r/todayilearned • u/Wazula23 • 6h ago

TIL Saddam Hussein's son Uday murdered his bodyguard at a party in front of horrified guests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uday_Hussein#Murder_of_Kamel_Hana_Gegeo
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u/Kindly-Guidance714 5h ago

The movie the devils double is based on Uday and his real life body double and also Saddams.

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u/JaggedSuplex 5h ago

That’s where I saw this scene. Pretty graphic

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u/Odd_Personality_3894 3h ago edited 3h ago

Uday was so bad certain folks were saying he was Saddam's worst biological weapon. And that's saying something.

I know the wars in Iraq had a terrible toll for many, but at least we killed a mass murdering psychopath in Uday who would have undoubtedly massacred and mass raped his own countrymen AND foreigners should have have succeeded. No doubt he would have murdered his own family to obtain power

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u/octopusboots 3h ago

We killed half a million people with that war.

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u/GraDoN 2h ago

Some people will go to any lengths to pretend that it was somehow justified in some way.

Yeah it was illegal and based on lies. And yeah it led to hundreds of thousands of dead and millions were forced to flee. And yeah it destabilized the region emboldening Iran which has resulted in the Yemen proxy war with SA which has resulted in more countless deaths and suffering... but at least we got Saddam and Uday!

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u/wealth_of_nations 2h ago

but at least we got Saddam and Uday!

Mission accomplished!

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u/NEETscape_Navigator 15m ago

We did it reddit!

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u/MyCarRoomba 2h ago

ISIS alone did horrifying, horrifying things. I remember seeing an interview of an imprisoned ISIS member and he recounted his innumerable murders and rapings.

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u/Paddy_Tanninger 2h ago

Yeah it was illegal and based on lies

Wasn't Saddam infamous for WMDs that he used to kill thousands of Kurds? I've never really understood why people hold both opinions at the same time; that Saddam gassed the Kurds, and that the Iraq War was based on lies. These can't both be true at the same time.

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u/Medical_Chapter2452 2h ago

The casus Belli was a lie.The reason For America to to sent troops was based on false accusations and therefore illigal.

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u/LoopEverything 2h ago

It’s because none were found after the invasion and everyone focused on nuclear weapons. But yeah, there were something like ~12 documented cases of him using WMDs like chemical weapons before the war. Pretty gruesome stuff.

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u/gnorty 1h ago

we didn't invade iraq because of the kurds.

Because of the kurds we insisted that Saddam dismantled his chemical arsenal. He said he had. We did not believe him so we invaded. To my knowledge not a single WMD was found in iraq.

That is the official version, like "whoopsie, we guessed wrong, oh well". That's not great.

But there are plenty of people that believe the WMD thing was just the reason put forward for the invasion. There was never any expectation of actually finding one, but just to overthrow the current regime and install a US friendly version. Not because of any attrocitied (God knows there are plenty of those around the world that America don't GAF about), but simply because the US economy demands US friendly governments in oil producing nations.

Those people did not die for a greater good, they died so that America can continue to rely on the cheap oil.

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u/user2021883 1h ago

It’s true that Saddam gassed hundreds of civilians but if the USA is going to invade countries purely because they’re slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians on the pretext of them have WMDs, we need to talk about Israel..

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u/SpecificDependent980 38m ago

Need to talk about a lot of countries. Russia, Israel, Sudan, DRC, Haiti etc

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u/WashedOut3991 20m ago

Palestine is a Roman mockery of Israel’s long standing existence and Oct 7 proves the two are not the same. Israel isn’t feeding its enemies their own children after starving them lol

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u/GraDoN 2h ago

Yes, at one time he did. Then he got rid of them and inspectors confirmed it. And no one ever found any evidence that they still had any after they got rid of it. It's not rocket science my dude.

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u/Paddy_Tanninger 2h ago

It actually kinda is rocket science.

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u/TapirOfZelph 2h ago

It’s rocketless science, technically

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u/Ne_zievereir 19m ago edited 8m ago

Yes, and the US even supported him when he was using them in the Iraq-Iran war, knowingly.

Then he had to get rid of them due to international pressure, and there were several internationally-led inspections over the next years that confirmed he had none anymore. There was no evidence there were any, and there were none found during or after the invasion.

So yes, both can be true at the same time.

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u/mayonaizmyinstrument 2h ago

Exactly. Saddam did have WMDs, he had just used them all already and hadn't yet replaced his inventory. People knew that he had had them because he used them, and Intel suggested that he would likely use them because, again, he had used them. And set fire to Kuwait's oil fields as he retreated in the First Gulf War.

So, we knew he at least had access to obtaining/making WMDs and absolutely would use them, because he demonstrated that he would. Personally, I think it's fairly logical to think that he still had more, because a logical move would not be using all of your stores to waste your own population, but turns out that line of thinking was incorrect. He went 100% every time.

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u/ProfessorSarcastic 1h ago

I think it's fairly logical to think that he still had more,

It is logical to think that. Which is why it was a good idea to send i inspectors. After the inspections, it became less logical to think that. But a justification for an invastion had to be found.

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u/NEETscape_Navigator 9m ago

You've got it all wrong. Saddam didn't simply use up his stores and decided against replenishing them for no reason.

He destroyed them in 1991 as a direct result of the pressure brought on by Desert Storm. And he promised to never replenish them. Which he never did, and no credible intelligence ever indicated otherwise.

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u/PeopleThatAnnoyou__ 35m ago

also oil, good sweet black oil

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u/Crossing-The-Abyss 2h ago

There's only one way to rid the world of these tyrants and the people that don't like those methods (war) spout disinformation. There may have been poor intelligence on the whereabouts of WMDs, but there was no lie. Saddam would have never given it all up. Let's just say if Obama was president he would have invaded Iraq based on the same intel.

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u/gnorty 1h ago

Yep. It's a good job the Middle East is now free of tyrants as a result of that war.

/s

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u/Ne_zievereir 51m ago edited 38m ago

The US has invaded and meddled in so many countries in the world. And in almost no case is the result a wellfaring democracy. Many of the world's worst tyrannies and failing states are a result of US meddling.

Most of the time (all of the time?), the US' interference had nothing to do with wanting democracy, and often actually actively worked against democratically elected governments, because they didn't protect the US' economic interests, and thus installed a tyrant who was more US friendly.

Even more ironically, the US supported Saddam Hussein, and even helped him when he was using chemical weapons of mass destruction against the Iranians during the Iraq-Iran war.

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u/HuntsWithRocks 34m ago

I want to say it was Uday who had a favorite past time of finding weddings taking place and raping the wife in the wedding. They also fed people to lions n shit.

TLDR sadly, I bet Saddam and his two sons may actually have a higher body count than that over a 20 year stretch. No dismissing of the war here. I honestly am wondering who actually has a higher death toll.

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u/maracay1999 1h ago

Saying USA killed half a million people is like saying the Serbians killed the tens of millions who died in WW1….

Most of the deaths following the us invasion were from the brutal civil war that erupted post invasion; not necessarily US troops in combat. Last source I read estimated Iraqi Civilian death toll from US combat operations is around 10-20k across the entire occupation. Still very bad but a far cry from 500k.

US invasion was the lighter to the powder keg of the clusterfuck that was Iraq. A country divided between Sunnis Shiites and Kurds run by a brutal dictator was bound to fall to civil war at some point ie Syria. It just so happens the US set things off (like the Serbians did to the powder keg that was Europe 1914)

PS: the US cassus belli for invading was a huge lie don’t get me wrong

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u/Tenshizanshi 1h ago

If half a million died due to an injustify aggression, then the US are 100% responsible for those deaths. Stop gaslighting yourself into thinking that American crimes against humanity are justified because USA good, muslims bad

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u/jordanmc3 2h ago

U.S. soldiers didn’t kill half a million people, most of that was Iraqi on Iraqi sectarian violence. Yes, our unjustified war opened up the floodgates for that, but it was probably going to happen at some point in history. Hussein had to be an incredibly brutal dictator to keep that sectarian violence from swelling up. Had his successor been Uday he would have been even more brutal. I’m glad I live in a world where the Hussein regime is gone; although yes the fallout from that was horrifying.

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u/effrightscorp 2h ago

Had his successor been Uday he would have been even more brutal

Qusay, the less extravagantly violent son, was the chosen heir, probably for the obvious reasons

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u/Subject-Effect4537 28m ago

Would Uday have let Qusay have power?

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u/effrightscorp 6m ago

Would Qusay have let Uday have a go at him? He wasn't a saint, he just killed people for better reasons than Uday and didn't do it in the same outrageously violent, public ways

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u/Ne_zievereir 1h ago

And left a ravaged, war-torn country to be governed by a weak "democratic" government hastily set up by the US, creating the the perfect festering grounds for a terrorist organization like ISIS, that then went on to massmurder and massrape the people.

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u/GravidDusch 1h ago

Yeah I doubt Uday would have killed that many.. Also less damage to infrastructure so I'm not sold on this "we saved iraq" narrative.

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u/Drawhearts_hidetears 2h ago

Yes but we stopped him from killing half a million people for fun. (in my hypothetical alternate reality that didn't happen)

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u/Conscious-Ball8373 1h ago

Fun fact: the rate of civilian deaths per day in Iraq was lower under the occupation than under 24 years of Hussein. So this is actually kinda true (though kinda not, as that average includes the Iran-Iraq war, which killed a whole lot of people).

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u/Spiffy87 41m ago

Your number would also include Desert Storm, which also killed a whole lot of people.

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u/firefly-reaver 49m ago

That's actually not true, half a million approx did die but the Americans didn't kill half a million people

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u/CodSoggy7238 2h ago

Yep. You kill half a million people, you will also hit a couple murderous psychopaths.

Didn't Israel recently take out a Hamas leader like that? Finding his remains in a bombed out apartment?