"Blair... is accusing us of executing British soldiers. We want to tell him that we have not executed anybody. They are either killed in battle, most of them get killed because they are cowards anyway, the rest they just get captured"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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