Ben Macintyre in the UK Times astounds with Chemical Ali invites you into his world of interiors:
Nothing explodes a despot's mystique like an avocado bathroom suiteSounds like Michael Jackson!
When dictators fall we rummage through their medicine cupboards, we gasp at their lavishly tasteless bathrooms and whistle at their walk-in wardrobes packed with designer clothes. For only by exposing those excesses, the bully’s luxury in the midst of want, do we understand the tawdriness of tyranny. Uncovering a dictator’s private opulence is the most intimate of liberations: Imelda Marcos’s bulging shoe cupboard, Nicolae Ceausescu’s gilded kitsch, Hermann Goering’s looted art collection.
We have yet to penetrate Saddam’s bunker, with its mythical gold-inlaid light switches and mother-of-pearl lavatory paper holders, but already his regime is going the way of all despotisms as the greed and self-indulgence of his rule are held up for contemplation and ridicule.
On Wednesday, US Delta Force troops entered the Maqar-al-Tharthar Palace outside Baghdad, the President’s pleasure complex inevitably nicknamed "Saddamland", with its amusement arcade and safari park with elephants and deer, Ferris wheel, casino and artificial lake.
British forces occupied the country home of "Chemical" Ali Hassan al-Majid, a pink monstrosity on the outskirts of Basra, its flowerbeds planted with exotic species, dying for lack of water. The floor is covered with shards of smashed chandelier; the swimming pool is filling up with wind-blown sand. Thus has the most feared mass-murderer of Saddam’s regime been demystified into a murderous fugitive with an overwrought patio.Much more by following the link.
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Last November, exactly one year after the fall of the Taleban, I stayed in the Kabul house once occupied by Osama bin Laden. Though hardly on the scale of Saddam’s palaces, by Afghan standards it was a stately home, the residence of the Saudi-born terrorist’s third wife. It was at once a surprise and a confirmation to discover that the ascetic, anti-Western terrorist had chosen French bidets for the green-tiled en-suite bathrooms. His luxury mansion outside Kandahar, with its door handles studded with semi-precious stones, would not have been out of place in Footballers’ Wives. A computerised replica of another bin Laden home, albeit a less comfortable one, will soon be installed at the Imperial War Museum to allow vistors to live, briefly and virtually, chez Osama. Bin Laden’s naff door handles and Chemical Ali’s broken chandelier serve the same symbolic purpose, rendering terror as commonplace as expensive bad taste.
