Politics

Why Was Saddam Anti-Jihad?

George Packer’s dispatch relieves me of the need to deal with Paul Berman’s salvo. He makes the same point I would have, plus three or four others, all of them more elegantly. Let me follow up on a point George made with a question, aimed specifically at Paul and Christopher, but that anyone should feel free to pick up: What do you make of Jim Risen’s front-page story in today’s New York Times, reporting that, before he was captured (but after he went into hiding), Saddam Hussein wrote a directive to his insurgent-followers, urging them to stay away from the foreign jihadists who were coming in to battle the Americans and who, S.H. apparently emphasized, had incompatibly different goals and motives?