In the years leading up to the war in Iraq, Americans were told repeatedly and consistently that Saddam Hussein employed a small army of lookalikes whose job was to foil assassination attempts.

 

The story was often parroted in the right-wing media, and especially on FOX News, where suggestions of simply assassinating Hussein could be parried by repeating the “fact” that the dictator commanded a legion of men who looked just like him.

 

The story became more and more outlandish over time. Soon Americans were hearing that many of the lookalikes had been subjected to involuntary plastic surgery so that they would not just resemble Saddam, but would look precisely and exactly like him, making it all the more impossible to know just which Saddam was the real one.

 

FOX commentator and chronically incorrect shithead Bill Kristol suggested that Hussein may have had up to two hundred lookalikes diverting the attention of our courageous intelligence operatives from a chance to put a bullet in the real Saddam’s greasy, mustachioed head.

 

This evolving yarn became a standard even on “legitimate” news outlets, where the legend of Saddam’s army of eerie body doubles became an indisputable truth that only served to justify why we needed to send our military into Iraq to sort through the lookalikes, find and kill the actual Saddam, and confiscate his gigantic hoard of nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry.

 

And so we invaded. The outcome was that we didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction.

 

But for me, the big story is that we didn’t find any of Saddam’s legendary army of body doubles – not a single one.

 

What happened to them?

 

My standing joke is that most Iraqi men look like Saddam, which is probably what started the whole bogus story to begin with. But that’s just a cheap ethnic joke, and most people don’t get it.

 

No, there needs to be accountability over this whole Saddam lookalike scandal. We were told - in no uncertain terms - that Saddam Hussein had as many as two hundred lookalikes stationed in every corner of Iraq for the purpose of confusing would-be assassins. We were told that this was a large part of the reason that we couldn’t just kill the guy with a cruise missile, and that we would have to invade Iraq old-school to save America from another 9-11.

 

But as it turns out, there wouldn’t have been another 9-11 in any case, and there were no fucking lookalikes.

 

Of course, I’m willing to recant all of this if someone can produce even one Saddam lookalike for me. And not just any lookalike — I want one of the lookalikes who was forced to submit to plastic surgery in order to look exactly and precisely like Saddam. You show me just one person like that, and I’ll take all of this back.

 

But I’m confident that there never were any. After all, looking exactly like Saddam Hussein would not have been a good thing for anyone after the invasion and the ensuing orgy of violence.

 

But I could be wrong. Hell, who knows – maybe the guy we hanged was a lookalike. There’s a thought.

 

September 9, 2009

Saddam’s Lookalikes

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