This book is fantastic. I’d like to share with you what I thought was an incredible exerpt from the man who knew more about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program than any other person in Saddam’s Iraq. In the immediate chaotic aftermath of the 2003 war in Iraq, Obeidi contacted the arms inspectors he had forced to lie to for so many years, and voluntarily turned over the key plans and parts to US Intelligence. Among the revelations reported (and maybe most importantly not reported) by the international media: In the early 1990′s, under orders to hide the core of the program from UN weapons inspectors, Obeidi had buried in his backyard garden the critical elements necessary to build uranium-enriching gas centrifuges. What he turned over to U.S. intelligence in the summer of 2003 proved to be the entire remains of a program put on hold since the last Gulf War. This telling book tells how close Saddam in fact came to realizing his dream of a devastating, destructive and horrible nuclear bomb.
This is his story (in part) of watching the famous statue of Saddam coming down:
After daybreak on April 9, with the sound of heavy fighting still pounding Baghdad, we saw images of American tanks on the city’s southern bridges over the Tigris. That afternoon we saw something we could never have imagined. Thousands of our fellow Baghdadis mobbed the famous Firdos Square. Many used sledgehammers to chip away the base of a statue of Saddam, cheered on by the crowd. We sat pointing at the TV with our hands over our mouths in disbelief.
“Look at that,” Ahmed said. “They are chopping at his feet, and no police are stopping them!”
It was an image I knew was being watched around the world. A U.S. armored personnel carrier rolled into the square to help them with a chain tied around Saddam’s neck, to pull the statue over.
“He’s going to fall!” my wife gasped.
Saddam’s figure tottered, fell face forward to the ground, and was instantly set upon by Iraqis beating his likeness with sticks, their shoes, and anything else they could find. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was as though I was watching the death of the tyrant himself. There fell the man who, for more than twenty years, had kept me and my fellow scientists physically and mentally on a string around his finger and my family in a shadow of fear. There fell the man for whom, years earlier, I had tried to produce enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. There went the statue of a man who used fear to make scientists lie and deceive. He was pulled down by his neck.
A tyrant bends every aspect of his subjects’ behavior to his rule. My family and I survived the worst of it, thanks to my position. We had lived on shaky ground, second-guessing our most intimate whispers, since before most of my children were even born. Saddam had literally ruled our lives. In that instant the fear that my family and I had lived through did not disappear, and in some respects it probably never will, but its grip loosened ever so sligthly. The fall of that great statue seemed to set free an emotion that I don’t have a name for. Although the war was still raging and uncertain, we cheered openly and embraced each other. We looked at one another in disbelief, shaking our heads and grinning with the first sense that a long nightmare might be about to end.
I can’t say enough about reading a first hand account of what it was like to live within close proximity to Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. What blew my mind was how dilusional they were right up to the “invasion”. They were still saying they were going to crush the Americans, and triumph, even when it was obvious they were small in comparison to American forces and didn’t have anywhere near the military might to even come close to defeating them.
I know a gal who works closely with an Iraqi woman. They are glad that Saddam is gone. I don’t know of a single Iraqi who isn’t…or any American Arab who isn’t, for that matter. I don’t think any of them are muslims.
Thanks to Mudville and Outside the Beltway
Pingback: NIF