Weekend at Udai’s

Admin plays games with corpses as Moslem fury mounts

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

7/27/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/corpses.htm

Back a few years ago, some wit took the poster from the movie, "Weekend at Bernie’s," and made a parody of it called "Weekend at Strom’s." It featured Tom DeLay and Trent Loot, with the then ninety-eight year old Strom Thurmond as the corpse propped up between them.

Republicans howled. They felt that such a ghoulish display was disrespectful to Strom, who wasn’t entirely dead yet, and was in bad taste.

I don’t even want to guess what the reaction would be if they had used a real corpse in the picture. They would still be screaming.

The deaths of Udai and Qusai Hussein in a barrage by American forces were of no particular benefit to Americans (We got rid of two very nasty people, but we lost a potentially valuable source of information on such things as Saddam Hussein’s whereabouts, his plans, and his role, if any, in the ongoing resistance to the American occupation of Iraq) but for most Iraqis, the deaths of those two monsters was doubtlessly a relief. The two, by all accounts, were responsible for the rape, torture, and murder of thousands of people, and doubtlessly cast a pall of fear over their countrymen.

If the Administration had announced the deaths, and turned the bodies over to the Iraqis in a timely manner, they probably would have gained a little ground in their failing effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and the Admin would have enjoyed a minor coup from the killing of those two.

But this admin always overplays its hand, and in this case, they decided that the news alone wasn’t enough, and they would need to put the bodies on display. The putative reason was to convince the Iraqi people those two were dead (and I could have told them in advance that it wouldn’t work) but the reality was that Rumsfeld wanted to play to American "red meat conservatives" – those vicious and sanctimonious sorts who love Ann Coulter and Michael the Savage Weiner, and who believe that severe punishment is the best way to deal with those who displease them. They like putting heads on pikes as an example to the rest.

So they put out pictures of the bodies, bloodied, bruised, with swollen faces and distinct features blurred by the deathmasque, and when they realized that nobody in Iraq was being convinced it was the Hussein whelps, they brought in undertakers to clean them up and make them look more like what they did when they were alive. The notion of making up bodies in order to make them look "life-like" is unknown in the Moslem would, and this was probably seen as, at best, a strange sort of desecration, and at worst, an effort to disguise the corpses so people would think they were Udai and Qusai.

And now, four days later, they’re still playing around with those corpses, and trying to get what ever political mileage as they can from them. We’ve gone from grotesque to a combination of grotesque and absurd, "Weekend at Bernie’s" as foreign policy.

The Pentagon was aghast. They had raised a ruckus about pictures of dead American soldiers showing up on al Jazheera and other Arab news outlets just weeks earlier, and were justifiably worried that the gleeful display of the Hussein brothers might lead to retaliatory desecrations and mutilations of American dead.

On the second day, I got around to wondering about Moslem burial customs. I knew they strongly resembled Jewish customs (not surprising, as both are based on Mosaic Law) and that one of the requirements was that of burial by the following sundown whenever possible.

The Brits can tell you a thing or two about the price of ignoring such cultural norms. During their long colonization of India, riots broke out for weeks and killed thousands over rumors – untrue rumors – that British bullets were shipped in cow grease. More recently, six British soldiers died at the hands of an enraged mob, spurred on in part by reports that British soldiers had been taking dogs into devout Moslem homes as part of their weapons search program. The British Army had apparently already stopped doing that, but too late for those six who got pulled apart by a mob.

One of my staunchest readers, Susan, provided me with some valuable background information on burial customs, and the transgressions of Rumsfeld, while serious, aren’t as devastating as I feared.

According to Susan, "Muslims bury their dead as quickly as possible, preferably before the sun sets on the day they die, a practice enforced by a Muslim saying: a fast burial is the highest honor to the memory of a deceased loved one."

So at least we aren’t doing the equivalent of refusing a Catholic Extreme Unction, or sticking dead American soldier’s heads on pikes and parading them around the town square.

Indeed, Susan’s information contained a glimmer of hope that we hadn’t merely made the mess worse there:

According to one news piece she sent along, "‘Showing dead and deformed bodies on TV is not acceptable,’ protested Amer Ahmed al-Azawi, a 55-year-old Baghdad merchant. ‘But the Americans are criminals and unbelievers. We got rid of one tyrant and we ended up with a bigger one.’ [...]

"‘What happened is a mutilation of the body of the dead,’ said Souad Saleh, an Islamic theologian who sits on a committee entrusted with issuing fatwas, or edicts, at Egypt's Al-Azhar University, the world's highest seat of Sunni Muslim learning.

"But the Americans are infidels, and whatever Islam says doesn't apply to them," he said.

But Rummy seems intent on inflaming the situation. On the 25^th, American forces announced that they would turn the bodies over to any family member who wished to claim them. Saddam has a huge family, and many relatives aren’t even on the wanted list, so it wasn’t a particularly silly proposal.

But today, it came to light that some family members DID try to claim the bodies, and were rebuffed.

According to Reuters, "A tribal elder from Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s clan said on Sunday he had tried to claim the bodies of Saddam's slain sons Uday and Qusay but that a U.S. official told him the ousted president should come instead."

This admin seems intent on insulting the ordinary people of Iraq, apparently just to satisfy the loathsome enthusiasms of the Ann Coulter / Mike Weiner crowd

So if we start hearing about American soldiers having their bodies desecrated and pictures showing up in the foreign media, feel all the outrage you want, but be honest enough to remember that Rumsfeld bears responsibility for escalating the insults traded. Because that is what he has done.