Soldiers shoot at villa harboring Saddam's sons

The shooting had stopped, and a gritty, anxious silence drifted over the bullet-scarred villa. It was a silence that almost seemed to echo against the house, a cut stone casualty in a once comfortable corner of the northern Iraqi town of Mosul. For a few moments, the soldiers savored the silence. And then cautiously, the first few Americans slipped out from behind their defenses, maintaining formation and as they had been trained, almost tasting the air to make sure that the battle was indeed done.

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Qusay Hussein alive, morgue photo

They moved inside the building, stepping around the blood and the shell casings, until they found their quarry. A photographer snapped the pictures. There was Qusay Hussein, the youngest son of the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam, the man who was believed to have been most likely to succeed Saddam, his body riddled with automatic weapons fire. Click. And there was his nephew, 14-year-old Mustapha. He too had died fighting. Click.

And not far from him lay his father, Uday Hussein, the psychopathic eldest son of Saddam, a hulking, brooding, malevolent man who until that moment had seemed almost immortal. This was "The Lion Cub", as he liked to hear himself called, the man depicted by the coalition as the virtual personification of all the evil in Saddam's regime. And in truth, he had developed a reputation in Saddam's Iraq as an almost mythically malevolent force, a torturer and sexual deviant, a killer who had survived Saddam's wrath years earlier, a feat few in Iraq had ever duplicated. This was the man who less than a decade before had almost inexplicably survived an assassination attempt, despite the fact that he was hit by 17 rounds fired from a squad of gunmen armed with AK-47's.

Uday Hussein alive, morgue photo

The Americans and their coalition partners had long hoped that if they could bring Uday Hussein and his brother to heel, that perhaps, they might at least prove that the regime that had for decades tormented the Iraqi people was finally over, and that the brutes and butchers would never return. Perhaps, they even hoped, news that Uday and his brother were dead, killed in a July 2003 gun battle with overwhelming American opposition, would help undermine the growing insurgency that was even then beginning to mock the U.S. led coalition's halting efforts to replace the shattered regime with democracy.

Adnan Pachachi

As Adnan Pachachi, a member of the American backed Iraqi Governing Council optimistically told CNN in an interview from England at the time, the death of Uday and Qusay Hussein would "hasten the end of the acts of violence that have been perpetuated recently."

"The death of Qusay and Uday has been welcomed by the Iraqi people, because they were a symbol of all the oppression imposed on the people of Iraq for decades," Pachachi exalted.

In fact, that was one of the reasons why the photographer was there. Military chiefs, from Donald Rumsfeld on down had planned to release the gruesome photographs of the slain sons and grandson of Saddam, despite the widespread approbation they knew it would further demoralize the resistance, which was then believed to be comprised of little more than the desperate remnants of the Saddam's military, particularly the ruthless cadre of thuggish soldiers that Uday had formed and had ruled through his own brutality.

Rumsfeld had publicly suggested that releasing the photographs would further demoralize the forces he had once described as "dead enders," and would, perhaps, in the end save American lives.

Uday & Qusay Hussein's graves

And Paul Bremmer, then the director of the US led reconstruction effort in Iraq, said at the time that he believed that releasing the photographs would "in the long run...hopefully encourage more Iraqis to come and give us information about more Baathists, and that's really what we have to have happen next."

In the end, it seems likely, it will turn out that Bremmer and Pachachi and Rumsfeld and Bush were, perhaps, too optimistic about the impact the deaths of Uday Hussein and his brother and son, as Steven A. Cook, an expert on political reform in the Middle East and a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations told Crime Library recently, it is likely that in the grand scheme of things, the deaths have had and will have little effect on the still roiling insurgency in Iraq.

"I think it was wishful thinking to think that the deaths of Uday and Qusay would have some kind of meaningful impact on the insurgency and in the end, it's proven to really be a non event."

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