Saddam Hussein: Gay?

You have to hand it to the Bush administration. They never ran out of clever ideas for their Iraq War. Many critics accused them of poor, if any, post-war planning, but the administration has a defense: it was so busy with its brilliant pre-war planning.

And part of that planning was a propaganda effort to discredit Saddam. Unbeknownst to the Bushies, Saddam was already discredited. He had not stock with the Arabs: after the humiliation of the first Gulf War Saddam was seen as a broken man who had been contained (emasculated) by the U.S., Saddam was also an object of piety because of his desperate attempts to appear the Arab savior akin to Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser whom Saddam had an inferiority complex toward and whom he could never emulate in inspiration and following, and, finally, Saddam had poor oratory skills which are much valued in the region.

But the Bush administration believed that Saddam was still a figure of important to the Arabs and thus in order to make his overthrow more palatable to the region's public opinion, they need to discredit him and use rumors against Saddam that would repel people.

What did they come up with? Gay.

They once thought over the prospect of spreading the rumor that Saddam was Gay in order to do what they thought they had to, which is end the image of Saddam being a strong and macho Arab leader. Again, this image was long dead.

But they still believed that they needed to do this so they thought of trying to convince Arabs that Saddam was really secretly gay. And, of course, if that were the case Saddam would have even less of the abysmal levels of sympathy (as any American politician would as well).

So, why didn't they go with the gay rumors? Probably because they realized it was stupid and Arabs would never fall for it, or probably because they realized that it conflicted with their other (real) propaganda that Saddam was a serial sex manic who'd spend Iraqi money on whores.

Anyway, in the end we know where the administration gets its lousy ideas: South Park.

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And you wonder why the post-war period was such a mess.