Mother of all battles
As the mother of all battles ( Arabic أُم المعارك, DMG Umm al-maʿārik ) described Iraq's President Saddam Hussein in 1990 as the then imminent Second Gulf War .
He threatened the United States and allied opponents of Iraq with a gigantic battle if they interfered in the Kuwait crisis, which in turn would only be the beginning of a series of more bitter battles between supporters and enemies of Islam . In reality, however, the Iraqi resistance quickly collapsed in the face of the overwhelming superiority of the US allies.
In the United States and its allied Western world, many believed that they had won a decisive battle against Islam. The “mother of all battles” became a popular target for scorn, ridicule and parody. The victorious US armed forces hold a "mother of all parades" on their return, and the phrase "mother of all ..." is still popular in advertising today. Former general and US Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke of a spiritual, ideological and propaganda "mother of all defeats" for the non-Western regime.
Critics of US policy, however, point out that the meaning of Saddam Hussein's words may have been misunderstood. The “mother of all battles” did not mean the final and decisive victory of Iraq or the USA, but instead the start of endless further wars that will ignite under US hegemony in the “ New World Order ” proclaimed by US President Bush senior . The number of further defeated opponents is only a Pyrrhic victory for US policy, the blowback effect is programmed.
Following this logic, Saddam Hussein initially saw himself as the victor of the lost war and had a mosque built 15 km from Baghdad in memory of the fallen in 2001 , which was called the “Mother of All Battles”. Four of their minarets are reminiscent of Kalashnikovs, four more to R-17 missiles. After the US victory in 2003, it was renamed Umm-al-Qura Mosque , a synonym for Mecca .
The term "mother of all ..." became popular, similar to a winged word . In the German language, it is used to highlight different objects or facts, such as festivals, churches, dolls, streets or cities. The American comedy film Hot Shots received the subtitle "The mother of all films" in the German dubbing. The US soccer coach Steve Sampson spoke in 1998 before the World Cup encounter with the Islamic Republic of Iran , Saddam Hussein's enemy in the First Gulf War , of the “mother of all games” and the American author Rebecca Solnit named a novel “The mother of all questions ".
Individual evidence
- ^ Jürgen Grimm: Information services of the media in times of crisis. In: Peter Ludes (ed.): Information contexts for mass media. Theories and trends. West German Verl., Opladen 1996, ISBN 978-3-531-12840-5 , p. 227.
- ↑ Undine Kramer (Ed.): Lexicological-lexicographical aspects of contemporary German. Symposium lectures, Berlin 1997. De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-095990-1 , p. 105 with further examples
- ↑ Mother Of All Games , article by Bonnie DeSimone, Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1997