For some Americans, the real iconic hero of the U.S. war in Iraq appears not to be an American at all. For the average cyberspace junkie, Iraqi Information Minister Saeed al-Sahaf symbolizes the United States’ war victory better than Gen. Tommy Franks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush himself.
The website www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com has become enormously popular since it was put up last week and accessed so much that it fried the first four servers on which authors hosted it.
“The great thing about this guy is that he’s reliably unreliable,” said Conn Nugent, one of the site’s authors. “Usually press secretaries try to put a spin on the truth. He didn’t do half-truths; he just did big fat lies all the time.”
Nugent, director of an environmental foundation in New York City, called al-Sahaf’s remarks the “biggest invective this side of a playground.”
Shortly after the United States began its war against Iraq, al-Sahaf began holding press conferences picked up by international television news networks, where he made absurd statements about the progress of the war.
“We have destroyed two tanks, fighter planes, two helicopters and their shovels — we have driven them back,” al-Sahaf said in one statement.
Al-Sahaf vehemently denied the victories reported in the international press about the U.S. troops’ convoy into Baghdad.
“The American press is all about lies. All they tell us: lies, lies and more lies,” al-Sahaf said.
Nugent said he and his friends set up the website as a personal joke.
“It was sort of a disagreement settler between friends,” Nugent said. “Our main motivation was just to have fun.”
Nugent said his group of friends argued endlessly as to whether the U.S. attack of Iraq was justified and necessary.
“There’s a group of us who continuously argued over whether the war was an awful thing, or if it was, all things considered, sort of a cool thing. The one thing we didn’t disagree on was that this guy was funny,” Nugent said.
Nugent and his friends set up a website, and each member of the group sent the address to their friends. Shortly after that, it was forwarded to an official at the Pentagon, who sent it to one of his friends at the London Daily Telegraph, and news services from around the world picked up stories about the site.
“We were getting 4,000 visits a second within 12 hours of posting the site,” Nugent said. “We just want to be clear that we’re not affiliated with anybody. It’s not like we’re USA Today; we’re just a bunch of guys having fun.”
The site crashed four separate servers carrying the site, and Nugent said he and his associates are trying to get the site onto a server with a larger bandwidth to ensure accessibility for everyone who wants to read al-Sahaf’s transcribed sound-bytes.
The Iraqi information minister has not spoken publicly since U.S. troops took over the streets of Baghdad April 9. The site lists April 9 as his last known remark, made to John Burns of the New York Times: “I now inform you that you are too far from reality.”
