What happened to all of Saddam Hussein’s doubles?

Margie Burns

Back when Saddam’s fearsomeness was being touted across the U.S., the public was given glimpses into his dictatorship including his practice of using several doubles — men who looked exactly like him, at least to Western eyes — as stand-ins. According to the mags, Saddam’s doubles were likely as not the actual personages to be photographed waving to a crowd from a balcony, on the reviewing stand or wherever else the dictator seemingly needed a ceremonial appearance but eschewed being shot at. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown; tyrants do never rest easy; and all the other sententiae from past millennia apply here.

So now, where did Saddam’s doubles go? In the massive manhunt that pulled the dazed and confused underwear-washer from his hold in the ground, did four or six or more Iraqi men who looked just like Saddam get ignored? Or were they at some point questioned and let go? And if his doubles were pulled in and questioned, why hasn’t the public been allowed to hear or see any of that? You can’t tell me that wouldn’t be a news item, even in these days of saturation coverage of Brangelina and Bennifer.

In fact, I’m still wondering about that passage in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack describing Saddam as carried out “blue.” Was Woodward misinformed? Or were the medical personnel on the spot so effective that they could revive an adult who’d turned blue? And by the way - what medical personnel? (Yes, I know that hospital personnel in neonates intensive care units bring back “blue babies” to life, and I celebrate them. But the same proposition gets very dicey indeed for bigger human bodies with more decades’ worth of tread marks.)

Meanwhile, the farce that is Saddam’s trial is a bloody farce. The BBC reports that yet another defense attorney for Saddam has been killed. This in spite of, or perhaps partly because of, the intense security crackdown of the past week in Baghdad.