Posted on 07/28/2003 4:49:00 PM PDT by FairOpinion
The decision to kill Saddam Hussein’s two sons Uday and Qusay when they were surrounded in a villa in Mosul - instead of taking them alive - was made by high-ranking officials in Washington to meet the overarching goal of showing the Iraqi people that Saddam Hussein and his like were doomed to be eliminated root and branch from Iraq’s ruling system, never to return. Washington needed to hammer this message home to counteract the corrosive effect on Iraqis of the mounting guerrilla campaign on American troops and their failure to take out a single senior member of Saddam’s inner circle since invading the country in March.
After the two sons’ deaths were confirmed, DEBKA-Net-Weekly published a world exclusive in its last issue of July 25 that, even now, the Saddam succession lives on in the person of a third, virtually unknown younger son called Al. Uday and Qusay had the same mother, Sajida. Ali’s mother is Samira Shahbandar, the daughter of an aristocratic Syrian-Iraqi family.
According to our sources, Samira was never married formally to Saddam although there are rumors of a secret marriage contract. She preferred to live apart from him in Syria so as to stay clear of Baghdad politics and the brutalities of the Saddam regime. But their relationship was strong and she often paid visits to Baghdad. In recent years, Samira is believed to have moved to Beirut, but their son Ali stayed in Syria, presumably under the custody of Saddam’s close advisers. His two half-brothers worked long and hard to keep Ali’s existence dark and unrecognized, but Saddam is fond of his youngest son and always protected him from his siblings’ rancor.
Just before the war, Ali dropped out of sight and has not been located so far by any intelligence agency. Until recently, US intelligence assumed the young boy had gone into hiding in a secret place prepared in advance by his father. Now, according to DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources, he is believed to have been brought to Iraq by Saddam several weeks before the war and kept beside him throughout the fighting. The son and father are most probably together in one of the presidential underground complexes between Tikrit and Samarra or Samarra East.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources report the strong possibility that Saddam Hussein will try and elevate his last surviving son to fill the dynastic gap left by the deaths of Uday and Qusay and Qusay’s 14-year old son Mustafa.
Ali’s presence in the presidential hideout is held by some intelligence sources as the reason for the two half-brothers’ unexplained emergence from hiding and exposure to danger in Mosul where they and Mustafa were finally killed by US troops last Tuesday, July 22. They may have fallen out with their father over the presence of the half-brother they hated and walked out to force Saddam to send him away.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that finding Ali Hussein was the object of the US Task Force 20 raid on a house in the Mansour district of Baghdad Sunday, July 27 and sweeps by the 4th Infantry Division around Ouja on the outskirts of Tikrit since Wednesday July 23. Their mission is deemed important enough to bring General Richard Myers, top US armed forces commander, to Iraq to lead operations. Finding Saddam’s last surviving offspring appears to be the key to the capture of Saddam himself. Failure would boost Iraq’s deposed president hopes and encourage him to name Ali as his successor.
Debka is the name of an Israeli folk dance. The site comes from Israel, and seems to run the leavings of Israeli intelligence. Some of their items are stuff that was new yesterday, and hence, though true, is no longer vital, and so gets passed on to Debka. Some of it is stuff that an intelligence officer said, "Why are you putting this crap on my desk? Give it to Debka!"
There is also a steady tone of marginally anti-American doomsaying. In the big picture, Debka supports the United States, thought 9/11 was terrorism, etc., etc. But in virtually every specific case, it takes the view that Americans are dumb cattle who don't know what they're doing. I assume this attitude is compounded from 1) the desire for sensationalist copy 2) Israeli arrogance — more common before the intafadas than now, but still sometimes surfacing: only we understand the region, only we know how to fight, and so forth and so on.
Posted at 09:47 PM
('The Corner' in National Review, March 23, 2003)
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp
No the options were to call the house a "compound" and send Janet Reno, or to kill them quickly.
The president chose the more humane alternative.
All they had to do was come out with their hands up, and they would have been taken into custody, and then hung. Which probably explains whey they didn't come out. :) Too bad though, they probably a good idea where Daddy Dearest was or might be in the future.
A man walks down the street
He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard
I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
Bonedigger bonedigger
Dogs in the moonlight
Far away my well-lit door
Mr. beerbelly beerbelly
Get these mutts away from me
You know I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore
If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you betty
And betty when you call me
You can call me al
A man walks down the street
He says why am I short of attention
Got a short little span of attention
And wo my nights are so long
Where’s my wife and family
What if I die here
Who’ll be my role-model
Now that my role-model is
Gone gone
He ducked back down the alley
With some roly-poly little bat-faced girl
All along along
There were incidents and accidents
There were hints and allegations
If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you betty
And betty when you call me
You can call me al
Call me al
A man walks down the street
It’s a street in a strange world
Maybe it’s the third world
Maybe it’s his first time around
He doesn’t speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound
The sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says amen! and hallelujah!
If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you betty
And betty when you call me
You can call me al
Call me al
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