Mark of the Beast
Independent
December 30, 2000
When the Egyptian journalist
Mohamed Heikal visited Iraq during the early years of Saddam's rule, he met the
minister for industry. Heikal was impressed by the intense, hard-working,
intellectual man running Iraq's dynamic industrial output. So on his next
visit, Heikal asked to meet him again. Officials explained that they had no
information about the minister and all enquiries should be addressed to His
Excellency the President. So when at last Heikal turned up for his interview
with the dictator of Iraq, he asked about the minister for industry.
"He's gone," Saddam
said. "Gone?", asked Heikal. There was a pause. "We scissored
his neck – he was suspected of being a traitor." But was there any
evidence of this, the appalled Heikal asked. Was there any proof? "In
Iraq, we don't need proof," Saddam replied, "suspicion is
enough." In Cairo, he went on, Egyptians might have a white revolution.
"In Iraq we have a red revolution." Heikal was horrified. But should
he have been surprised?
There is about Saddam Hussein a
peculiar ruthlessness, an almost calculated cruelty, perhaps even an interest
in pain. It wasn't enough to order the murder of his sons-in-law after their
return from exile in Jordan. They had to be dragged away with meat hooks
through their eyes. It wasn't enough to order the hanging of the Observer
journalist Farzad Bazoft in 1990; Bazoft was to be left unaware of his fate
until a British embassy official turned up at the Abu Ghorraib prison to say
goodbye. At Abu Ghorraib, women prisoners are allowed a party the night before
one of them is to be hanged. Women are dispatched on Thursdays. Families are
asked to bring their own coffin when a relative has been executed.
And yet we loved him. In the days
when Saddam clawed his way to power, personally shot members of his own
cabinet, or used gas for the first time on his recalcitrant Kurds, we loved
him. When he invaded Iran in 1980, we gave him Bailey bridges and Mirage jets
and radio sets and poison gas – the Mirages from France, the poison gas, of
course, from Germany – and US satellite reconnaissance pictures of the Iranian
front lines. I once met the Cologne arms dealer who personally took the photos
from Washington DC to Baghdad. The Russians poured in their new T-72 tanks.
Saddam's war against Iran – the greatest mass killing in modern Middle Eastern
history until the UN sanctions of the last decade – was designed to appeal to
both Arabs and the West. For the Arabs who tamely poured their millions into
his armoury, Kuwait among the most prominent, his Iraqi sons were wading
through anharr al-damm – literally "rivers of blood" – to defend the
al-bawwabah al-sharqiyah, the "Eastern Gateway" to the Arab world and
Saudi Arabia.
To the West, he was fighting off
Khomeini's Islamic hordes. Asked why the Iraqis used gas against their enemies,
one of his senior confidants replied: "When you weed the lawn, you have to
use weed-killer." Blundering, ignorant of Western (though not Arab)
history, largely uneducated, an original Tikriti corner-boy whose first
political act was an attempted assassination and an escape, wounded, into the
desert; how did he do it? How come the man who defied George Bush senior is
still there to defy George Bush junior? How come, 10 years after the
"mother of all battles" – a phrase typical of Saddam – and 10 years
after UN sanctions that have killed at least a million Iraqis, Saddam is still
enjoying his palaces and cigars? The French are a clue. They idolised Saddam in
the late Seventies. He was feted on his arrival at Orly, dined out by the Mayor
of Paris (a certain M Chirac), swamped with champagne as he watched a
bull-running circus in central France.
For the French, he was a kind of
Jacobin, the reformer-turned-extremist whose reign of terror had a power all
its own. Saddam's "red revolution" was always rubber-stamped by the
democratic mockeries of Iraq – he asked the Kurds of a northern Iraqi town if
he should hang Bazoft and their cries of affirmation doomed the correspondent –
but somehow, in a crazed way, it was modern and progressive. Iraq's hospitals
and medical care were on a par with Europe, women's rights were rigorously
enforced, religious insurrection was suppressed in blood.
And he was – and is – a very
intelligent man. When I first saw him, in 1978, he was espousing the merits of
nuclear power, of binary fission (technology courtesy of his beloved France).
Self-confident, quoting from Arab poets and writers, replying to foreign
journalists who snapped at him, with humour and history. Asked, in view of his
little speech, about the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation, he replied:
"Ah, you must not ask me about Israel's 250 warheads in the Negev desert –
you must ask the Israelis!" He always wore a massive wrap-around jacket
with too many buttons, but his shirts and shoes were always the latest in Paris
fashion. I visited his abandoned palace in Kurdistan in 1991, one of the series
of massive, fortified royal residences he continues to build across Iraq,
evidence, according to Madeleine Albright, that sanctions haven't yet brought
him low and thus must continue. In truth, they are evidence that sanctions
clearly do not work – because they don't touch Saddam – and thus should not
continue.
But what was so evident about his
northern palace was its tawdry nature, the poor quality of the concrete round
the swimming pool, the cracked pseudo-Grecian columns in the dining-room, the
under-weeded flower beds. In Baghdad, the palace lawns are better tended, but
the same sense of spent taste and vulgarity pervades the president's imagery.
Saddam on horseback, in Kurdish clothes, embracing babies and war heroes,
riding on a charger in medieval armour to confront the Persians at the Battle
of Qaddasiyeh, dressed as Nebuchadnezzar, he who conquered Syria and Palestine,
sacked Ashkelon and subdued all the tribes of the Arabs. Like the king of
Babylonia, Saddam decided to rebuild Babylon; and so the ancient city was
ripped apart and reconstructed, Disney-style, in the image of the great man.
Even the giant egg-shell monument
to the Iraqi war dead of 1980-88 is a personal museum to Saddam's family. Visit
the crypt and beside the names of half a million dead you find a photograph of
the young, revolutionary Saddam, on the run from the royal family, of Saddam
studying in Cairo (his hero was not Hitler but Stalin), of Saddam with his
first wife. Now there is a second wife – the feuding between the wives' two
families is one of the causes of the ferocious bloodletting within the family.
His son Oday, partly crippled in an assassination attempt while on his way to a
nightclub, murdered a bodyguard at a party. "My son must be tried like any
other Iraqi," Saddam announced. Then the family of the dead man –
surprise, surprise – forgave Oday. Unpunished, he continued to run the highest
security apparatus of the state, all the while enjoying the title of head of
the Iraqi Olympic committee. Greatness, for Saddam, is a simple affair.
Victorious in war, the people love you. Strength is all.
In an Arab world that sadly
admires power more than compassion, he was a hero for millions of Egyptians,
Saudis, Kuwaitis, Lebanese, even Syrians. "He may be ruthless," a
Lebanese journalist remarked to me in 1990, "but you have to admit he's
strong. He stands up to people." In reality, Saddam walks tall when his
enemies are beaten. He dreams like a sleepwalker. I recall huddling with Iraqi
commandos in a shell-smashed city in southern Iran in 1980 when an officer
announced a personal message from Saddam to all his fighting forces. They were
participating, he announced, in "the lightning war". There was even a
song that played continuously on Iraqi television: "The Lightning
War". Like the "Mother of All Battles", it was a mockery of the
truth. There were other hints in his war with Iran, had we but known it, of
Saddam's behaviour in Kuwait. In 1983, after proclaiming the Iraqi-occupied
Iranian city of Khorramshahr a bastion to be defended to the last man –
Saddam's personal Stalingrad – he simply ordered his thousands of troops to
abandon the fortress and march back to Iraq, just as he ordered his men to
abandon Kuwait the moment the Western armies broke into Iraq in 1991.
If his behaviour seems
irrational, it is certainly consistent. He believed that a strong Iraq must be
self-sufficient. It must make its own weapons, its own tanks, its own bullets.
A year to the day after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, I was prowling through the
wreckage of the Iraqi army along the Basra highway when I came upon an upturned
ammunition truck whose cargo of battalion and brigade notebooks had been
scattered across the desert, partly buried in sand. "Message from the
Supreme Commander," it said in one. And there, page after page, was the
text of a secret Saddam speech to his high command. Iraq, he said, must abandon
its traditional confidence in other nations; it must set up its own arms
factories, invent its own secret weapons. There it all was, in blue Biro, the
authentic voice of Saddam speaking from beneath the very floor of the desert.
It is not so difficult to struggle into the mind of Saddam when you read this.
He had invaded Iran and the West loved him. Why should they object – or fight
him – when, threatened by Kuwaiti demands for the billions of dollars in
"loans" used to pay off the Iran war and with the Kuwaitis apparently
"stealing" Iraqi oil from beneath the Rumailah field, he invaded
Kuwait? Only four months earlier, just after Bazoft's hanging, a group of
American senators visited Saddam in Baghdad and assured him that
"democracy is a very confusing issue – I believe that your problems lie
with the Western media and not with the US government" (this from Senator
Alan Simpson). Senator Howard Metzenbaum, announcing himself "a Jew and a
staunch supporter of Israel", went on to tell Saddam that "I have
been sitting here and listening to you for about an hour, and I am now aware
that you are a strong and intelligent man and that you want peace." So
what had Saddam to fear from the US? In that last fateful interview with US
ambassador April Glaspie, less than a month before the invasion of Kuwait,
Saddam told Ms Glaspie that Kuwait's borders were drawn in colonial days.
Saddam had always been an anti-colonialist. "We studied history at
school," the luckless Glaspie replies. "They taught us to say freedom
or death. I think you know well that we... have our experience with the
colonialists. We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border
disagreement with Kuwait." In a post-war press interview, as the writer
Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, Glaspie gave the game away. "We
never expected they would take all of Kuwait," she said. The Americans
were going to let Saddam bite a chunk out of the Kuwaiti border.
Saddam thought he had permission
to gobble up all of Kuwait. And so we went to war with the Hitler of the
Euphrates. And so he lives on in his palaces and bunkers while his people die
for lack of clean water and medicines under the UN sanctions that are supposed
to harm Saddam. We still bomb him every day – our war with Saddam has lasted 10
years now – and slowly, the Arabs, dismayed by the bloodshed in the
Palestine-Israel war, are warming once more to the man who never gave in. Jordan,
Lebanon, Syria, the Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia – almost all of them
America's allies in 1991 – are now breaking the air embargo by flying into
Baghdad. Saddam lives.
More
Information on Questioning Saddam's Regime
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Information on the Iraq Crisis