Saddam Hussein In The Atlantic By Mark Bowden

Saddam Hussein is known today as a vicious Iraqi dictator that lead his country into a downward spiral. In 2002, Mark Bowden, an author for “The Atlantic”, a prestigious newspaper company, published an article going inside the life of Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. This article reveals many intimate details about the life of saddam Hussein that was nowhere close to common public knowledge. Mark Bowden portrays Saddam Hussein as ambitious, yet unstable through his intensive use of logos to appeal to the reader’s reasoning in order to support his claims with facts and evidence. Mark Bowden wanted us to see that Saddam’s intentions weren’t the suffering and deaths of his people. Saddam actually had ideas that would help make the lives of the

He came to a point in which he had developed a god complex where he saw himself and expected others to perceive him as some sort of divine diety. Saddam went as far as to order “genealogists to construct a plausible family tree linking him to Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad” (Bowden). By bringing forth the idea that Saddam felt the need to falsely create a family tree linking him to Muhammad, Bowden demonstrates that Saddam is insecure about the god like persona that he wants the people to see him as. By introducing this lie, Bowden brings reasoning for the others to question other things that Saddam stated were true. As time progresses, Saddam isolates himself in a somewhat perfect world that he creates for himself in which he only sees and hears what others want him to see and here. With this, Bowden indicates that his truly is separating further and further away from sanity. Bowden describes how first hand witnesses tell how overcome Saddam was by his need not to show weakness. He perceived that any weaknesses that were spotted would lead to others attempting to steal the power away from him. Bowden truly demonstrated to the audience that Saddam has officially lost his marbles which is seen through the conversation with military officer, Wafic Samarai. In this conversation Saddam proposes “capturing U.S. soldiers and tying them up around Iraqi tanks, using them as human shields” (Bowden). Saddam has strayed farther and farther from stability. This gives the author more and more reasoning to see Saddam as the unstable dictator that he truly is. By revealing and emphasizing upon Samarai’s the first hand encounter with Saddam Hussein, Bowden illustrates the full instability of Iraq’s notorious