Will Bardenwerper

A bizarrely incurious recounting of the period of time leading up to Saddam Hussein's trial and eventual execution in the early 2000s. Will Bardenwerper uses declassified FBI interrogations and a series of oral history interviews with former members of the so-called, self-dubbed "Super Twelve", the U.S. army soldiers tasked with standing constant watch over Saddam in the last months of his life.

A more skillful writer may have been able to do something truly interesting with an exploration of the shifting relationships between Saddam and his American guards, and with what it means to truly confront the banality, even the humanity, of monstrous actions. But none of the Super Twelve members really come to life here, all of them swaddled away behind pseudonyms and feeling like two-dimensional characters from a bland Hollywood action movie. The prose is clunky and repetitive—did the reader need to be told, for instance, that Saddam's interpreter was Lebanese-American (or, to be fair, sometimes "a burly Lebanese-American") every time he was mentioned in a 200-page book?

More damningly, Bardenwerper doesn't seem capable of making more of Saddam's personality or the lessons of his brutal authoritarian rule than, "He wasn't one-dimensional! Fancy that." As far as perceptive and nuanced insights go, this book is up there with, "Hey, did you know Hitler liked dogs?"

Move over, Hannah Arendt.

The subtitle of the book also stresses the fact that Saddam's guards were Americans, but doesn't seem to want to make anything of that. Nothing is really explored in terms of why the U.S. invaded Iraq, or why the rank and file of American armed forces are generally filled with teenagers from poor backgrounds and no-hope towns, or what it means that Saddam and some of the guards clearly shared certain ideas about masculinity, or how American imperialism and hegemonic impulses were and are embedded in all of this. On more than one occasion, Bardenwerper recounts how the Super Twelve told him that they'd been upset by Saddam's execution because they'd known him and had grown to feel some form of affection for him—but that they felt nothing about the deaths of other Iraqis. That seems a very important—and telling! and horrifying!—point but Bardenwerper just drops that in there and then moves on as if that's... commonplace? Reasonable? The very lowest estimates for the number of civilians who died in Iraq because of the invasion stands at 100,000. Excess mortality was likely much higher than that.

Surely the bigger moral dilemma at play here isn't the fact that the fact that a dozen Americans found themselves caring about the death of Saddam Hussein, but they and so many of their fellow citizens didn't care about all the other Iraqis who died?

The words "primitive" and "tribal" repeatedly crop up in Bardenwerper's descriptions of Iraq and Iraqis. Saddam, he writes at one point, had a "deeply held, primitive belief" that courage and bravery could allow his forces to win against "enemies who enjoyed vastly superior technological capabilities" because "this was Saddam the Bedouin, placing faith in mystical warrior virtues over rational computer-driven metrics." (134) This made me raise an eyebrow for a number of reasons. One of them was knowing how deeply the idea of "rooting for the underdog", etc, is embedded in the American psyche. I guess when an American narrative talks about the little guy triumphing in the face of overwhelming odds, that's hoo-rah patriotism but when a brown Muslim man does it he's irrational and backwards?

Another eyebrow-raising thing was the fact that near the beginning of the book, Bardenwerper recounts an anecdote about two members of the Super Twelve who were caught speeding by the state police when back in the U.S. Since they were tired and in military uniform against regulation, they panicked and tried to outrun the cops. When they were caught, the cops essentially gave them a slap on the wrist and told them to run along—that they wouldn't charge them with anything because they were in military uniform. (And, I'm willing to bet, because they were white men. Would pretty much any other demographic in America get away with a $200 fine for trying to evade cops and having a police helicopter scrambled to follow them? As bad as the Gardaí can be at times, American cops are irredeemable.)

Bardenwerper tells this story, I think, in order to say "look how the army is going to Make Men out of these two mere legal adults." For me, though, it was an early warning sign for how Bardenwerper would repeatedly fail to grapple in any serious, sustained way with what power is, and how it works. Power is good when our guys and the people who look like us have it; the rules are the rules except for when we let you get away things. I finished the book with the feeling that Bardenwerper is just fine with the status quo and a whole bunch of terrible shit that happens in the world—but doesn't it, like, suck when a bunch of white men are made to feel bad about that?

In a patch of soil in the compound where he was held captive, Saddam apparently tended to a patch of weeds—watering them and caring for them as if they were plants. They were not. The Prisoner in His Palace puts forth a similar sleight of thought.… (altro)

If ever a book proves that there is not only more to a story than we know, but also that the complexity of human being is unparalleled, this is the book. The Super twelve, the twelve soldiers, from all different backgrounds, who guarded Saddam Hussein up to and through his trial and their​ experiences doing so are told in a clear and concise manner. We learn some of their backgrounds but much of the book is about their daily interactions with the former ruler of Iraq. Not at all what I nor they expected.

A monster to some of his people, a hero to others, he held on to Iraq for 3 1/2 decades, through numerous plots to unseat him and various plots of assassination, he had many reasons to be paranoid.
Considered a monster by most of the world, this man had a different side that was presented to the soldiers. Maybe because at that point he didn't have much to lose. Technically his trial was a farce, and his sentence a foregone conclusion. Maybe he wasn't all he was made out to be, though of course many of his actions were abhorrent​, maybe they had to be for him to keep not only his position but any kind of peace in this waring nation of tribes. Certainly isn't more peaceful without him, more Iraquies are killed now every day than before.

This book makes one think , so many questions, so few answers. He may have lived as a monster but he died as a man.

ARC from publisher.… (altro)