War & Peace Quote by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

It is bravado pitched as weather report: inevitable, clinical, unbothered by evidence. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Saddam Hussein's information minister during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, isn’t trying to persuade skeptics so much as to manage a collapsing reality in real time. The line works because it treats victory as a logistical fact - “as soon as they reach Baghdad gates” - collapsing uncertainty into a tidy sequence of cause and effect. You can almost hear the map being smoothed flat.

The intent is twofold: stiffen domestic morale and muddy the informational waters for foreign audiences watching on satellite TV. “Besiege them and slaughter them” is not strategy; it’s theater, a shock phrase meant to reclaim agency at the exact moment the regime is losing it. The most revealing tell is the complaint disguised as contempt: “Until now they have refused to do battle with us.” That’s an admission that Iraq cannot dictate the terms of engagement. The enemy isn’t cowardly; they’re simply not cooperating with the narrative.

Then comes the “boa” metaphor, a child-simple animal image that tries to downgrade a mechanized coalition into something instinctual, panicked, and ultimately beatable. It’s propaganda by naturalization: if the invaders are just a frightened creature “running to somewhere else,” then their movement isn’t operational success, it’s flight.

The subtext is desperation dressed as certainty. Al-Sahaf’s performance became iconic precisely because the gap between his absolute claims and the visible advance of U.S. forces exposed the core fragility of authoritarian messaging: it must sound total even when it can no longer be true.