{"id":4914,"date":"2009-08-20T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-19T23:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/08\/20\/house-of-saddam-part-1\/"},"modified":"2009-08-20T07:11:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-19T23:11:00","slug":"house-of-saddam-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/08\/20\/house-of-saddam-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"House of Saddam – Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blog-saddam1\" House of Saddam<\/a><\/em> (2008) \u2013 on rental. The show begins with a thickly moustache middle-aged Iraqi celebrating his daughter\u2019s seven birthday. He welcomes his friends and well-wishers. One could had easily mistaken this man to be just an ordinary loving father.<\/p>\n

But in the next 10 minutes, Saddam Hussein proceeds to pull a coup on Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr while a guest at his own daughter\u2019s party. He then makes himself President, starts a bloody purge of the Ba’ath Party leadership, and requires the remaining leaders to execute each of the condemned. By the 14th minute of the first episode, he has also personally executed by shooting into the forehead his closest ally and friend Adnan Hamdani.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

I have vivid memories of the first gulf war of 1991. I\u2019d completed my National Service vocation training and had been posted to a combat unit. In the early months of that year though, we were in a relative lull, so I spent quite a bit of time with my platoon mates watching CNN and following the gulf war developments daily.<\/p>\n

It was a white-wash of course \u2013 the Coalition forces with their superior technology and arms overwhelmed and all but routed the Iraqi army and \u2018famed\u2019 Republican Guard out of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein\u2019s proclamation that this would be the \u2018Mother of All Battles\u2019 never materialized past a whimper.<\/p>\n

15 years after that conflict and in 2006, with a second gulf war and more blood letting in between as Saddam Hussein beat up the Kurdish movement and starred eye-balled with Coalition forces in no-fly zones, the old President was finally caught, then unceremoniously hung by the new Iraqi government.<\/p>\n

Continued in the next post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House of Saddam (2008) \u2013 on rental. The show begins with a thickly moustache middle-aged Iraqi celebrating his daughter\u2019s seven birthday. He welcomes his friends and well-wishers. One could had easily mistaken this man to be just an ordinary loving<\/p>\n

Read More House of Saddam – Part 1<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-entertainment","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-10-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}