Saddam's Sons: Cubs and Psychopaths

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Saddam's Sons: Cubs and Psychopaths

By Matthew McAllester
Staff Correspondent

July 22, 2003, 8:10 PM EDT

Baghdad, Iraq -- Red and yellow tracer bullets scythed through Baghdad's sky in celebration Tuesday night when U.S. officials announced that Uday and Qusay Hussein were dead.

But it seems that even psychopaths legendary for raping and killing can be lovable -- if they have the power of the sons of Saddam Hussein. Consider the Christmas card to Uday written by a woman named Thikra:

"If all the seas were one sea! What a great sea that would be? If all the water of that sea will be an ink... what a great ink that would be? If each drop of that ink can write one thoused ward of my feeling to your personalty it will be greater than that."

Thikra may not have won any spelling bees or poetry contests but she clearly had a soft spot for a man considered by many Iraqis to be considerably more murderous than his father. The card was found by a reporter just after the war in one of Uday's palaces in Baghdad, a residence that hinted at the flamboyant, luxurious and violent life of the man Iraqis feared would inherit the presidency.