War & Peace Quote by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

It is hard to read Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf without hearing the grind of a propaganda machine trying to sound like a human voice. Speaking as a public servant in Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the 2003 invasion, al-Sahaf is not clarifying facts so much as laundering them. The stated intent is denial: we have not executed anyone. But the sentence immediately smuggles in a menu of outcomes - killed, killed because cowards, captured - that normalizes violence while dodging the one category that triggers international outrage: unlawful execution.

The rhetorical trick is a pivot from legality to masculinity. By branding British soldiers as cowards, he reframes their deaths as self-inflicted, a moral failing rather than a battlefield reality. It is a classic authoritarian move: collapse complex events into character judgment, then let the insult do the explanatory work. The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To Iraqis, it signals defiance and control: we decide what happened, and we are not afraid to say it. To the West, it tries to poison sympathy: if your soldiers die, it's because they were weak.

The context matters because al-Sahaf was performing under asymmetry: militarily outmatched, information-war obsessed. His language is brittle, almost overstuffed, because it has to carry multiple burdens - deny a war crime, project strength, mock the enemy - while the world watches images that may contradict him. The result is not persuasion but posture: a verbal sandbag against accountability.