Saddam's worst folly and war crime gets the restoration treatment dead First Edition

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: Robert Fisk in Baghdad
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 13.07.2004
• Subjects: Maude, Stanley; Saleh, Ahmed Hadi
• ISSN: 0951-9467

THEY ARE going to preserve the monument to [Saddam]'s greatest folly and his greatest war crime. The vast blue, egg-shell monument to his invasion of Iran and the subsequent eight-year war - complete with the names of about 600,000 Iraqi soldiers who were killed - is to be restored by the new, American-appointed Iraqi ministry of culture. Iraqi police now guard the site, only days after US troops abandoned the memorial. It had been used as an American military headquarters for well over a year. Qadassiya was the great Arab battle against Persia, fought under the Third Caliphate, which the Iraqi hero General Saad bin Abi Wakaas won after urging his warriors to blind the new Iranian terror weapon - elephants - by throwing spears at their eyes. Caliph Omar bin al-Khattab had sent his general to destroy the Persians and it took him six days and five nights. Saddam, who of course thought he was Abi Wakaas, took eight years to achieve a ceasefire. Which tells you all about Baghdad; the foreigner on the run, even in the cemetery of his own country's dead. Goodbye, then, to District Policeman N L Nisbett, aged 29 (died 15th August, 1920), farewell to Captain Buchanan who was 27 and who died the same day, and to 25-year-old Captain Bradfield of the Somerset Light Infantry who was killed two days before Nisbett and Buchanan. Goodbye General [Stanley Maude]. And to the 600,000 Iraqi dead of the "Qadassiya" war. And, of course, to the 900,000 Iranian dead, many still hidden beneath Iraq's sand.