Now we've appointed Allawi. It's a step in the right direction, because he is one mean son of a bitch. An interesting guy; he started out as a hit man for Saddam's Ba'ath Party, quashing dissent by blowing the dissenters' heads off. Then he decided he wanted to be a doctor -- maybe he got interested in medicine by seeing what people's brains looked like splattered all over the sidewalk, I don't know. Anyway, he went up to the head of an Iraqi medical school, Godfather-style, and said "I want an MD degree." They agreed with hardly any delay. It was the fastest qualification in history. None of those 50-hour shifts as an intern for Allawi; he graduated with honors in the time it took the Dean of Med School to sign the paper, trying not to let his hand shake too much.
Then Allawi had a fight with Saddam. Luckily, he was in London at the time. If you had a fight with Saddam in Iraq, you ended up in the dungeons getting cigarettes put out on your eyeballs. But London allowed Allawi a little more scope. So instead of hitting Saddam's enemies, he became a CIA asset and started putting .22 rounds in the back of Iraqi officials' heads. You know, putting his talents to the service of freedom.
By all accounts, Allawi is a talented killer. In his first week in office, he personally took out six suspected insurgents -- just lined'em up and gave each one a bullet in the brainstem. Him being an MD, he also performed the autopsies which revealed that the deceased died of heart failure, which was technically true -- your heart does tend to stop when your head's blown open.
This is the kind of guy we need to run Iraq. If Allawi had had a better start, he'd be fine. Unfortunately, he's way, way too closely identified with the Occupation. No Iraqi will ever trust him again. Right now he controls about ten square yards of Iraq -- the space covered by his special Delta-Force bodyguards. That's it. If he ever walks out alone, even in the middle of that downtown mortar range known as the Green Zone, he's toast.
What we need is somebody like Allawi, but not identified with the American occupation. Somebody double-tough, with plenty of experience in running Iraq.
That narrows it down to a pool of applicants consisting of exactly one guy.
I think you can see where I'm going here, folks. That's right: Bring back Saddam!
Look at the man's record! He came up from nowhere, a peasant boy from the boondocks (Tikrit) and took control of the craziest country on the planet. Better still, he kept control for decades. He survived every crisis a ruler could have: rebellions in Kurdistan and the Shiite zone, all-out war against Iran, American bombing and invasion, CIA assassination plots, blockade. None of it even fazed him. There were literally hundreds of attempted coups against him -- and the guys who planned them are fertilizing the desert now -- some of them taken out by our own guy, Doctor Allawi.
But Allawi was never more than hired muscle. Saddam was the brains of the outfit all along. We ought to realize that by now, after trying to run Iraq on our own. Saddam must be sitting in his cell mumbling to himself, "So, Yankees -- now you see what I had to deal with! Now you see it's not so easy, huh? Now you see you can't run Iraq on hymns and happy thoughts, eh, you sons-of-jackals amateurs!"
By hiring Allawi we've already pretty much admitted that Saddam was the right man for the job, because Allawi is just a midget version of Saddam with the beard shaved and the American flag stamped on his forehead. Which is why he'll never get the respect he needs to run the place -- the Iraqis see him as our puppet. Old ladies would tear him limb from limb if they caught him in the street without his Delta operators.
Nope, there's only one man for this job: ol' Soddom himself. Sure, there might be a problem explaining to the American voters why we blew a trillion dollars and a thousand GIs' lives putting the guy we ousted back in power. But hey, just wrap the flag around Saddam. He won't mind, he's a flexible guy. And we'll fall for it. We'll fall for anything.
http://www.exile.ru/2004-November-13/war_nerd.html