So Saddam is trying to show he cares. The amnesty was the most important gesture of a campaign aimed at presenting a softer face to his people and rallying them for war. Iraqis are being regaled with propaganda showing him as a caring and conciliatory leader.
He certainly has the means to do that – satellite television is banned, foreign radio stations are jammed and the internet is tightly controlled, with many websites blocked. Iraqis have no choice but to be overwhelmed by Saddam’s immensely powerful propaganda machine as the great majority encounter nothing but the state media’s relentless diet of indoctrination.
As part of the propaganda drive a mass wedding was held in Baghdad yesterday, paid for by the regime. More than 150 couples gathered at the headquarters of the Youth Wing of the ruling Ba’ath party to tie the knot, benefiting from the benign patronage of their leader.
The regime had supplied wedding dresses to the brides and suits to the grooms. None fitted. The grooms wore trousers that either flapped around their heels or barely covered their knees. Equally ill-fitting shoes condemned them to walking in a painful hobble. The brides, all clad in identical dresses, struggled to raise a smile.
After posing glumly for photographs, the couples left for a party organised by Saddam’s eldest son, Uday. Saddam had also paid for their honeymoon – a two-night stay in the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad. After this, the brides would be allowed to hand back the wedding dresses. But the grooms would have to keep the suits.
Isn’t that just wonderful? The problem is that I have heard of this kind of grotesque and absurd propaganda stunts. They are usually perpetrated by dictators who have completely lost touch with reality and live in the world of their own. It is a result of an evolutionary process based on survival instinct – the leader spends first few years shooting everyone who disagrees with him and voilà, all is well as everybody agrees with him! Remember Nicolae Ceausescu?
I suspect that we only hear about a small fraction of Saddam’s escapades. I hope that after Iraq is freed and the full horror of his regime revealed, it will become one of the examples of justified use of force.
Hi Adriana: You say that in Iraq “the internet is tightly controlled,” but Salam Pax seems able to get articles from the Economist and other western-media sites to excerpt on his blog. Is he too clever for them, are the controls haphazard, or what? (Salam suggests that the Iraqi gov’t “doesn’t get” the internet, which is why they haven’t hauled him off to make sauce out of yet for maintaining <http://where_is_raed.blogspot.com“>a weblog.)
IRRC it was Ceausescu’s visit to Kim Il Sung’s North Korea in the early 70s which really opened his eyes to the unexplored possibilities of megalomania. One Romanian later commented (something like): “Before he went to North Korea, he was just an average scumbag dictator, but afterwards he was a total lunatic”. Ceausescu even began to use a golden sceptre. Salvador Dali, the surrealist, sent him a postcard congratulating him on this ‘great advance in republican thinking’. It was months before they worked out that the compliment wasn’t entirely serious.
The last two sentances you quote say the brides are “allowed” to return the dresses and the grooms “have to” keep the suits. This seems reversed. Does anyone know why?
Anrew read the posting again, concentrating on the description of the clothing involved. It is then obvious why the brides were allowed to return the monstrosities they were forced to wear.
Having to keep a suit that does not fit (and wear it special events?) is rather nasty of course. A bit like me have to go about in my ill fitting Chubb uniform – althoug A. Clarke would say (with my lack of concern for style and taste) no would notice the difference.
I think Adriana is right. I have no special concern for the special right of evil regimes not to be overturned. If that is “American Imperialism” – well I have never had much of a problem with the basic idea of Imperialism either. Imperialism can be good or bad – it depends on time and place.
The Monarchy in Iraq would never have been destroyed in 1958 if Britain had stood up to Nasser in 1956. Britain (and by extention to West) had shown weakness (as we all did with regard to Hungary in the same year) – so the enemies of the West took note.
Actually Suez was not the fault of the Americans (although not standing up to the Soviets over Hungary perhaps was). Basically Suez failed partly because Eden was incompetent (one should also remember that it was Eden who took British troops out of the Canal Zone in the first place – back in 1954, in return for a scrap of paper from Nasser) but mostly because “Super Mac” either lost courage or decided it would be a good time to back stab Eden.
Old “first in, first out” Harold M. first pushed Eden into the Suez operation and then said we had to give in – because there was a “run on the pound” and the Americans would not bail out the pound. Plenty of people (such as Rab Butler) pointed out that rigged exchange rates were stupid – but it was not in Harold M.’s interests to listen to them.
Hopefully George Bush has not got his own “Super Mac” – although the Secretary of State has allways seemed deeply dodgy to me.
Paul Marks.
Jim: I am not sure what your point is as you seem to answer your own question (Salam suggests that the Iraqi gov’t “doesn’t get” the internet, which is why they haven’t hauled him off to make sauce out of yet for maintaining a weblog.)
Indeed, Perry, and the blocking of sites is more likely to extend to internal and/or external dissident sites, if any such exist, rather than the global press web-sites. Saddam’s regime can always dismiss those as Western propaganda.
You can also control the internet by making access to it impossible or difficult… There are many ways to impose tight control on communications in oppressive regimes. And there is always some way to get round them provided you are willing to risk it.
To see what ‘tight control of internet’ means, check out the last comment on this posting. Iraqi ISP doesn’t like Andrea Harris blog, so it’s blocked! Nuff said.
This would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic