Behind Iraq’s Green Door

It’s not a big story, as combat tales go. Nor is it all that surprising, as much more than Saddam Hussein statues fall in Iraq.

The troopers of A Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment were going door to door not selling Girl Scout cookies in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood the other day. Inside a split-level townhouse in a neighborhood populated by suddenly departed Iraqi VIPs, the soldiers discovered more-than-adequate alcohol reserves from Italy, a heavily mirrored bedroom and airbrushed paintings of women without veils or shirts. Plus the usual assortment of pistols, machine guns, antitank missiles and ample ammo for relaxing.

Those high-ranking hypocrites really knew how to party.

The structure belonged once to Hussein’s mistress -- or one of them. So with their usual deference to enemy authority, the troopers’ leader pronounced the no-longer-safe house “Saddam’s love shack.”

Who are we to argue with a heavily armed sergeant? Whether, as Hussein’s mistress recalled last year, the former dictator really danced there to Sinatra music while waiting for the Viagra to kick in doesn’t matter. Nor does what Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusai, did there while their parents were out.

Americans in this post-Clinton era are in no position to lecture former foreign presidents about palace dalliances. But in a delightfully democratic way it is rather comforting that the dictator and his henchpersons have feet of clay, as vulnerable as those of the toppling statues, and are fully susceptible to the familiar weapons of mass titillation, or WMT, that escape parental inspectors elsewhere.

The U.S. soldiers also found some not-exactly-religiously-orthodox paintings. In one, a crocodile battles a hero with a large, bushy black mustache. (The man wears the bushy mustache; it’s not a weapon.) From the finger of one partially clad blond female in another comes a giant serpent that wraps itself around a mythic hero. A third depicts a large dragon with sharp talons diving toward a buxom woman chained to a desert ledge.

Never mind the booze, beanbag chairs, gorgeous garden (all plastic) and the 6,000 Berettas, it would be interesting to hear husband Hussein explain these paintings during marriage counseling.

But perhaps the most damaging detail from Saddam’s love shack is the revelation that this notorious tough guy, one of the world’s most ruthless dictators, who ordered thousands of executions, tortures and gassings, secretly put up with sleeping in a bedroom chock-full of pastel throw pillows, those soft, pretty pink and yellow and blue things that so uselessly litter the beds and clog the chairs of millions of other ladies’ bedrooms cohabited by males. Wait till that gets around what’s left of the barracks.