps — and a boxed set of The Godfather. Near by there is a somewhat tattered March 8 copy of The Times reporting that “Iraq gets ten days to avert war”.
Music includes Tchaikovsky’s Recollections of Florence by the Borodin Quartet, a Frank Sinatra album, Russian gypsy songs and Diana Ross.
Downstairs the fine cellar has been stripped of all but a few boxes, which indicate that Chivas Regal, Grand Old Parr and Jerez brandy were his chosen drinks. Upstairs he shows he is no slouch for brand names in the clothing department, either. A coarse green military uniform has been discarded on the floor, but gone are his Pierre Cardin shoes, Vostok Military Watch and Spanish Rima shoes.
The taps, gold of course, are mainly missing and someone has even stolen the marble kitchen sinks, plural.
Clearly concerned about the arrival of American missiles, the adjoining exercise room has been sandbagged, but this is no defence against the looters, who have stripped it like locusts.
The rooms for his wife and children run across the top floor, overlooking a garden with immaculately trimmed hedges and shrubs and the mother of all heated swimming pools in an outhouse, complete with slide for the children.
Then The Times interpreter, who is somewhat disorientated to be wandering around the Deputy Prime Minister’s residence just 36 hours after being freed from prison, points out a lovely irony.
On the wall next to the pool is engraved a poem Missing Baghdad: “The world has passed you and you are drinking in her dreams.
“Nations and time have passed away and are in their graves.”
The poet was exiled, but it is Saddam’s regime that is now in its grave, he says.
Regards, Ivan
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Indicating again the HYPOCRISY of the regime. Aziz was a Catholic, who changed his name, so he wouldn't be thought of a Christian in an Arab land essentially.
He used a Christian cross, yet stood over the LEAST Christian acts of this century.
May he rot in hell.
(Woody Allen will rot in hell too for his hedonism, but I don't blame him for Tariq Aziz)
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