On March 29, 2003, after the first suicide bombing in the war in Iraq, “the Iraqi vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, appeared in Baghdad to declare that such attacks would become ‘routine military policy,’ and the Iraqi government awarded two posthumous medals to the bomber, an Iraqi military noncommissioned officer named Ali Jaafar Nuamani. In an hour-long speech of defiance and threat, Ramadan warned: ‘I say to the United States administration, that it will turn the whole world into people who are willing to die for their nations. The aggressors think their B-52s carry bombs of such weight that they are capable of killing an unlimited number of people. Should we wait until Arabs are capable of making bombs to counter that? No, all they can do is turn themselves into human bombs.’ ”
– Todd S. Purdum and The New York Times Staff, A Time of Our Choosing, Pages 179-180