Politics & Power Quote by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

Certainty is the last refuge of a collapsing narrative, and Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf delivers it with the blunt-force confidence of a man trying to talk reality out of existing. "There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!" wasn’t meant to persuade skeptics so much as to anesthetize a domestic audience at the precise moment the world could see the opposite. The line’s power comes from its absolutism: no, never, infidels. It’s propaganda as incantation, designed to slam the door on doubt before doubt becomes contagious.

The word "infidels" is doing double duty. It’s not just a description of enemy troops; it’s a moral sorting mechanism, converting a military invasion into a civilizational offense and casting the speaker’s side as guardians of faith and sovereignty. That framing tries to make resistance feel inevitable and righteous, even as the state’s capacity to resist is visibly evaporating.

The context, of course, is what turned al-Sahaf into a global symbol: the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with televised briefings that often contradicted on-the-ground footage. The subtext is less delusion than triage. In authoritarian information ecosystems, admitting weakness isn’t honesty; it’s an invitation to panic, desertion, and regime fracture. So the spokesman performs solidity, betting that performance can hold the center long enough to matter.

It didn’t. The line survives because it accidentally exposes the mechanics of wartime messaging: when facts are losing, volume and certainty become the product.