"Now even the American command is under siege. We are hitting it from the north, east, south and west. We chase them here and they chase us there. But at the end we are the people who are laying siege to them. And it is not them who are besieging us"
About this Quote
The genius of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf was never in convincing you; it was in daring you to keep listening. Speaking as Iraq's information minister in the 2003 invasion, he delivers a sentence that sounds like a battlefield map and functions like a magic trick: north, east, south, west. Total encirclement. Total control. Total certainty. The specificity is the seduction. By naming directions, he manufactures the feeling of tactical mastery even as the larger situation collapses.
The intent is bluntly operational: keep Iraqi morale intact, slow panic, and project an image of command to both domestic audiences and wavering insiders. But the subtext is more interesting. The line "We chase them here and they chase us there" accidentally admits instability, improvisation, and mutual disorientation. Then he snaps the frame back into place with the closing reversal: we are the besiegers, not the besieged. It's rhetorical aikido, flipping the opponent's reality into your own preferred narrative.
As a public servant performing for cameras, al-Sahaf embodies state messaging at the moment it becomes performance art. His certainty isn't naive; it's strategic. The repetition of "siege/besieging" tries to overwrite the most psychologically devastating fact of war: being overrun makes you feel watched, trapped, passive. He offers the opposite emotion - agency - even if only as language. The quote works because it exposes propaganda's core mechanism: when you can't control events, you try to control the verbs.
The intent is bluntly operational: keep Iraqi morale intact, slow panic, and project an image of command to both domestic audiences and wavering insiders. But the subtext is more interesting. The line "We chase them here and they chase us there" accidentally admits instability, improvisation, and mutual disorientation. Then he snaps the frame back into place with the closing reversal: we are the besiegers, not the besieged. It's rhetorical aikido, flipping the opponent's reality into your own preferred narrative.
As a public servant performing for cameras, al-Sahaf embodies state messaging at the moment it becomes performance art. His certainty isn't naive; it's strategic. The repetition of "siege/besieging" tries to overwrite the most psychologically devastating fact of war: being overrun makes you feel watched, trapped, passive. He offers the opposite emotion - agency - even if only as language. The quote works because it exposes propaganda's core mechanism: when you can't control events, you try to control the verbs.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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