July 22, 2003 (Tuesday)
Key West, Florida

THE media today are full of reports that US troops have found and killed Saddam Hussein's two sons.

According to one source they have killed his teenage grandson too, whom Washington evidently considered no less a threat, though his precise age is not divulged by the media. It reminds me of Heinrich Himmler's famous Posen speech in 1943, about the need to kill the children and grandchildren of the Jews too.

The Republican Pentagon has been in the business of killing president's offspring ever since it first tried to take out Muhammar Ghaddafi in Libya in the 1980s, and its missiles missed -- which is where they get their name from -- and killed one of his daughters instead.

Not wanting to make myself obnoxious to the country of my hosts, I keep my views on this latest episode to myself.

It was a contract killing in the best gangland style, worth fifteen million dollars per head to somebody. The object of the killing, to use no less neutral word than that, was to get at President Saddam Hussein.

And yes, as the father of five, now four, daughters, I can guess that he is pretty demoralized at hearing that his sons have both been killed. So, for what it is worth, the Americans have succeeded in demoralizing the ex-president-in-hiding of a country which they now largely geographically occupy.

No doubt they have done their profit-and-loss calculations, and have worked out that the profit from this extra shedding of blood in a peacetime Iraq (because the war is over, isn't it?) will more than offset the unrest and bodily harm it will invoke against innocent Americans all round the world.

I do allow myself some private thoughts, as the evening progresses and the media wallow in hateful, unChristian bloodlust against presidents and their sons (as long as they are not American).

Loyal patriotic Americans who believe everything that they are told by the Bush dynasty should read no further, as I don't want to upset.

I know no more about the two late Hussein sons than do the rest of the American people -- i.e., what we learn from the media, who tell us they have it in turn from the same trustworthy folks who put us wise to Hussein père's purchase of uranium ore from N*ger and his high-grade metal tubes and his mobile biological laboratories and, well, all the other war-propaganda stories than have been forked over to us, one dreadful spaghetti-strand at a time.

I MUST say however, that watching with an increasingly skeptical eye the television specials which the four main American TV channels serve up to us, warm and steaming, during the evening, based mainly on interviews with Iraqi dissidents and émigrés, and on the pronunciamenti of the professionals and "ABC television consultants," my own mind is shrieking at the end of it all:

"Yes, I agree, those two guys could have stood a bit closer to the razor in the mornings, and one of them does look a bit goofy to my western eyes, but . . . where's the Bolognese?"

If they were criminals, then that's what a war crimes court is for, right?

The next bit of the story that I find a bit indigestible -- it just won't stay down -- is that the operation lasted some eight hours, climaxing in a three-hour fire-fight. Now, that is some gun battle, considering that it was between three adults and one grandson holed up in a villa on one side -- they were the only bodies found afterwards in the thinly walled building -- and "two hundred men", so we are told, of the 101st Airborne Division on the other, who used heavy machine guns, bazookas, helicopters, and an A-10 gunship, and loosed off no fewer than ten TOW wire-controlled guided missiles into the building.

The OK Corral had nothing on this gunfight, by the sound of it.

Another point: Those well known brothers were living openly in unguarded villas like this, and nobody ratted on them for two months, despite the Almighty Dollar inducement? What does that tell us about the sons' standing among the Iraqis, and the morale of the people?

BEFORE I turn in for the night, a warm and muggy night down here in the Lower Keys, a Government spokesman comes on, and reveals some more about this contract killing -- that the tip which led them to the building in Mossul was from an Iraqi "walk in", the word used by hotels to describe guests who don't pre-register.

So the raid was executed on the same kind of basis on which the "coalition of the willing" tossed a bunker-buster deep penetration bomb into a house in a Baghdad suburb when the war opened, killing a somewhat surprised suburban family; and on the basis on which they threw a Tomahawk missile at a Basra doctor's home a few days later, terminating half his daughters too.

Questioned as to the whether this lucky native "walk-in" will qualify for the fifteen million dollar per head bounty, the Washington spokesman craftily points out that the reward offered was "up to" fifteen million.

That'll teach the Iraqis -- you're dealing with gangsters. Next time read the small print. Some restrictions apply.