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Castro doesn't strike me as enough of a killer to accept Saddam, although I could be wrong considering his assistance to Chavez.

I doubt that I would have gone to Cuba last year if I'd known Castro was still into international adventurism. I thought he was too broke for it, but I guess with Venezuelan oil money anything is possible.

(The thought crossed my mind that my tourism dollars might have gone to finance the evil Chavez, but any impartial view of the situation would note that oil takes care of the cash, and the common worldview of Castro and Chavez does the rest).

I tend to agree with you about Saddam and exile. For one thing, I don't think he would trust any country that would take him, even Cuba. For another, I believe him to be sincere in wanting to appear "great" to history, and he will look like just another coward if he goes into exile.

More to the point, it's worth remembering what happened to his son in laws in Jordanian exile. They defected, the information was dragged out of them, and they were then left alone with boring lives with nobody to push around or torture.

They were so bored of this that they went back to Iraq even though they must have known that Saddam's promises of eternal friendship were phony, after the knife they plunged in Saddam's back earlier.

Saddam and his belicosity is like a shark that constantly needs to move and eat. If you take it away, you take away his essence. Better to die, he says, than to leave Iraq with a life drained of meaning.

That's my take, anyway.

D