I won’t shed any tears for Uday or Qusay, but I do wonder how their mother(s?) feels.
(Assuming she/they is still alive to hear the news, anyway)
True, I won’t be shedding tears for their demise, either.
Without daddykins, Odai and Qusai would have been nothing more than a couple of schoolyard bullies who pull the wings off of flies for fun. Shrub and company merely batted cleanup after Saddam loaded the bases.
I am totally glad they were killed, and hope that as they died, a fraction of the tortue, suffering and murder they inflicted on others flashed before their eyes.
As for Saddam - I imagine the loss of his sons makes him feel older and weaker.
I do feel sorry for the fourteen year old grandson caught in the crossfire. Whatever he may have been like, he was a child caught up in his parents’ and grandparent’s games, and he deserved the chance of a future.
Quite a Catch-22 there my friend.
If YOU were the informer, well, if all of a sudden you started showing up driving around in a new Ferrari driving down the main street of Tikrit, it ain’t gonna take someone real long to put two and two together to work out that YOU BASTARD! You’re the prick who ratted Saddam’s sons out. And I daresay your life wouldn’t be too safe not long after that.
And even if you tried to really, really keep things quiet - someone in a bank in Iraq somewhere who’s a Saddam loyalist might find your bank account recently jumped by $15 million US Dollars - and again your name would be called out as the rat.
So I reckon it’d be pretty hard right now to celebrate your good fortune, and still live a long life sadly.
And yet, there’s nothing that the US forces would love to trumpet in public more than the informer collecting his paycheck - like some huge lottery winner.
Such footage would send a killer signal across Iraq that the US is the highest bidder of all.
But man, your life wouldn’t be safe I rather think.
I dunno. How did Hitler’s mother feel, do you think?
Some people truly just need killin’. These two fit very nicely into that category.
Saddam is (or was) only as Muslim as political expedience requires. He might make a public statement saying they died a martyr’s death and are now in paradise etc. etc. if he thinks it will win him points in the right circles, that’s all.
Maybe he’s crying his heart out (assuming he’s still alive). Maybe he’s angry because the fools were stupid and disloyal enough to get caught. Maybe he’s just relieved it wasn’t him… Or maybe he’s already worm food.
I want to be the first to offer a tshirt with Saddam’s picture saying “You. Yankee Bastards. You. Killedmysons…”.
Celebrating their deaths is macabre, but it’s human nature. I also think that many of the arguements here are moot, for judgement is not ours to tender. Gawd, that makes me sound like a Xtian!
[scurries off to sin his way back to normal]
Was he a devil while Rumsfeld was shaking hands with him and all that lovely support was flooding into him in the 80’s?
As for gassing the Kurds, don’t forget that Churchill did that as well. Was very proud of it too.
Well, with 30 million, I for one wouldn’t be hanging out in Tikrit or Mosul. I’d be lounging on a beach somewhere in the Cayman Islands. Or maybe somewhere else. There are lots of places to go, and it’s not at all clear how long the arms of any wishing vengeance might be. Besides, 30 mill will also pay the salaries of a few really good bodyguards.
Yeah, and George Washington had slaves. Whoopdie ding.
Is it impossible for you to think that in spite of the past, some things are the right things to do? You seem to think that something that happened 50 years ago with people long dead should dictate what should happen now. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Would you like an example of how long the arms of vengeance might be?
Two years ago in my sleepy little coastal town of Southport, we had an assassination. At first it didn’t seem like one, but eventually the police pronounced it as such.
It seems we had a Russian gentleman, a former Army colonel, a handsome man in his early 40’s with a young attractive wife and children living quietly and peacefully in a quiet, waterfront suburb. The gentleman had started a florist shop and it was doing nicely. The family were well liked in their street.
And one night - this is no shit - the father was killed by two men with guns with silencers in his garage. There were screams by the wife and neghbours came out to look. The two killers placed their weapons in plastic bags according to witnesses and were wearing wetsuits! They dived into a canal, and went underwater and sometime later, a dark boat with no lights powered up and drove off.
After much investigation, it seems the father was a former KGB colonel, and had really made some enemies amongst the Russian mafia - and they sent out two bloody NAVY seals to kill him!
The case was never solved. It was literally a case of something so over the top you could never track it down or pin down a suspect. It was a great hit though. Straight out of the movies.
So nothing would surprise me - absolutely nothing.
Hold on.
Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988. People are continually bringing this up as evidence of how evil he is/was.
Churchill used mustard gas in the 1920’s against Kurdis villages
“against recalcitrant Arabs as experiment”. another of his quotes “we cannot in any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier”.
so, it was right For Churchill to gas kurds as part of an experiment, because it was the right thing to do?
Jesus fucking christ.
and another thing:
I must remember this quote from you if we ever get into a discussion on Israel.
Nope. I never said that “it was right For Churchill to gas kurds as part of an experiment, because it was the right thing to do”. What I (didn’t actually say but implied) was that getting rid of Saddam was the right thing to do.
The difference is that we now recognize that that is a particularly despicable, evil, and cruel thing to do to people. Saddam never did learn that lesson.
And I’m not sure what you’re implying with your off-topic Israel comment, but I’m sure I’m not going to like it.
Can I get a cite for that? I’m sorry, but that seems a wee bit on the unbelievable side, don’t ya think? Like a story that grows with each telling?
What, don’t like that story?
Take your pick of any of these.
It’s funny. Evidence is given that these guys are douchebags, and everyone understands that to be true until they’re dead. And then, suddenly, there are a gazillion apologists saying that stories are “unbelievable”, or “I wonder what the mother is feeling right now”.
She’s feeling bad because her sons were killed, OK? Too bad she didn’t feel that way when they were raping and murdering.
The stories are unbelievable, OK? Yet there are a whole pissot full of them for you to read. This one is no more unbelievable than the rest. Yet they’re TRUE. That’s what’s unbelievable.
This is not a big loss, no matter what the circumstances. These guys were a fine example of evil, and they are no more. Pardon me while I do another dance.
Easy there, Airman. I just asked for cite. That doesn’t make me an apologist.
Oh, we knew it then, too.
Thank you Jodi, that was a nice summary. Like I said originally, I have rarely in my life read of such atrocity and blatant cruelty as Uday and Qusay had for innocent people. I have no genuine pity that their lives ended in a bloody gunfight, but I will not sit around and take ‘pleasure’ (which is what you said in the OP Zenster, you said it was a genuine PLEASURE) at their demise, which started, with Qusay at least at the age of 13.
At one point in their lives, Uday and Qusay were giggly three year olds, playing ball, and then their father, also a monster, steered them into a nightmare, which probably fed on the mental and psychological deficiencies they already had. To me, that’s sad. It’s like murdering two children, taking away their chance to be normal by thrusting them into hell.
As they grew they chose their path, and chose darkness, like their father, and why not? In such an impoverished land of misery under the hand of dictatorship, it’s better to live in a palace and murder people than to live in a mud hut and fear the death squad.
Zenster, I am not comparing you to any of those people, nor to terrorists, nor to Nazis, nor to mediocre chefs, I am simply saying that 50,000 wrongs don’t make a right, and just because they had turned into animals doesn’t mean we have to.