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CAIRO: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his coterie have been hurling verbal abuse at the United States and Britain at a level never before heard in Iraqi propaganda, perhaps reflecting their fear or frustration.
Traditional insults like "donkey" and "old shoe" have been uttered publicly along with baser vulgarities by Saddam, his son Odai Hussein and Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Even during the 1980-88 war with Iran, not a single Iraqi official publicly used such words to describe any Iranian leader.
"They are a gang of war criminals ... international bastards," al-Sahhaf said at a news conference in Baghdad on Saturday. "They lie day and night. They are not human."
In his speech on Thursday, Saddam called US President George W Bush a "petty criminal."
Odai was more impolite. In a message carried by the official Iraqi News Agency, he exhorted the people of Iraq to "strike hard to prove that we are the sons of good women and they (Americans and Britons) are the sons of adultery, dirt and bastards." Al-Sahhaf, the information minister, has been using similarly colourful language.
He told reporters that Britain "is not worth an old shoe," normally an insult about someone's intelligence or lack thereof. He used a vulgarity referring to a person's posterior to describe British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was "the dog."
Ali Abdel Amir, an Iraqi journalist who watches Iraqi affairs from neighboring Jordan, said that now that the war has started, the Iraqi leadership is dropping diplomatic niceties.
"They are terrified," he said. "When they discovered that they are going to lose power, the mask was dropped."
Source: The Times of India
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