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15-Dec-03
Richard Maybury answers questions on the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Q. How do we know it's really Saddam?
Maybury: He and his family were known to use doubles. He was recorded to have at least fifty for himself. We know it's him only if the persons who supplied the DNA were trustworthy. And that leads to the question, who in Iraq is trustworthy?
Q. Wouldn't a double admit that he's as double in order to keep from being punished, or punished so severely?
Maybury: If he did admit he was a double, his family would be killed. On the other hand, the real Saddam might claim to be a double.
Q. Is it the end of the feud between the Bush family and the Hussein family?
Maybury: Probably not. Hussein's tribe numbers in the thousands. It would be considered unmanly if they didn't try to get revenge.
Q. What will be the effect on the US elections?
Maybury: Not much. The attention span of the voters is about 7 days. By the time the elections roll around I think this will be long forgotten.
Q. What about the effect in Iraq?
Maybury: I think this is the most important question. If I was an Iraqi and believed it really was Saddam Hussein that was captured, I'd be saying to myself, "Now the enemy tribe in the village down the road knows that Saddam is not coming back, so they know they can attack us and Saddam isn't going to show up later to punish them for it."
And they know the same about us.
The side that strikes first has the advantage so they will think, "We'd better start accumulating more weapons and hit the other tribe as soon as we can get ready."
Q. How bad was Saddam really?
Maybury: On a scale of 1 to 10 for dictators, with 10 being the worst, he was probably a 3. He's reported to have murdered tens of thousands of people, which is probably true, but in Africa the dictators typically kill that many people before breakfast. So you might ask, "Well, why is it that we don't hear about these dictators in Africa who are so much more brutal than Saddam?" and in my opinion the answer is that the people they are killing have dark skin, and people outside Africa don't care.
Q. There is the perception that if you remove a dictator, all is well.
Maybury: Essentially, in every country you've only got three choices: liberty, tyranny or chaos. The Iraqi people have no experience with liberty, so they have only two choices, and that's tyranny or chaos. If you remove the tyranny there is only one choice--chaos.
You have to ask a deeper question, "What comes after? Who's going to replace him?"
Since the days of the Ottoman Empire the only person who's been able to control Iraq and keep the Iraqis from massacring each other was Saddam Hussein, and he did it by being extremely brutal and ruthless, by continuing to make examples of people who annoyed him.
If he's gone the question is, "Who's going to keep all these warring tribes under control?" And maybe even more deeply we should ask, "Who's going to be ruthless and brutal enough to keep these tribes under control?" and I don't know of anybody on the scene that could do that.
Q. Will a captured Saddam make any difference in the problems of an occupied Iraq?
Maybury: I think it will make the place more unstable. It will make a whole lot of Iraqis more desperate since the only guy who could keep things under control is now out of the picture. There's going to be a lot of fear, not only from the village down the road but from the other countries surrounding Iraq.
Who is going to hold off these other countries that want that oil?
This is the reason Saddam was never removed in the first place. It is why Powell and Swartzkoff recommended not getting rid of him back in the early 90's, because he was the lid on the pressure cooker.
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