SADDAM IN '96!

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It's election time in the Mother of All Democracies, and Iraqis are officially scratching their heads over whether they will, in fact, cast their votes on Sunday for Most Beneficent Leader, Savior and President Saddam Hussein. Posters plastered across Baghdad suggest that it wouldn't be a bad idea to support the only candidate on the ballot in the national referendum. ("Life is meaningless without the leader," reads one specimen.) Iraqi officials, however, are outraged that the international community has dismissed the event as a sham. A Ministry of Information statement today, for example, said truculent remarks by State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns "show the level of nervousness and the state of fiasco that the American administration has reached in dealing with Iraq." An opposition group, the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution, is urging foreign journalists to stay home.