The three men all look at the handbags and each one is able to identify one of the handbags as belonging to his wife. With all handbags accounted for the policewoman leaves the men to deal with their grief in peace. The three men sit in silence for a while, then the Englishman opens his wife's handbag and rummages through the contents, finally pulling out a half-empty packet of cigarettes and says "All these years married and I never knew the old girl smoked."
The Scotsman looks into his wife's handbag and pulls out a half-empty bottle of scotch. "Jings, I knew her all that time an ah didnae ken ma missus drank."
The Irishman empties his wife's handbag onto the floor, looks through the contents and picks up a half empty packet of condoms. "'Saints preserve us! All dese years an oi never knew me wife was a man."
Welcome to Iraq! It is so good of you and your Weapons Inspectors to visit my humble nation once again. My people are overjoyed to assist the totally neutral and gloriously impotent UN in serving their American Masters. I realize that many of you would much rather be touring the Third World for some magnificently ineffective do-nothing NGO, but alas you are here compromising your values on behalf of Western oil companies.
Before you wipe the blood from your hands and get down to the business of concocting reasons for the US to bomb us back to the stone ages of 1991, I thought I'd help reorient you to the ways of magical Baghdad with a few "Dos" and "Don'ts".
DO:
Slavishly patronize Baghdad locals with chocolate bars and worthless Western baubles. Nothing ingratiates us more to intrusive throngs of chubby, sweaty, lobster-red warmongers then when they pass out meaningless tchotkes to us Third World "savages". We will remember these tokens as we dance on your bleached bones. I joke!
DO:
Ignore my playful peoples penchant for recreational HAZMAT suit use. Moreover, ignore the glowing, three-tailed rats that are indigenous to Baghdad. While you're at it, ignore the totally desolate warehouse full of rotting canisters at the corner of Saddam Is Great Avenue and Drown In Blood Yankee Dogs Boulevard.
DO:
Feel free to enter any building, factory, or hospital you desire. And while you're busy violating my paranoid and fragile egos sovereignty, feel free to double-check the bedpans of the dying, gut the teddy bears of orphans, and pour into the dirt any and all bottles of weapons grade baby formula you might uncover.
DON'T:
Forget your high-tech Weapons of Mass Destruction Poking Sticks or Nintendo Gameboys at the hotel. We know that without these useless, aesthetic "tools" you cannot unearth the make-believe stores of plutonium I don't have hidden underneath my opulent Presidential Palaces that my people willed me to build for my own noble pleasures.
DON'T:
Ignore the cultural relativism we know you studied in your Liberal Arts Colleges. We humble Iraqis have a far different culture than the advanced West. Whereas you respect the differences between languages, cultures and value systems, I want to kill. Kill you, your family, friends, grammar school teachers, the Israelis, whole bunches of Saudis and just for good measure, my new yet treacherous-looking barber Adnan.
DON'T:
Mock our cherished Iraqi way of life. While you might think it barbaric and backward, our seemingly brutal governmental system is based on sound fascistic principles that have helped keep the majority of Arabs in splendid desolate squalor for decades.
I truly hope your stay here is a positive experience. I pray that those of you I do not like do not accidentally get caught in the crossfire of the invasion you are busy inventing!
In Me I Trust,
Saddam
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