Saddam : His Rise and Fall

by Con Coughlin

  The rumor was widely circulated in Baghdad during the March offensive that Saddam had himself come close to being captured by the Iranians. While driving around the rear of the fighting, near the Iraqi border, Saddam’s convoy was besieged by Iranian troops unaware of Saddam’s presence. The only Iraqi force close enough to relieve Saddam was commanded by General Maher Abdul Rashid, a fellow Tikriti, and one of Iraq’s most competent soldiers. Rashid, however, was not on speaking terms with Saddam because some years previously he had arranged for his clan to murder the general’s uncle during one of his purges. Before rescuing Saddam, Rashid made him beg for help, swearing by the name of the murdered relative. Under heavy bombardment and with his bodyguards piled on top of him to protect him, Saddam capitulated to the general’s demand. Rashid promptly relieved the besieged president, and even though his daughter later married Saddam’s son Qusay, the two men never overcame their mutual antipathy. Before the war ended, Saddam had placed Rashid under house arrest at his farm near Tikrit, where he remained for many years.7

  Saddam’s war plan was quickly collapsing around him, and unless he found a means of countering these setbacks, he faced the prospect of the Iranians mounting an offensive to remove him. The summer of 1982 was to be one of the most critical periods of Saddam’s career. From the outset of the conflict the incessant drumbeat of his propaganda machine had made it clear that this was Saddam’s war: if he was victorious, the victory would be his; if the war was lost, defeat would be Saddam’s personal responsibility. But the failure of the Iranians to respond to Iraq’s aggression in the way Saddam expected was a source of great frustration for the Iraqi leader. Saddam now lamented that the Iranian leadership had perversely refused to abide by the anticipated rules of war. “Despite its military defeat in 1980, the Teheran regime insisted on its aggressive stands and expansionist trends,” he declared.8 In June 1982 Saddam responded to these reversals by declaring a unilateral cease-fire on the rather dubious grounds that Iraq had achieved its objective of destroying Iran’s military status. Nobody inside or outside Iraq was deceived, particularly the Iranians, who threatened to reverse the tables and carry the war into Iraq, with the professed aim of toppling Saddam Hussein and the Baathist regime and replacing it with an uncompromising Islamic republic, along lines similar to the ones that had been established in Teheran by Ayatollah Khomeini. By this time Saddam must have wished that he had never invaded Iran, particularly as from this point on the conflict would degenerate into a bloody war of attrition, much like the trench warfare of the First World War, with both sides suffering heavy losses for little tangible gain.

  In many respects the Iran-Iraq War can be seen as yet another episode in the long-running feud between the Persians and the Arabs for domination of the Gulf. The origins of the conflict can be traced back to the Arab Islamic conquest of Persia in the seventh century, which had continued, at various levels of intensity, up until the twentieth century when the discovery of the region’s vast oil reserves only served to intensify the animosity. Apart from the cultural differences that distinguish the two peoples—Persians and Arabs have their own languages and literary traditions—they must also contend with the fierce rivalry of their competing Islamic traditions. The Iranians are Shiite and have a strong sense of religious hierarchy, which is why the ayatollahs, the leaders of Shiite Islam, are omnipotent. The Arabs, on the other hand, are predominantly Sunni, with its emphasis on the Koran and religious law, and enjoy a more democratic religious structure. One of the enduring fault lines in the composition of modern Iraq is that the majority of the population are Shiite, while the governing regime, from the monarchy onward, has been composed of Sunni cliques, such as Saddam’s Tikritis.

  From the outset of the conflict Saddam’s propaganda machine was quick to mine the rich historical vein that had been created by centuries of conflict. Saddam drew parallels between the modern-day struggle with Iran and the battle of Qadisiya in A.D. 635, when a numerically inferior Arab army had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Persians, and forced them to embrace Islam. Saddam, who claimed to share the same birthplace as Saladin, the great Kurdish warrior who evicted the Crusaders from the Holy Land, now saw himself following in the tradition of Saad ibn-Abi Waqqad, the Arab commander who defeated the Persians. The war with Iran was hailed as a second Qadisiya. The Iraqi media, with monotonous frequency, referred to the conflict as “Saddam Hussein’s new Qadisiya.” Saddam encouraged comparisons to be drawn between himself and other legendary figures from history, even those who predated the Islamic era. The great ancient empire of Mesopotamia had been located in the area that is now Iraq, and Saddam had a particular affection for Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who had conquered Jerusalem in 587 B.C., destroyed the Jewish Temple, and forced the Jews into exile by the rivers of Babylon.

  The blame for starting the war must, of course, lie with Saddam. He mistakenly calculated that with Iran crippled by Islamic fervor, he could take advantage of Teheran’s weakness and strengthen Iraq’s claim to be a significant military force in both the Middle East and the Gulf. But if Saddam was guilty of succumbing to hubris, it could equally be argued that some degree of conflict was inevitable once Ayatollah Khomeini had taken control of Iran. From Iraq’s inception the majority Shiite Muslim community had believed that they merited a greater say in the running of the country, and were forever agitating to improve their lot. The emergence of an exclusive Shiite Muslim regime in Iran intensified the agitation by Iraqi clerics, most of whom had been close associates of Khomeini during his fifteen years of exile in Iraq, and who now openly called for the establishment of an Islamic republic in Baghdad. Not surprisingly Saddam came to see Khomeini as a threat to the Baathist regime and as a mortal threat to himself. In essence the dispute between Saddam and Khomeini was as much a clash of ideologies as a clash of personalities, with the Iraqis championing secular Arab nationalism and Iran preaching the Islamic revolution, and Saddam and Khomeini demanding each other’s overthrow.

  Officially, the principal casus belli of the Iran-Iraq War was the dispute over the Shatt al-Arab, although it was Iran’s neglect of other protocols in the 1975 Algiers Agreement that provoked Saddam into action. Under the terms of the agreement both countries were to observe a policy of noninterference in each other’s internal affairs and a rigorous enforcement of border controls. In the wake of the Khomeini revolution the Iranians no longer respected either condition. The absence of proper policing of the border enabled Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq to rearm, and in July 1979 the main Kurdish leaders, who had been living in exile, were allowed to cross back to Kurdistan by the Iranians. Iraq’s Kurdish leaders in the north now joined with Shiite clerics in the south in calling for the overthrow of the Baathist regime. In retaliation the Iraqi government revived its support for dissident Arab groups in Iran’s eastern Khuzistan province.

  To give Saddam his due, he had gone out of his way to be hospitable toward the new Iranian government after it came to power. Soon after assuming the presidency he had reiterated his interest in establishing close relations with Iran “based on mutual respect and non-interference in internal affairs.” Even though his statement received a dismissive response from Teheran, Saddam maintained his upbeat rhetoric. He declared that the Islamic Revolution, or any other revolution that purported to be Islamic, “must be a friend of the Arab revolution”—i.e., the revolution the Baathists had undertaken in Baghdad. Secular by nature, Saddam began praying with greater frequency, a development that was duly broadcast on Iraqi television. Saddam undertook a range of pro-Islamic initiatives aimed at placating Iraqi Shiites and the ayatollahs: Radio Baghdad was asked to broadcast excerpts from the Koran; Saddam visited both Sunni and Shiite holy shrines; the birthday of Imam Ali, the founder of the Shiite tradition, was made a public holiday; Islamic symbols were used more frequently. Saddam even pledged himself to “fight injustice with the swords of the Imams” while calling at the same time for “a revival of heavenly values.”9 Saddam the secu
larist became Saddam the Muslim.

  The mullahs, however, remained intractable. Even before Saddam had become president, senior Islamic clerics were identifying him as their main target. As far back as 1978, after Khomeini had been exiled to Paris, Iran’s spiritual leader, when asked in an interview to list his enemies, declared: “First, the Shah; then the American Satan; then Saddam Hussein and his infidel Baath Party.”10 After the ayatollahs seized power a militant member of the new leadership, Hujjat al-Islam Sadeq Khalkhali, claimed that Saddam was standing in the way of the their attempts to export the revolution. “We have taken the path of true Islam and our aim in defeating Saddam Hussein lies in the fact that we consider him the main obstacle to the advance of Islam in the region.” From June 1979 Teheran was urging the Iraqi people—in particular the Shiites, who constituted about 60 percent of the population—to rise up and overthrow “the Saddamite regime.”

  The Iranians’ anti-Saddam campaign continued in the autumn. Khomeini’s main ally in Iraq was Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, the head of Iraq’s Shiite Muslim Dawa (the call) Party, whom he had befriended during his exile in Najaf. Sadr had been a constant thorn in the side of the Baath government and had been imprisoned on several occasions, the latest being during the bloody Shiite disturbances in 1977 (see Chapter Six). In the past the problem for the Baathists had always been that whenever they arrested Sadr—as they had done in 1972, 1974, and 1977—they only succeeded in increasing his popularity. But now Sadr overstepped the mark. He announced that he accepted Khomeini as the undisputed leader of the Shiites, and that he was acting as the Iranian ayatollah’s official deputy. Sadr’s treasonable actions, combined with the increasingly frequent anti-Baath demonstrations in Najaf, were a challenge Saddam could not ignore. The confrontation between Saddam and Sadr came to a head in April 1980 when members of Sadr’s Dawa Party, which had already murdered a score of government officials in 1979, tried to assassinate Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s deputy prime minister and a leading member of the RCC. Aziz himself was only lightly wounded but there were an unknown number of dead and wounded. A few days later the Dawa terrorists demonstrated their fanaticism by attacking the funeral procession of those killed in the failed attack on Aziz, causing yet more deaths.

  Saddam’s response, as one might expect, was brutal and uncompromising. The time for making Islamic overtures to the ayatollahs was over. “Our people are ready to fight to protect their honour and sovereignty, as well as maintain peace among the Arab nations,” he declared. Having made membership of the Dawa a crime punishable by death, Saddam rounded up and executed hundreds of suspected Iraqi Islamic militants. He dispatched his special forces to Najaf, where they arrested Sadr and his sister. Obeying their orders to shoot to kill, they overwhelmed Sadr’s guards and brought the prisoners back to Baghdad. There is little doubt that the cleric and his sister were tortured by Saddam’s half brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, the head of General Intelligence, before being hanged in secret after a summary trial. No record of the trial has ever been produced. As news of the hangings reached the Shiite heartlands of southern Iraq, widespread riots broke out, and were brutally suppressed by Saddam’s security forces. Hundreds more were killed and thousands arrested, never to be seen again. Saddam reinstituted the mass expulsion program carried out in 1977, forcing an estimated thirty-five thousand Iraqi Shiites out of their homes and deporting them to Iran. Khomeini reacted furiously when he learned of the execution of his friend and colleague. “The war that the Iraqi Baath wants to ignite is a war against Islam…. The people and army of Iraq must turn their backs on the Baath regime and overthrow it…because the regime is attacking Iran, attacking Islam and the Koran.”11 From this moment onward the border skirmishes escalated, and it became clear that the two countries were on a collision course that would inevitably result in war.

  Nor was the dispute confined solely to Baghdad and Teheran. The Iranian revolution had a dramatic impact internationally, particularly when Iranian revolutionaries were held responsible for incidents such as the storming of the American embassy in Teheran on December 17, 1979, when the Revolutionary Guards took sixty-six American diplomats hostage. The following year the mounting tensions between Iran and Iraq spilled onto the streets of London when a group of six pro-Iraqi rebels from Khorramshahr in Iran’s Arab province of Khuzistan seized control of the Iranian embassy in May, and held the staff hostage. The siege was ended when an elite unit from Britain’s SAS stormed the embassy after the terrorists had shot dead one of the hostages. Five of the terrorists were killed during the ensuing operation, and one survived. But by the time the survivor went on trial at the Old Bailey courthouse in London in 1981, Khorramshahr was under Iraqi control. He later received a life sentence after being convicted of terrorism charges. It later transpired that the entire operation had been conceived by Iraqi intelligence, and that the Iranian gunmen had been trained in Iraq; they had also received false passports from their Iraqi trainers.

  Desperate situations sometimes require desperate remedies, and with no end in sight to the increasingly destructive war with Iran, Saddam embarked on a wild gamble that he hoped would finally persuade the superpowers to intervene and bring hostilities to a halt. In the summer of 1982 the Begin government in Israel was straining at the leash to launch an offensive in Lebanon aimed at destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization. Aware of this, the PLO had been on its best behavior and had gone out of its way not to give the Israelis a pretext for launching an attack. Then on the evening of June 3, 1982, an assassination attempt was made on Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London, as he left the Dorchester Hotel, where he had been giving a talk on the current situation in the Middle East. Argov was shot and seriously wounded, but the British authorities were able to round up the assassins. The British investigation revealed that the three gunmen who took part in the shooting were all members of Abu Nidal’s terrorist organization, which was still based in Baghdad. One of the gunmen was one of Abu Nidal’s relatives while the man who organized the attack was a colonel in Iraqi intelligence. It was also discovered that most of the weapons used in the operation had come from the military attaché’s office at the Iraqi embassy in London.12

  It was, of course, inconceivable that the attack could have taken place without Saddam’s knowledge—Abu Nidal was still in regular contact with Saddam’s private office and relied heavily on Saddam’s patronage. And both Saddam and Abu Nidal were well aware of what the likely consequences would be of trying to murder the Israeli ambassador. Neither Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, nor Ariel Sharon, his defense minister, was the type of person to sit around waiting while the British authorities tried to ascertain who was responsible for the shooting. To their minds the suspects were bound to be linked to the PLO in some shape or form, and the assassination attempt gave them the pretext they had been looking for. On the morning of June 6, 1982, Begin ordered the Israeli army to invade Lebanon. On June 10, Saddam declared a unilateral cease-fire with Iran, and ordered his troops to withdraw from the small pockets of Iranian territory that they still occupied. He proposed that both Iraq and Iran should make use of the cease-fire to divert their resources to helping the Palestinians defend themselves against the Israeli assault. Even though Saddam had managed to start a new Middle East war in his desperation to extract himself from the conflict with Iran, the ploy was a miserable failure. On July 14, Ayatollah Khomeini rejected Saddam’s cease-fire offer and launched a new offensive against the Iraqis. From Khomeini’s point of view, this was a war to the death.

  The assassination attempt on Argov was not the only desperate measure Saddam was prepared to contemplate to end the war. Once it became clear that Iran was not going to be defeated easily, Saddam was keener than ever to employ his various nonconventional weapons. As usual, it was the nuclear research project that particularly interested him. Before the war started, Saddam had been promised that the reactor would be ready to produce weapons-grade material by July 1981. Although the French, responding
to international pressure, were still dragging their feet on supplying Saddam with the enriched uranium necessary to power the Tammuz reactor cores, by July 1980 the first shipments had arrived at Al Tuwaitha, on the outskirts of Baghdad, where the nuclear research establishment was being built. Iraq was also engaged in a worldwide search for uranium. A hundred and twenty tons were acquired from Portugal in 1980, and a further two hundred tons from Niger. Saddam clearly hoped that he would have use of an atomic bomb by either late 1981 or early 1982, and had his scientists succeeded in their mission, there is little doubt that he would have used it against Iran. When, later in the 1980s, Saddam renewed his efforts to acquire a nuclear capability, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) issued an assessment that if the Iraqis were successful in producing a nuclear weapon, Saddam would most likely use it to bring the war with Iran to a speedy conclusion.13