Saddam gets the X

[Rob E Dangerously 0]

Time's next cover:

 

 

accompanying article-

 

Time magazine x'ing out Saddam

 

AP, NEW YORK, April 14

 

Just as in April 1945, the editors of Time magazine don't know whether the dictator is dead or alive. But just as they were then, they were sure enough of his downfall to put him on the cover - with a large, blood-red "X" over his face. This year, the weekly newsmagazine's April 21 issue, out Monday, has a portrait of Saddam Hussein that reprises the cover from 58 years ago - showing Adolf Hitler "X-ed" in red.

 

In a brief statement about the cover, Time magazine managing editor Jim Kelly describes the situation in Iraq today as being roughly parallel to Germany then.

 

He notes that Hitler's fate was unknown when that cover appeared on May 1, 1945. Nazi Germany was prostrate in defeat, but six months would pass before it became known that he had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker as Soviet troops closed in on the city. "World War II and Gulf War II, of course, are very different conflicts, and though some commentators have compared aspects of Saddam's tyranny to Hitler's, the two dictators belong in separate leagues of cruelty and terror," Kelly said.

 

"But like Hitler, Saddam became the target of a U.S.-led war, and like Hitler, he had a regime that collapsed before the exact circumstances of his own downfall became known." In both cases there was speculation that the leader had escaped ahead of the invading army, was in hiding or dead in an underground bunker. U.S. military officials bombed an underground safehouse in Baghdad last week after receiving information that Saddam, his two sons and other cronies were there.

 

Proof of that awaits an excavation of the site, where four 450-kilogram "bunker-buster" bombs buried whatever was there under tons of rubble.

 

Superficial similarities between the Fuehrer and Saddam include the fact that both were born during what the poet T.S. Eliot called "the cruelest month" - Hitler on April 20, 1889, and Saddam on April 28, 1937.

 

Abraham Foxman, founder of the Anti-Defamation League and a leading spokesman on Holocaust issues, said he was not troubled by Time's equation of the Iraqi despot with Hitler, whose Nazi regime was responsible for exterminating six million Jews and five million others.

 

"The record is certainly rather similar to many of the things that Hitler did. In view of everything we know that Saddam has done, I don't think it trivializes Hitler," Foxman said in a telephone interview.