If I was right in saying earlier that Saddam Hussein’s being dead would have been mostly bad news, the evidence that I was probably wrong in thinking that was dead is good news.
Got that?
Note that I’m saying “probably.” That an Iraqi peasant somewhere would bring down an American helicopter with an old weapon, and that the Americans would go around Iraqi defenses, were certainly not far-fetched notions, and it’s not hard to believe that a set of Saddam Hussein tapes made before the war might have included some with references to those expected events. If the tape is contemporary, why not name the date, the village, and the peasant? But the hypothesis that he’s actually alive and well seems the less tortured hypothesis for now.