Part II: "Don't be a Mute Satan"

His heroic feats as a pilot catapulted Georges' career, despite the fact that he was not a Ba'athist, not an Arab and not a Muslim-three prerequisites to climbing the Iraqi political ladder. In 1980, Georges was given his first star. He was now a General. He began instructing at all three of Iraq's War Colleges, a job that seemed to have given him as much pleasure as his days as a pilot.

If it took courage to fly a plane without training or even an instruction manual, Georges' new career provided even greater occupational hazards. Over the years, General Sada would develop a new reputation: he was a man who would tell the truth-even to Saddam Hussein.

Georges explains this with an Arabic saying: "Don't be a mute Satan." Which means, if you have crucial information that can help someone in a difficult situation, don't keep quiet. This is why he committed to telling the truth, even though Saddam was capable of killing any man who dared to contradict him.

Georges would give honest military assessments, even if all Saddam wanted to hear was that victory was inevitable. He warned, for example, that the U.S. assault on Iraq after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait would be overwhelming and Iraq would be completely defenseless. Others in the same meeting, in order to placate Hussein, were congratulating themselves on Iraq's military superiority. Most of them simply believed that the retaliation by Coalition forces would never come and so felt no harm in a few false boasts. A spokesman for the Air Force commander told the commanders: "No coalition aircraft will be able to penetrate Iraqi air space-Not even a house fly can enter our air space without being intercepted by our fighters."

But, of course, Georges was right. Iraq was attacked and defeated. The country paid dearly for its failure to evacuate Kuwait before the U.N. imposed deadline.

In the picture Georges paints for us, the Iraqi military leadership was hopelessly inept and corrupt. Friends or relatives of Saddam and loyal Ba'ath Party members were given high-ranking positions in the military and government for which they were unqualified. Saddam's son-in-law, who had been made Minister of Defense, ordered a nighttime helicopter assault on Kuwait, despite the fact that the pilots were not trained for night flying and the pilots had not been briefed on the terrain ahead of them. Because of this, forty-seven Iraqi helicopters and four attack fighters were lost that night.

According to Georges, "At least 50 percent of the Iraqi aircraft sent into Kuwait were lost in the first hours of the assault because of the stupidity of our commanders."

Georges' words, if heeded, could have saved countless lives. In some cases, Georges' willingness to stand with the truth did prevent bloodshed. In one such instance, the lives he saved were enemy combatants and, according to Saddam's son, "war criminals."