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| Trumped! | |
Card games are normally games of chance, and Uday and Qusay got unlucky
yesterday as their cards came up - trumps for the US, and the two hated sons of
Saddam were dealt out of the game. Many people wanted to see their heads on pikes in central Baghdad, but the
US is a bit coy about such open displays of violence, instead to show a gentler
face to the Iraqi population. They are now debating which pictures to show of
the corpses - the gruesome blood spattered corpses or the cleaned-up and
peaceful funeral home variety. The US is sensitive to the fact that many Iraqis hate them even more than
Saddam's sons and doesn't want to provoke anti-US fervor. The obvious solution of handing over all the photos to the interim Iraqi
administration, and letting them make the choice themselves presumably hasn't
occurred to George W. (must-retain-control) Bush, but presumably his
sensitivity doesn't extend that far. Meanwhile the US deck-of-the-most-wanted is looking a bit thin, and the US
is rapidly burning the deck as more and more of the most wanted are captured or
killed in the post-conflict mop-up. No sign yet of the Ace of Spades (Saddam), but with the next generation
eliminated (and even one of the generation after that caught in the crossfire),
the regime is clearly finished. The former dictator must be feeling a little despondent. With Iraqis in
Baghdad celebrating by firing into the air (it must be an Arab thing), with
tens of thousands of US soldiers looking for him, and with millions of his
fellow Iraqis dreaming of getting the 25 million bounty on his head, the deck
does seem rather loaded against him. He may still be in control of the several truckloads of cash that were
looted from the banks as the regime's house of cards fell, but he he has to use
that money to continually out-bid the American's 25 million, and over time that
could become very expensive. Unless he has something pretty good up his sleeve,
it's only a matter of time.
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