StormWarning’s Counterterrorism

Fears of a Madman

To me, this is comical. Saddam Hussein feared contracting HIV or an STD from guards in the prison he was kept prior to his hanging. Other insights into how this madman thought were revealed in his diaries, being reported today.

Among the revelations of from the Al-Hayat newspaper was that he feared catching “young people’s diseases” because the soldiers were hanging their clothes out to dry on the same clothes line with his.

Of course, the diaries (not available in their entirety yet, I don’t think), also offer insight into this madman’s thinking.

“I explained to them that they are young and they could have young people’s diseases,” Saddam wrote. “My main concern was to not catch a venereal disease, an HIV disease, in this place.”

[:]

“The spread of the Persians… is more dangerous for Iraq than the Zionist entity, now and in the future,” he wrote. “The Persians are similarly dangerous to the Arab nation, especially the Arab countries of the Gulf.”

More is included in another article:

I joked with him saying… may Allah will enable me to get married and have children again, to name two of them Uday and Qusay, and the third Mustapha,” wrote Saddam, who was reportedly married four times.

This is a link to the translated page(s) of Al-Hayat. Here is one of his poems.

I suspect that I remain in the minority on this one. But Hussein was so delusional that I believe that either his WMDs had been shipped out of Iraq and sent to Syria (or Yemen), or maybe more likely, Saddam had been duped by his scientists into believing that Iraq still maintained a stockpile of WMDs, their motivation being the continuation of their budgets and good life styles afforded by doing phantom research.