For him this may have advantages over the dark cellar in Tikrit where he has been hiding.
MOVIE ABOUT SADDAM HUSSEIN CAPTURE TRIAL
He will feel humiliated by being captured alive but if he is brought to trial – and it will be the trial of the century – he will once again have a platform from which to speak to the world. The Iraqi leader has always had a deep hunger for publicity and in captivity he may seek to exploit this. Over the next forty years he escaped so many attempts to kill him that his belief grew in his divine mission. He once told King Hussein of Jordan that ever since he had escaped after trying to assassinate a former Iraqi President in 1959 he had treated every day as a gift from God. Even in defeat he remained an optimist always hoping that the political wind in Iraq might change in his favour.īut he was also a fatalist. He believed in his own star and divinely guided fate which had led him to rise from being an orphan in an obscure village to supreme power in Iraq. Saddam Hussein always lived in something of a fantasy world. There was not a lot he could do to stop them. But the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001, with which there is no evidence that Saddam was connected, increased the influence of the those US leaders who had always wanted to get rid of him. Three years ago there seemed to be no reason why he should not rule in Iraq for as long as he wanted. He almost kept his grip on power despite his disastrous invasion of two of his neighbors,Iran and Kuwait. Saddam will feel himself uniquely unlucky. Three exactly similar convoys would leave his presidential palace at the same time to confuse assassins who would not know which vehicle to shoot at.
His guards were executed for giving a hint of his whereabouts. A remarkable aspect of Saddam’s life when he was the supreme power in Iraqis was that he always behaved like a criminal on the run expecting arrest by the police. What was Saddam Hussein thinking about in his hide-outs in and around Tikrit, the dusty city by the Tigris where he first began to make his mark forty years ago? He cannot have been too surprised by his new life-style. Certainly he spoke with same long-winded vagueness which made his speeches so tedious when he was in power. The CIA confirmed the voice was probably his. In these he called for continuing resistance to the US, but he gave little sign that he was organising guerrilla attacks himself. He dare not communicate with other people because he is frightened they will betray him.”įrom his hiding place Saddam was able to send out cassette tapes which were delivered anonymously to foreign media organisations in Baghdad. He is not able to organise the resistance. That is the only way he can avoid being captured. Hoshyar Zebari, the Foreign Minister of the interim Iraqi government, told me several weeks ago: “Saddam is very isolated. In the months since he fled his capital Saddam has been preoccupied with avoiding capture. Instead, unlike Uday and Qusay who died with guns in their hands, he will be presented by Washington as a symbol of its military victory in Iraq and a sign that America is winning the war despite its mounting casualties. He probably envisaged blowing himself up with a grenade at the last moment or being shot dead by US troops in a final struggle. Just as US troops were entering the city he told his two sons Uday and Qusay, later killed in a gun battle, that it would be safer for him to go on the run by himself. He cut himself off from his senior lieutenants at the time of the fall of Baghdad in April. The former Iraqi leader had put great efforts into avoiding the American dragnet. But, going by the paranoid way his mind worked during his long years in power, Saddam will be thinking about the identity of the traitor who led his enemies to his last hiding place. It may be that there was no betrayer and US soldiers were simply following up leads. Saddam will wonder who finally betrayed him in exchange for $25 million. Instead he has fallen alive into the hands of US troops after successfully evading them for over half a year. He has always portrayed himself as the Arab hero who would fight to the last bullet and die surrounded by the bodies of his enemies. For Saddam Hussein his capture is the moment of supreme humiliation.
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