Saddam : His Rise and Fall

by Con Coughlin

  Saddam’s hopes of acquiring a nuclear arsenal at this juncture, however, were to be frustrated by the Israelis, who would have been high on Saddam’s list of targets if the Iraqi scientists successfully completed development of an indigenous atomic bomb. Having seriously damaged the reactor cores in 1979, Israeli agents were blamed in June 1980 for the murder in a Paris hotel of Yahya al-Meshad, an Egyptian-born nuclear scientist who had been recruited to work on Iraq’s nuclear program. Saddam was undeterred by these setbacks and insisted that development of the Tammuz reactors continue. “Whoever antagonises us must know that the nation he is antagonising today will be different in five years.”14 The next blow against Saddam’s pet project came three months later, on September 30, shortly after Saddam had invaded Iran and the French had delivered the first consignment of enriched uranium, when the Iranians launched a surprise air raid against Al Tuwaitha. The attack failed, but on June 7, 1981, the Israelis completed what the Iranians had failed to do when the Israeli air force successfully bombed the plant, just one month before it was to become operational. The reactor was completely destroyed, although most of the enriched uranium, which had been stored in a deep underground canal, remained intact; this would enable Saddam to recommence his beloved nuclear weapons project at a later date.

  Even after this disastrous setback, Saddam was not to be diverted from his determination of acquiring a weapons of mass destruction arsenal. Speaking during his annual address to mark the Baath revolution in July, Saddam declared: “We will not succumb to the Zionist aggression and we will not deviate from the war we have chosen.”15 He also took the opportunity to grant a rare television interview to Barbara Walters of the U.S. ABC News network, in which he claimed that Israel wanted “to maintain the Arabs in a state of underdevelopment to be able to dominate them and persecute them.”

  While the nuclear project had to be shelved, Saddam achieved considerably more success in his attempts to acquire chemical and biological weapons. Saddam’s obsession was to acquire “strategic reach” weapons that could inflict a devastating blow on an enemy such as Iran or Israel. Many of the proposals for chemical weapons plants that had been hidden in Iraq’s five-year plan by Adnan al-Hamdani had lain dormant. Following the Israeli bombing of the Tammuz reactors, Saddam resurrected these projects and ordered his scientists to redouble their efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons. This time they were greatly assisted in their endeavors by a variety of West German companies, which, for the next few years, worked shoulder to shoulder with Iraqi chemists, ballistic engineers, and nuclear scientists to develop one of the most diversified arsenals of unconventional weapons to be found anywhere in the world. U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, whose staff assistants spent months tracking them down, called these companies and their cohorts “Saddam’s Foreign Legion.”16 And it was this “foreign legion” of German companies that was mainly responsible for building the Salman Pak military complex at Suwaira, thirty kilometers south of Baghdad, near the ancient site of Ctesiphon. Work was started on the plant in late 1981 and, despite Iraqi claims that it was a “university” project, when it was completed two years later it became Saddam’s first nerve gas plant.17 A German company was also responsible for building the other main Iraqi chemical weapons plant at Samarra. The official explanation was that the Samarra plant had been commissioned by a newly created Iraqi entity, the State Establishment for Pesticides Production (SEPP) to help develop the country’s agricultural production. Even though they could see this claim was fictious, the Germans helped the Iraqis to build six separate chemical weapons manufacturing lines at Samarra called Ahmed, Ani, Mohammed, Iesa, Meda, and Ghasi. The first was completed in 1983; the last, sometime in 1986. These plants made everything from mustard gas and prussic acid to the nerve gas compounds Sarin and Tabun. With typical German efficiency, the plant was designed so that the poisons were funneled from the production “reactors” to an underground packing plant, where they were put into artillery shells, rockets, and other munitions. By the time work on the complex was completed, Iraq could boast one of the largest chemical weapons manufacturing plants in the world.18 For good measure, a third chemical weapons plant was constructed in the Iraqi desert at Rutbah, near the Syrian border.

  The Iraqis wasted no time boasting about their new capability, and in April 1983 the Iraqi High Command, of which Saddam was supreme commander, broadcast an explicit warning to the Iranians that Iraq was now armed with “modern weapons [which] will be used for the first time in war,” and which had “not been used in previous attacks for humanitarian and ethical reasons.” In a desperate attempt to ward off any further Iranian attacks, the warning went on to declare that “if you execute the orders of the Khomeini regime…your death will be certain because this time we will use a weapon that will destroy any moving creature on the fronts.”19

  The Germans were not the only Western country supporting Saddam in the war against the ayatollahs. The French were outraged by the Israeli raid on the Tammuz reactors, and immediately promised to rebuild it. The new French president, François Mitterrand, had surrounded himself with pro-Arab ministers who wanted to redress what they regarded as America’s “lopsided” support for Israel. The first batch of the new Mirage F1 fighter-bombers that Saddam had purchased during his negotiations with Jacques Chirac had been delivered to Baghdad in February 1981. From then on, new Mirages continued to arrive in Baghdad at the rate of two a month. With most of the American-built Iranian air force grounded because of the U.S. arms embargo against Teheran, the new fighter-bombers were an important contribution to the Iraqi war effort. In February 1982, President Mitterrand concluded France’s new $2.6 billion deal with Baghdad. Not to be left out, in September 1980, just days before Iraq invaded Iran, the Italians signed a $2.6 billion deal to provide Saddam with a new, almost purpose-built navy.

  The new arms deals reflected Saddam’s determination not to be reliant on one supplier, a philosophy that derived from the difficulties he had experienced with the Soviets when they were Iraq’s main arms suppliers in the early 1970s. At the start of hostilities with Iran, the Soviets had again proved their unreliability as an ally of Baghdad when Moscow suspended all arms shipments. The official Russian position was that Moscow wanted to maintain its neutrality in the conflict, while privately Leonid Brezhnev wanted to punish Saddam for continuing his appalling treatment of Iraqi communists.20 There was disquiet in Moscow about Saddam’s attempts to effect a rapprochement with the West, a development that the Russians interpreted as a threat to their plans to extend their influence into the Gulf region. This might explain the claim (see above this chapter) that the Soviets had secretly provided the Iranians with Iraq’s invasion plan. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former Iranian president who oversaw the early years of the Iranian war effort, insisted that the Soviets arranged for Teheran to receive details of the invasion plan after they discovered that Saddam had opened a secret dialogue with Washington.21

  Officially the United States and Britain maintained a policy of neutrality toward the combatants, but there were clear indications that both London and Washington were more favorably inclined toward Baghdad than Teheran. President Carter, in particular, was desperate to find an ally to help him extricate himself from the political situation caused by the American embassy hostage crisis in Teheran, which seriously threatened his prospects of his being elected for a second term in the autumn of 1980. Even though Washington still had Iraq on its list of countries that sponsored terrorism and had not enjoyed full diplomatic relations since the 1967 Israeli-Arab Six Day War, from mid-1980 onward there was a distinct shift in the Carter administration, which began to regard Saddam as a potential counterweight both against the ayatollahs and as an ally that might provide a bulwark against Soviet expansionism in the Gulf. According to President Bani-Sadr and the New York Times, Carter’s desire to explore the possibility of a clandestine alliance with Saddam resulted in a top-secret meeting taking place in Amman, Jordan, during the first week of Jul
y 1980 between Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, and Saddam Hussein. According to the Times, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss ways that the United States and Iraq could coordinate their activities “to oppose Iran’s reckless policies.”22 Brzezinski and his former aides have always denied that there was a face-to-face meeting, although Brzezinski did meet with King Hussein of Jordan, whose own survival instinct had already persuaded him to befriend his dictatorial namesake and neighbor. It is possible that a high-level Iraqi emissary was also present. As with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait ten years later, various former Carter administration officials, including Gary Sick, the former national security adviser, have claimed that the Americans led Saddam to assume that they had given Iraq a green light to invade Iran in the summer of 1980. Certainly from that moment on there was a distinct thaw in U.S. relations with Baghdad. While the U.S. Senate continued to block any attempt to export military equipment to Baghdad, in July Carter approved the sale of five Boeing airliners for Iraq’s national airline, America’s first significant commercial contract with Iraq since the Baathists came to power.

  By the summer of 1982 the glory Saddam had hoped to acquire from the “second Qadisiya” was fast becoming a distant memory. The brutal reversal in Iraq’s fortunes in a war that Saddam had predicted would last just two to three weeks was developing, as it neared the end of its second year, into a crisis for the Iraqi leader. With an estimated one hundred thousand Iraqi dead, thousands more injured, and the remnants of his invasion force rotting in Iranian prison camps, for the first time in his presidency Saddam’s personal survival was starting seriously to be questioned.

  The first indication that Saddam’s popularity was on the wane emerged in April when an assassination attempt was made on the information minister, Latif Jasim. The gunmen were members of the Dawa, Iraq’s militant Shiite group, although the assassination attempt itself was inspired more out of a desire to avenge Saddam’s execution of Sadr, their leader, and his sister. Saddam responded in his customary fashion by rounding up hundreds of Shiites, many of whom were never to be seen again. A few months later a serious attempt was made by the Dawa to assassinate Saddam himself when he was visiting the village of Dujail in the Balad district of Iraq, about forty miles northeast of Baghdad. In the ambush, which lasted for more than two hours, the presidential party was pinned down and had to be rescued by the army. Several of Saddam’s companions died in the attack and eight of the assassins were killed. The assassins named their operation Um Al Hada, after the sister of Ayatollah Sadr executed by Saddam. A few days later the inhabitants of Dujail were evicted from their homes and relocated to a new town while the village itself was destroyed by the army. According to one report, the village was attacked by helicopters dropping napalm. Bulldozers were then sent in and turned the village into agricultural land. The failed assassination attempt was to make a lasting impression on the way Saddam conducted his presidency. Until this attack Saddam had been in the habit of making impromptu appearances around the country as part of his ongoing campaign to present himself as a populist. From this point on he would make no more impromptu appearances.

  From the start of the war Saddam had tried hard to insulate the Iraqi population from the reality of what was taking place at the front. The Iraqi population was fed on a constant, and somewhat repetitive, diet of pro-Saddam propaganda. From the moment they glanced at the morning paper, through their journey to work, to the family evening gathered in front of the television, the Iraqi people was inescapably exposed to the towering presence of the “Struggler President.” They saw him posing with a rocket launcher on the front lines or paternally embracing young children; as a statesman meeting heads of state and as a military leader discussing war plans. Saddam was depicted as an efficient bureaucrat in a trendy suit and as an ordinary peasant, helping farmers with their harvest, scythe in hand. His portraits pervaded the country to such an extent that a popular joke put Iraq’s population at 26 million: 13 million Iraqis and 13 million pictures of Saddam.23

  In addition to maintaining a constant stream of propaganda in the state-owned media in praise of the country’s armed forces and leader, Saddam used the oil wealth to ensure living standards were maintained at a high level. At the outbreak of hostilities Saddam was widely quoted as having said that Iraq had two years’ supplies of all key commodities.24 Instead of concentrating most of Iraq’s resources on the military effort and, like Iran, stressing the virtue of sacrifice, the Iraqi president sought to prove to his people that he could wage war and maintain a business-as-usual atmosphere at the same time. Ambitious development plans that had commenced prior to the war went ahead, and public spending rose from $21 billion in 1980 to $29.5 billion in 1982. The lion’s share of this expanded budget was spent on civilian imports to prevent commodity shortages. This guns-and-butter policy meant that most Iraqis were relatively immune from the ferocious war being waged on the battlefield. Instead the country was buzzing, much to the delight of foreign contractors. Construction projects of all sorts, begun prior to the war, continued apace with the result that Baghdad was being transformed at a feverish pace from a medieval into a modern city. Daily life in the capital was largely unaffected by the war. The blackouts imposed at the start of the fighting were soon lifted once it became clear that the dwindling American-built Iranian air force, starved of spare parts by the U.S. embargo, was unable to extend the war to the Iraqi hinterland. Most foodstuffs were readily available, and the black color of mourning was not too visible in the streets of Baghdad.

  Apart from the protective shield Saddam had thrown around the civilian population, he took great care to look after those directly involved in the fighting or affected by the war. With the Iraqi authorities forced to admit that casualties were running at the rate of 1,200 a month, Saddam saw to it that all the participants were handsomely rewarded. The already high standard of living of the officer corps was further improved, and members of the armed forces were given priority for car and house purchases. Officers who had displayed any measure of heroism were presented with Rolex watches, which naturally had Saddam’s face on the dial. Bereaved families, for their part, were compensated with a free car, a free plot of land, and an interest-free loan to build a house. To ensure the Baathists were clearly identified with the war effort, Saddam ordered all leading party officials to dispense with their tailor-made suits and wear olive green battle fatigues, which soon became one of the distinguishing features of televised meetings of the Baath.

  Another example of Saddam’s attempts to maintain a facade of normality was his insistence on keeping to his plan to host the Non-Aligned Nations Conference in Baghdad in the autumn of 1982. Saddam’s interest in the Non-Aligned Movement, formed in the 1950s to represent the interests of developing countries that sought to be independent of the superpowers, dated back to 1978 when he had attended the quadrennial conference in Havana, Cuba. Despite his hatred of communism, Saddam is said to have befriended Fidel Castro and to have developed a taste for fine Havana cigars, which were henceforth exported to Baghdad on a regular basis. In his desire to prevent Iraq being subjected to either superpower’s sphere of influence, it was natural for Saddam to turn his attentions toward the Non-Aligned Movement. In arranging for the movement’s 1982 conference to be held in Baghdad, Saddam was hoping that he might prevail upon its membership to elect him as Castro’s replacement when his term ended as head of the Non-Aligned Movement. Much of the frenetic construction work taking place in Baghdad in the early 1980s was the building of new hotels and conference centers for the planned conference. Millions, if not billions, of dollars were spent on various construction projects, and existing buildings and facilities underwent substantial renovation.

  By mid-1982, however, as Iran began its determined drive into Iraq, the butter-and-guns policy, the main buttress of Iraqi national morale, could no longer be maintained. Iran’s success in attacking and destroying many of Iraq’s oil installations around Basra was one reaso
n the country’s financial reserves could no longer finance both the war and a prosperous domestic economy. Another was the decision by Baghdad’s rival Baathist colleagues in Damascus to order the closure of the Iraqi pipeline to Banias on the Mediterranean, which passed through Syria. President Asad had been itching for an opportunity to avenge Saddam’s purge and execution of pro-Syrian Baathists when he assumed the presidency in 1979, and for the duration of the Iran-Iraq War, Damascus proved to be one of Teheran’s staunchest allies. With Iraqi foreign reserves plunging from $35 billion before the war to just $3 billion at the end of 1983, Saddam was forced to reduce radically all spending on nonessential goods. As a consequence civilian imports to Iraq dropped from a peak of $21.5 billion in 1982 to $12.2 billion in 1983, and $10–11 billion between 1984 and 1987. Saddam was even forced to cancel plans to hold the Non-Aligned Movement conference in Baghdad; the meeting was moved to New Delhi and in Saddam’s absence India’s Indira Gandhi assumed the leadership of the nonaligned world for the next four years.

  The reversal in Iraq’s war fortunes and the dramatic economic downturn combined for the first time to raise serious doubts about Saddam’s leadership qualities. The setbacks the Iraqis suffered following the Iranian counteroffensives meant Saddam was being held directly responsible for the failures of the armed forces. He was also blamed for exercising poor political judgment in declaring war on Iran in the first place. His insistence on taking personal command of the military meant that he had no alternative other than to accept responsibility for the military setbacks. From the outset of hostilities Saddam had ordered that military command be subjected to Baath Party control. In the early weeks of the conflict Saddam had personally overseen operations from a bunker located beneath the Presidential Palace in Baghdad. Every order had to be referred back to Baghdad and Saddam insisted on being involved in every military decision, from a platoon-level action to the bombing of major targets. Even Adnan Khairallah, his cousin and brother-in-law who was the army chief of staff, had to defer to Field Marshal Saddam on the smallest of issues.