Saddam and Gilgamesh

Dear Cessair

Our discussions have made me more conscious of Mesopotamia otherwise known as Iraq and I note from the papers (July 1988) that the governemnt of Iraq has mounted a ferocious counteroffensive against the Iranian hordes who have been invading the lowlands from the mountains of the East, threatening the Shatt-al-Arab waterway that connects the ancient Iraqui city of Basra to the Persian Gulf. It seems that the war is being fought with a gleeful brutality that shocks even the most bloodthirsty correspondents. Chemicals and piosonings and the bombing of civilian centers are the order of the day. The Iranians had almost taken Basra, then had been driven back. It appears that the war is a continuation of a battle that began five thousand years ago between the Sumerians and the Elamites. It is said that much of the fighting is conducted by young village boys attracted to an Islamic afterlife that the almost certain and speedy death is likely to bring.

There was a map of the area in the paper and I noticed that it seemed to be in the vicinity of the outlet of the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, where the two rivers join to flow into the Persian Gulf. Geographically, it was if the people of Stockton and Sacramento had been attacked by the residents of Reno. I marked up the map to show where the old and new geographic feaures are. I seem to recall tht Abraham grew up in Ur of the Chaldees which puts him right in the area of the war.

I did a little research on Mr. Saddam Hussein, Iraq's leader. His son recently killed his father's food taster while partying on a tourist island in the Tigris. It was not the first time of such trouble; Uday, aka "The Prince", had been accused of another discotheque murder in 1986. Hussein was reportedly in the midst of a national campaign to recreate himself as a Mesopotamian king; centerpiece of the effort was a campaign to rebuild ancient Babylon with a thousand imported workers and large sums of national treasure. Great artistic festivals are to be held there. The city of Faw, which Iraq captured earlier this year at an expense of 160,000 dead Iraquis, is having its name changed to "The City of Sacrifice and the Gate of the Great Victory."

Best, Dick

Footnotes

[1]

The city of Basra is an ancient one, and was once a center of romantic poetry that is said to have been the origin of romantic western ideas of love, having travelled into medieval France via the Moslem influence in Spain. Basra is the home of Sinbad the sailor and the Arabian Nights. Other unpublishable tales collected there by Richard Burton had beeen burned by his wife.