Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/09/2003 5:23:24 PM PDT by MadIvan
A statue of Saddam Hussein clad in chain mail and mounted on a charger dominates the main boulevard running through his home town, Tikrit, widely expected to be the last redoubt of the regime.
It is in Tikrit, on a rocky spur overlooking the nearby Tigris river, that Saddam sited his largest and most ostentatious palace.
Even if he is dead, his clansmen around Tikrit may try to hold out, for no other reason than a deep and justified fear of the vengeance their fellow Iraqis may wreak now that Saddam's protection has been lifted.
Many dictators have lavished money on their home towns and transformed them into gleaming showcases. As with so many features of his rule, Saddam took this familiar obsession of autocrats one step further.
Until Iraq's Ba'athist revolution brought a clique of Tikritis to power in 1968, the small town was a neglected backwater, growing from the mud banks of the Tigris. Saddam changed all that.
He built two palaces, the largest a sand-coloured riot of pillars, domes and colonnades with a spectacular riverside setting. This huge, sprawling and grotesque pleasure dome boasts the colonnades of Buckingham Palace, the domes of a great mosque and the faintly sinister, hunched appearance of a nuclear bunker. Miles of razor wire surround this temple of self-glorification.
Saddam added a wide boulevard running through the heart of Tikrit, decorating it with statues of himself and more colourful portraits of his distinctive features than anywhere else in Iraq.
He added a parade ground overlooked by a cool marble balcony where his guests would gather to watch Iraq's armed forces demonstrate their prowess.
But away from the central boulevard Tikrit looks like a normal Iraqi town - squalid, dusty streets strewn with litter and tumbledown houses made of crumbling mud bricks.
Like everything else in Saddam's Iraq, the glorification of Tikrit was based on a lie. Tikrit was not even his home town. He was born in a mud hut in the tiny, poverty-stricken village of Ouja, a few miles down the road.
Claiming that he came from Tikrit carried two key advantages for Saddam. When he was a young gunman in the early 1960s, the leadership of the Ba'ath Party included several Tikritis, notably his cousin Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr whom he succeeded as president in 1979.
Moreover, Tikrit was the birthplace of Saladin, the hero of the Arab world who defeated the Crusaders in the 12th century. Saladin was a Kurd but this was conveniently forgotten.
The invention of Tikrit as a home town gave a historical twist to Saddam's personality cult. The statue of a mounted Saddam in chain mail depicts him as a latter-day Saladin.
The entrance of Tikrit is dominated by a vast mural showing Saddam waving a sword and leading an army of Arab horsemen to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
But nothing can disguise Saddam's biggest lie. He posed as a hero of the entire Arab world and used Tikrit's link with Saladin to bolster this myth. Yet Saddam was a fake Tikriti, hailing from an obscure village and an obscure clan of a small tribe.
He was, first and foremost, a tribal leader, supported by a narrow clique of clansmen, whom most Iraqis hated and despised. That essential truth has now been cruelly exposed on the streets of Baghdad.
Saddam's hard core of followers may view Tikrit as too obvious a hiding place. The wealthiest and most prominent may have already fled Iraq altogether.
Less prominent Ba'athists will probably try to emulate the remnants of the Fedayeen and disappear into the heaving slums of Baghdad. They will take down their portraits of Saddam, burn their party cards and masquerade as normal civilians once again.
These Ba'athists will gamble, probably correctly, that so many Iraqis are implicated in the excesses of the ancien regime that it will be impossible to wreak vengeance on them all.
Regards, Ivan
I nominate Tikrit.
Hopefully the destruction of this city will be available on a live TV feed during the day with a great sun angle for proper lighting.
Tikrit was the birthplace of Saladin, the hero of the Arab world....
Symbolic; more reason to level Tikrit.
CNN announced, a bit ago, that we had dropped a MOAB, and that they would give details later.
Earlier, a correspondent from Janes Defence Weekly said that a brigade of the 4th Infantry had left Kuwait for Iraq. I suspect that they will be in Tikrit, Mosul and Kirkut within three or four days.
In any free society he would have been laughed out of town for such a mural. In Iraq any body that laughed at this would have been killed. How could the liberals not have despised this guy
Yawn...
The MOAB has been moved into the "theater". So please, by all means do a "Burger King " on them and let them have it their way.
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