The characters are larger than life (Ong 30, 69-70).
"Reading Saddam's Mind - For U.S. intelligence,
it's been a maddening exercise"
In hindsight, maybe he should have kept his mouth shut.
It was the summer of 1986, and Iraq's Fao Peninsula had just fallen
to the Iranian Army. Saddam Hussein was livid. With his top military
advisers, he planned revenge. But one general, Salah el-Kadi, argued
against a massive counterattack. Defeat was certain, he warned. Saddam
ordered the man to his feet. "You are a coward," he bellowed.
Unholstering his revolver, Saddam backed el-Kadi against a wall and
fired six times into his chest. The others in the room froze, recalls
bodyguard Karim Abdallah al-Juberi, who witnessed the killing. But
Saddam sat down and calmly continued the meeting as though nothing
had happened.
Saddam's reckless and unforgiving management style keeps
his troops in lie but gives Western analysts fits. Since the gulf
war, the Iraqui dictator's utter unpredictability has frustrated attempts
to psychoanalyze his behavior -- and figure out what he might do next.
At times his actions seem to defy logic. Why, for instance, did he
choose to provoke the United States just when he was about to clinch
the oil-for-food deal he'd demanded for so long? In fact, it might
not be as crazy as it looks. Saddam is far more concerned with flexing
for his Arab neighbors -- and reminding his own Republican Guard that
there's a price to be paid for crossing him.
Saddam had to do something. In recent months, his power
base has eroded. Even Saddam's top advisers began to doubt his staying
power. Ever paranoid of coup plotters, he rarely sleeps in the same
place two nights in a row, has a mustachioed double to stand in for
him at public appearances, and routinely takes over the homes of Iraqui
citizens for government meetings. " Joe Blow family might get
kicked out of its apartment for a few days out of the blue to make
way for a cabinet meeting," says Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington
Institute for Mideast Policy.
But, as the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies....
When more than 1,000 iranian troops crossed into Iraq ... in July,
Saddam needed to prove he was still in control. .... Last Thursday,
Baghdad boasted it had fired three missiles into the no-fly zone,
"scaring" the United States away. In fact, the missiles
didn't get anywhere near any coalition planes. But the risky maneuver
got the attention - and quiet admiration -- of Saddam's neighbors.
"He's trying to divide the coalition and win his way back into
the Arab heart," says State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns.
Saddam may have also had another, more prosaic reason for attacking.
"For nearly two years the world has been talking about Saddam
less and less," says Haifa University's Amitzia Baram. "He
just couldn't stand it." Saddam's outsize ego, after all, is
one thing that all his would-be mind readers can agree on.
As literacy developed and democracy took hold socially,
characters in drama came from the working classes, no longer the ruling
or socially prominent ones. Characters are life-sized because the reader can flip back if s/he forgets who a personage is.