Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/26/2003 3:53:20 PM PDT by MadIvan
THEY were doing laps together in a pool at the palace, Saddam Hussein and Ibrahim al-Basri, his doctor. Bodyguards paced at the water’s edge, intently following the leader’s progress. Pausing for breath at the end of a lap, al-Basri told Saddam the guards looked a bit podgy.
The leader looked at his physician with interest. “I told him military officers in Europe had better posture,” the doctor recalled in his garden last week. “These fellows had paunches.”
Saddam climbed out of the pool and began haranguing the men. “Later that day he issued a decree that members of his entourage would be punished if they went above their optimum bodyweight,” said the doctor.
Al-Basri, 62, a sports medicine specialist, offered an unusual glimpse of life behind the palace walls as he reminisced about treating Saddam’s chronic back pain with anabolic steroids and helping to whip flabby security officers back into shape.
For 16 years he was the dictator’s personal trainer, enjoying, he readily admits, a heady atmosphere of privilege and ease. He got a new Mercedes car each year, along with the gold watches, guns and bundles of $100 bills that were more regularly handed out by the dictator to his friends.
He remembered meals around a table sunk in a giant aquarium — “You could watch through the glass as the sharks circled while you ate lunch,” al-Basri recalled — and shooting parties on palace lawns in which Saddam blasted away at cigarettes planted in the turf.
“He was an excellent shot,” said the doctor. “Nobody could compete with him. Of course nobody really dared to.”
Saddam’s courtiers knew only too well how the dictator’s fun and games could turn lethal in an instant and al-Basri watched Saddam commit unspeakable acts of cruelty, sometimes with a grin. “One minute he was all gentle, mild as a poet, and the next he was a beast,” he said.
Like so many others who found a precarious place in the rough and muscular world of Iraqi power, it ended abruptly for al-Basri when they came to take him away in 1990. He was imprisoned for “insulting” the regime: he had fallen for a woman whose family was perceived by Saddam as hostile to his rule and had ignored a command not to marry her.
He emerged from prison late last year. More than a decade in a dungeon does not leave the doctor feeling kindly disposed towards his former patient.
“If I meet him in the street I will kill him,” said al-Basri, brandishing a titanium-plated machinegun given to him by Saddam in the 1980s. He believes that Saddam is “hiding underground”.
A dead bird was wired to its perch in a cage on the terrace where al-Basri sat listening to American tanks rumbling past his gate. “I loved that bird,” he said. “It died while I was in jail. I have kept it to remind me of what happened.”
His second wife also died while he was imprisoned and a large photograph of her adorns his sitting room wall. “My life was ruined by that man.”
The relationship began in 1974, when Saddam was vice-president and already controlled the feared state security apparatus. Al-Basri, who had qualified as a doctor in East Germany, was becoming famous in Baghdad for a fitness and health television programme that he presented: “I was surrounded by beautiful young girls in tracksuits demonstrating the exercises with me.”
One devotee was Saddam, who summoned the doctor to a meeting at which he complained of severe backache. “After examining him and looking at x-rays I told him it was a disc that was misplaced and asked if he had been injured. He told me it must have been from too much hard work.”
With some trepidation the doctor prescribed a series of steroid injections in the spine, warning that there was a risk of side-effects, including paralysis. “Until then his doctors had been afraid even to examine him, let alone give him injections. He was happy to be offered some chance of improvement,” said the doctor.
The treatment seemed to work. Al-Basri was summoned regularly to various palaces to inject a cocktail of Xylocaine, an anaesthetic, and steroids such Deca-Durabolin and Depo-Medrol into Saddam’s back. “He would lie down on a couch. It took about 10 minutes. It eased the contractions.”
He also recommended suppositories, but his patient frowned at the idea. “So I gave him capsules to swallow, but then he complained of stomach aches. He later asked for the suppositories, saying they were for somebody else.”
By the time Saddam declared himself president in 1979, the doctor was visiting Saddam at least once a week, either to inject him or to supervise swimming. Sometimes he was summoned at 4am when the dictator could not sleep and wanted a dip. “You could not refuse him anything,” said al-Basri. “Everybody knew that saying no to Saddam could mean death.”
Beyond laps in the pool al-Basri got him stretching and bending to touch his toes. Often he would be invited to meals: “I became part of the family.”
The 15 years he had spent studying and working in Germany seemed of great interest to Saddam. “He was very interested in Hitler and would often ask me what people in Germany thought of him. He agreed with Hitler’s ideas about stopping the mentally insane and seriously ill from getting married and having children.”
Saddam also expressed an interest in Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and philosopher whose writings revealed that public duties depressed him and he longed for a simple life. It seemed to strike a chord with the Iraqi leader who, in quieter moments, enjoyed tending his palace gardens.
“People were always coming to him and asking for things,” said al-Basri. But such encounters could backfire. “Once this woman came in, kissing his hands and feet. Her husband was in prison and she was begging for his release. He smiled at her, wrote out a note for some money to be given to her and said her husband would be back home the next day.”
When the woman had left, Saddam turned to his security adviser. “He’s still alive, then?” he asked, to which came the reply that the man had not yet been sentenced for his crime. “Saddam said, ‘Well, I gave her my word that he would be home tomorrow, so kill him and send her the body.’ He was laughing as he said it. But it was not a joke.”
On other occasions the doctor watched as Saddam erupted in fury at clumsy servants. “He would yell at them and they would cower. Everybody would — even the minister of health, who refused to sit down when offered a seat, saying, ‘I cannot sit in your presence.’ I never refused a seat. I think he respected that.”
By 1987 the fitness regime imposed by Saddam on his cronies had notched up some notable successes: Taha Yassin Ramadan, the vice-president, had lost more than 4st. As a reward, al-Basri was appointed doctor to the national football team.
Imprisonment in the 1990s may have saved al-Basri from a far worse fate. According to the doctor, in 1996 his replacement in the palace came to an untimely end when suspected of involvement in an assassination plot.
“Saddam starved his dobermans for two weeks, then unleashed them on the doctor when he came through the door. They chewed his face off. They tore him to pieces.”
Regards, Ivan
Be proud, Bush-haters, Be very proud.
Leni
The sort of man only Oliver Stone could love.
Regards, Ivan
Nice legacy!....especially considering this is coming from a doctor!
Here in Oz we've been hearing comments like "Prime Minister Howard should be tried for crimes against humanity"...."John Howard should be tried for war crimes"...."This is the most humiliating moment in Australia's history"....etc etc
Many of the arguments against being part of the 'coalition of the willing'(at least here in Oz)have centered around what will happen to us here in Australia as a result of invading Iraq...ie:our wheat trade will suffer,we will be even more the target of terrorism etc
The Iraqi people are finally rid of this tyrant no thanks to those who seem to think 'peace' is simply the absence of war
Thanks for the post
God bless
Too bad he didn't hold Saddam's head under water. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble.
LQ
That evil, but also mentally ill. It's not one or the other. Think about it. Why are most hopelessly insane people completely harmless and pitiful, but others dangerous?
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