Life & Mortality Quote by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

It is propaganda delivered with the swagger of certainty, and it works precisely because it overshoots reality. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Saddam Hussein's information minister during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, isn’t just denying defeat; he’s trying to manufacture an alternative moral universe in real time. The line "I am responsible for what I am saying" is a preemptive claim to authority, an attempt to convert sheer audacity into credibility. In a collapsing state, conviction becomes a substitute for evidence.

The grotesque twist is in the verb choice: not merely that the enemy is dying, but that they are "commit[ting] suicide". It reframes American military pressure as self-inflicted harm, turning invasion into humiliation and tactical failure. That shift matters: if the attackers are killing themselves, then Iraq isn’t losing; Iraq is simply enduring while the enemy self-destructs. The follow-up - "We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly" - performs a kind of theatrical dominance. It imagines Iraq as the choreographer of the battlefield, not the object of it.

The subtext is aimed at multiple audiences. For Iraqis, it’s a morale transfusion: hold the line, the empire is brittle. For Arab viewers, it’s defiance packaged as punchline, a refusal to grant the invader narrative control. For outsiders, it’s a dare: if you doubt me, you’re already participating in the enemy’s psychological warfare.

Its enduring cultural afterlife ("Baghdad Bob") comes from that friction between the visible facts and the insistence of the script. The quote is less a report than a last-ditch spell, spoken as the walls close in.