Posted on 04/04/2003 12:00:41 PM PST by Dominic Harr
It's a 3 minute speach, he only flips the page twice, reading about a minute per page. And he's clearly reading.
It can't be small type.
Contacts is possible, but his reading glasses are those big, coke-bottle thick glasses.
I'm just clueless abou glasses and such.
It's a fun detective game, tho.
I think Saddam feared that we had planned to run this war the same way as the last one - days and days, if not weeks of aerial bombing before the ground war began. We are nearly untouchable in the sky and would sustain next to zero casualties. He knows that he can't beat us in a war, but could only hope to wear us down and have American public sentiment turn by inflicting casualties where he could. He wanted "a million Mogadishus". Well, the only way he could inflict casualtiees is if we began the ground war, allowing him to use his Fedayeen death and suicide squads against us.
How could he get us to begin a ground war? Fake his death or severe injury. How would he do that? Simple. Have one of his top aides contact the CIA via replying to cell phone/e-mail messages they had been receiving. This aide would tell the CIA ops that he knew that Saddam, his sons, and top aides would be meeting and staying in a particular building that is quite vulneralbe to attack. All the top guys? Together? At once? Not underground in a bunker? How convenient! How could we resist?!
Meanwhile, Saddam and his sons, aides, really were hiding in his bunker that goes down 10 stories into the earth. They make the hit look authentic by "frantic digging" in the rubble the following day and haul off somebody that sure looks like Saddam in an ambulance. Saddam hopes this will encourage us to rush our ground forces to Baghdad as we think/hope there will little/no resistance with the leaders taken out/seriously wounded, and we want to rush in before the power vacuum is assumed by some other Ba'ath leader. He's hoping that we get overextended, tired, and short of supplies, allowing him to ambush the Coaltion and "cut the Boa snaking through the desert into pieces". At first, our troops meet little resistance as we cross into Iraq from Kuwait. Our embedded reporters are cruising through the desert and remark how fast they are going because there is no resistance.
Then Saddam appears on TV, reading his notes in the biggest, thickest, ugliest glasses every created. Does he need glasses? No. Even if he did, why wear such a pair that draws attention like bees to pollen? Simple. It's a sign to the Fedayeen. He has already instructed his death squads to go into action once they seem him appear on TV wearing glasses. He wears the biggest, ugliest glasses so there is NO mistake amongst his underlings that THIS is it. While he calls for his people to fight in generic terms in his statement he obviously is not going to overtly reveal his most dastardly plans for the Coaltion. The Fedayeen see the glasses and go into action using terror against all troops, foreign and domestic, trying to put their "Black Hawk Down" plan into operation.
This is why we have only seen Saddam wear those glasses once. It was a sign to his death squads. Until today, his messages have been ambiguous and pretty generic. This he needed to do for 2 reasons. ONE, he wanted to keep US thinking he was dead or seriously wounded, but TWO, he couldn't allow the Arab world, especially the Iraqis to think that he was dead, so he had to tread a fine line - giving out enough info to his people for them to think/fear he was still alive, while not giving out enough info for us to be sure that he was alive and well. Has the "Mogadishu" strategy worked? Not in my estimation. Yes, we have suffered some losses, but likely nowhere near the scale he had hoped. His Plan A was to stop us and get us to turn around before we got to Baghdad. Too late. Onto to Plan B now for Saddam.
So why does he come out now and "prove" that he is alive? Well, this is obviously his final stand - Plan "B". He has nothing to lose at this point, so he hopes his appearance will strike fear in our hearts and further rally the Iraqi people, or at least make us desperate to flood Baghdad with troops to smoke him out.
Of course, the worst fear is that he has some sort of "surprise" waiting for us in Baghdad, like setting off a nuke when 50,000+ American troops are in the city limits. I think that possiblity is very, very remote. Of course the plan could also be to use chem/bio on everyone over the city via drones and ground forces firing of chem/bio munitions. It might not cause many US/UK casualties but could kill MILLIONS of Iraqis. And you know who the liberals and most of the world would blame.
Meanwhile, Saddam is in his bunker. He thinks at that point we will leave voluntarily with all of Baghdad contaminated, or that world outrage at the deaths will force us to leave. He then hopes to emerge elsewhere - Tikrit, Basra, somewhere, and continue his rule. Far out? Yes, but this is Saddam "Insane" we are dealing with. Does he have a "better" option as far as he is concerned?
But there was a different assessment from a woman who claims to have known the Iraqi leader intimately. Parisoula Lampsos, who says she was Saddam's mistress over a period of nearly 30 years, told U.S. officials and ABCNEWS that the man who appeared on TV was not Saddam.Lampsos had previously distinguished Saddam from his doubles in more than a dozen cases and she said that Saddam would never come out of the bunker during battle to deliver a statement.
Last year Lampsos explained to ABCNEWS' Claire Shipman how she could spot Saddam's doubles.
For starters, she said, the real Saddam has an unusual tattoo: two dots on his left hand that he received in prison years ago. But his eyes are the real giveaway, she said.
"Look everywhere — it might change," Lampsos told ABCNEWS. "You can change your teeth, everywhere. But the eyes, no."
BAGHDAD, Iraq (DPI) - Saddam Hussein appeared on Iraqi television last night, sending the message to his people that he is alive and well despite "some seriously heavy sh*t going down around here." Holding up his bandaged right arm and turning to show the cameras the "big-a$$ lump" on the backside of his head sustained during last week's "bunker buster" bombing attacks, Saddam condemned the United States for its "bad f-ing attitude" and "acts of jumping all over" the Iraqi people's a$$. According to inside sources, Saddam's glasses also were reported to be broken until he could find some duct tape or "one of those little f-ing screwdrivers."
The Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, is reported to be suffering from lymph cancer and to be preparing to undergo chemotherapy...He is suffering from pain in the joints, breathing difficulties, poor eyesight, temporary memory loss and lack of concentration, the doctor is quoted as saying.
Also found another joke...
So war could have been avoided. President Bush would have gladly accepted Saddam's challenge to a duel if he had known that his eyesight was that bad.
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