Why is saddam hussein evil

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If you don't follow the rules , your comment may be deleted. User Legend: Moderator Trusted User. The Vietnam War, for example, vividly demonstrates how wartime distorts productive reportage. The few journalists who wrote potentially subversive articles critical of government claims, such as David Halberstam, had their coverage actively undermined by their editors.

Such jingoistic metamorphosis is readily observable even today. When President Donald Trump launched two missiles at Syria in April , the media establishment rushed to praise his actions, even the reporters who had spent months denouncing him as a threat to American democracy. Indeed, since the Vietnam War, the U. By placing in historical context the deferential dynamic between the press and government, and citing instances of its occurrence outside of situations involving either Iraq or Saddam Hussein, I hope to demonstrate that these are enduring problems inherent to the field of journalism and the practice of government as they transpire in the U.

From the s to the early s, these longstanding institutional dynamics and deficiencies combined to create the mythical beast that is Saddam Hussein as he currently lives in the American imagination. His image was forged on the anvil of war, at the moments when the U. Hussein himself, being an awful dictator in his own right, simply helped the process move along.

When it ended in , he was still nobody. In between those years he killed about , Iranians and at least 13, of his own citizens, but as far as the American press was concerned, he was nobody. Indeed, Saddam Hussein was such a non-factor in U.

That Hussein committed the worst atrocities he ever would in the s, when his U. In March , Saddam Hussein launched a chemical attack on the remote Kurdistani village that killed more than 4, civilians.

News of this brutal genocide did reach the shore of the U. However, while the bombing of Halabja received extensive coverage, it was not necessarily good coverage. This is because a straightforward story—Iraq used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurds—was quickly complicated and obfuscated by the Reagan administration. The government never substantiated this claim with evidence, but at the time that hardly mattered.

As the Iran-Iraq war dragged on, reporters moved on. The Saddam Hussein that is remembered today—the ruthless sadist, the brutal dictator, the unhinged madman, the terrorist sponsor—was created in the lead-up to and during the Gulf War of , through a combination of self-induced demonization, government propaganda, and a pliant and sensationalistic media.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the U. The resulting patriotically charged political environment encouraged the media to propagate a government-produced narrative as groundless as it was spectacular.

To be clear, Saddam Hussein himself played a critical role in setting the foundation upon which the U. After emerging from the disastrous Iran-Iraq War in with an international image that was, if not exactly rosy, at least not cataclysmic, Hussein undertook a series of ill-advised actions that focused hostile international attention on him where none had existed before.

In the West, Hussein found himself abruptly promoted from distasteful but generic Third World strongman to the new post-Soviet threat.

In , the Iraqi secret police detained Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft at the Baghdad airport, where he was awaiting his flight back to London following the completion of a reporting assignment. Hussein ordered him executed. This brazen murder of a British journalist provoked international outrage. By the time the Bush administration began demonizing Saddam Hussein with ruthless propaganda, loyally transmitted by the American press, the public was primed to receive it. Receive it they did.

Much as Bush personally attacked Hussein, so to did the media personalize its coverage of the Iraqi dictator.

He was not just Hiter. Jerrold M. Even his name was mis-pronounced as Sad- dam Hussein, associating him with sadism [42] and may be why the media and the public developed a tendency to call him by his first name rather than his last. The government of Kuwait funded numerous public relations firms to help the U.

The story had a major impact on public opinion of Hussein—who now did seem evil enough to warrant the Hitler label—and public support for the war. Six of the senators who eventually voted to authorize the Gulf War specifically cited the baby incubator story as the reason for their stance. The Iraqi army likely did commit numerous atrocities in Kuwait. The baby incubator story, however, was nonsense. Before then, American journalists appeared to have reported the allegations as fact.

This failure, aside from once again demonstrating the U. By not challenging the government narrative, journalists had, in a very real sense, fooled not just the public but also themselves. Saddam Hussein captured 10 years ago — Two U. Saddam Hussein captured 10 years ago — The entrance to the "spider hole" where Hussein was hiding. Saddam Hussein captured 10 years ago — The interior of the "spider hole.

Saddam Hussein captured 10 years ago — U. Saddam Hussein captured 10 years ago — Hussein's capture is splashed across newspaper headlines in Chicago. Personal: Birth date: April 28, Death date: December 30, Birth place: Tikrit, Iraq. Read More. Father: Hussein Abid al-Majid. Mother: Subha Tulfah al-Musallat.

Religion: Sunni Muslim. Education: University of Baghdad College of Law, On the day of the execution, it was a holiday, so I was at home. There was an overwhelming celebratory spirit, especially here, you can expect, in Najaf, one of the cities that suffered the most from the oppressive tyranny of Saddam.

There was shooting [in the air]. This is the usual habit of Iraqis everywhere to celebrate. This was the first impression, but later, when the first videos from the execution came on TV, for me, it was a disappointment. Saddam was a criminal, he deserved to die, but in a way that can achieve justice to the victims. Not in that way that was shown on Iraqi TV on that day.

At that moment you remember the people who suffered from Saddam Hussein I was from a family that did not have any relations to the politics So, there were tears in the family, there was crying. An Iraqi policeman watches a broadcast of Saddam Hussein moments before his execution. Surood Ahmad, On that day in Ahmad, a Kurdish human rights activist, was in Halabja, the city that Saddam had hit with chemical weapons.

She says people on the day felt they received retribution for the suffering they endured, but that she was shocked by how the media showed Saddam's death. As a human rights defender and as a member of the [Kurdish community], it hurts me to talk about this because I was one of the people displaced during the Saddam regime.

I lost three members of my family. On the other hand, now when I look at the community and how it was before compared to now -- In the past we had one enemy, but now we have a hundred enemies and we don't know who our enemies are.

But what we are cultivating now is from [Saddam], because he planted this during his period. He created hate between the Shia and the Arabs and the Sunnis and he brought the Arabs to kill the Kurdish people, and brought the Sunnis to kill the Shias.

This was his long-term plan. I didn't like the way they [sentenced Saddam] and the way they hanged him. Despite all what I went through I didn't like how the media showed his [execution]. He was our leader for a while. Unfortunately on that day I was in Halabja, the city [where people were gassed] by chemical weapons.