Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Saddam Hussein Wishes He Could Help The Americans

The bang of metal on metal woke me again. It was always the same wake up call. The barrel of an American rifle hitting the metal bars on my little room. The walls were cinderblocks, the floor was poured concrete, the cot was a metal frame. The toilet was missing its cover. The desk was metal, as well as the chair. The sounds of metal on metal, hard surfaces against hard surfaces surrounded me, all night and most of the day. The only thing soft in my life was the mattress and the sheets. My flesh. My flesh was soft. The Americans at least gave me new white sheets every day, and my soft flesh would nestle in the sheets every night, but also often during the day. My flesh was getting less soft, though, as the days passed. I am on a hunger strike, you see. I have not eaten in days, maybe weeks. I drink. The Americans give me water. I know they are putting some vitamins or minerals in the water to secretly provide nutrition. That's OK. I let them think that I do not know, but I like it just the same. Afterall, this is for show, my hunger strike. It is a symbolic thing. So if everyone thinks I think that I am not getting nutrition even tough I am, then that is just fine with me.
The Americans rotate the Marines so no one ever develops a relationship with me. Sometimes I think that is good. Sometimes I think that is bad. I would like to talk to someone. I do know English, sort of. I can understand the American Marines when they talk to each other. I want to tell them how to run things in Iraq. I want to tell them how to do it. I actually wish to help them because my whole country is falling apart and the Americans do not seem to know how to glue it back together. They do not seem to understand that I was actually more like them than they fully understood. Religion is a big deal here in Iraq, but I tired to make it less of a big deal. Because I understood something that the Americans seemed to not understand, and that is many of my fellow Iraqis, mostly the Shia, desire to convert the world to their point of view, and so the only way to keep them from pursuing their mission is to make them concentrate on something else, like staying alive.
I kept the Shia on edge. I kept the Kurds on edge, who were really a different problem. I liked the Kurds. They were good fighters and they were organized, and they were sensible. But they had a lot of oil and they felt that they should control it, and they also wanted their own damn country. So I had to get tough with them. But now that I think about it, I should of forged an alliance with them so we together could undercut the Shia. But now the Americans have unleashed the Shia, and they are raging and they are mad and they are itching to start spreading their shit. Look how fast they have moved since unleashed. Of course, they have the help of the Iranians. The Iranians are on top of the mountain now. They are sitting high and mighty with lots of money, with their loudmouth president, and thinking that they are somehow more moral than everyone else.
That is the problem. The minute someone things they are more moral than the next guy, they no longer become sensible. The way I see it is, you assess a situation from a practical standpoint, not a religious or moral one, and you proceed from there. I wish the Americans would go back to their practical ways. I wish the Americans would stop with their high and mighty goals of spreading democracy and start thinking about money and power and alliances again. I would alter the way I speak of things. I would crush the Shia in the only way they can be crushed, with supreme and ugly force. They are like cockroaches. And they need to be exterminated. I understand that. It is a shame that the Americans did not consult with before they conquered me. I would have given them a little advice. Now they have created this huge mess that will keep spreading unless someone does something about it. The Shia are worse than AIDS. When will someone figure that out.