Saddam : His Rise and Fall

by Con Coughlin

  Apart from trying to demoralize the Iranians, Saddam’s other main goal from the mid-1980s onward was to internationalize the conflict in the hope that the West could be persuaded to end the war for him. On this basis in March 1984 he ordered his newly acquired French Super Étendard warplanes to launch long-range attacks on Iran’s oil terminals and shipping in the Gulf. Initially the Iraqi attacks were concentrated on tankers bound for Iran’s ports, especially the Kharj Island terminal. In the first months some seventy ships were hit by the Étendard’s highly efficient Exocet missiles.

  The war continued along similar lines until February 1986 when the Iranians made a surprising breakthrough on the battlefield and captured the Fao Peninsula south of Basra, which put Iraq’s second largest city in serious jeopardy of falling to Teheran. Even though the Fao Peninsula itself was militarily irrelevant, the Iranian breakthrough nonetheless constituted a significant political setback for Saddam at a time when Iraq appeared to be making headway on the war front. Saddam compounded this setback by instructing his generals to retake Foa, even though by the time he gave the order it was too late. The Iranians were too well dug in to be dislodged. Obeying Saddam’s orders, the Iraqi generals poured men and equipment into the peninsula, and suffered appalling casualties. Iraq’s total manpower losses in early 1986 were put at between 8,000 and 10,000 dead and the Iraqi military was forced to organize special trains to carry its wounded; the corresponding casualty figure for Iran was 20,000 fatalities.15

  The failure to recapture Fao prompted Saddam to make another strategic error. Desperate for a victory, he ordered the Iraqi army to launch an offensive on the central front to take the Iranian town of Mehran. Saddam’s strategy was twofold: he wanted to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that their armed forces were still capable of taking offensive action; and he wanted to capture Iranian territory that could be used as a bargaining chip to recover Foa. Initially the Iraqis, who attacked in May with four divisions, succeeded in capturing the town, which was lightly guarded by five thousand Iranian troops who were quickly overwhelmed, suffering heavy casualties in the process. The victory certainly boosted the morale of the armed forces, and Saddam was quick to exploit its propaganda potential. But the victory was short-lived. The Iranians refused Saddam’s offer to exchange Mehran for Fao, and at the end of June launched a counteroffensive, which caught the Iraqi occupiers by surprise. By early July, Mehran was back under Iranian control and the Iraqis had suffered further casualties.

  The loss of Fao, and the heavy Iraqi losses suffered as a result of Saddam’s demand that the Iraqi armed forces launch a series of futile attempts to recover the territory, was deeply wounding for him. The Mehran adventure was a further example of the problems caused by having civilians in charge of military operations. Saddam’s insistence on personally directing the war effort had in no small measure contributed to the failure of Iraq’s superior military firepower to react adequately to the initial Iranian attack. The loss of the Fao Peninsula prompted a reaction from the Iraqi president that bordered on the irrational. All Iraqis were urged to donate money and blood and to work longer hours. Some 100,000 men, women, and children were enlisted to cut reeds in the southern marshes to help facilitate Iraq’s military operations in the area. In an attempt to offset Iran’s overwhelming demographic superiority, Saddam personally launched a nationwide campaign to encourage procreation. “Our motto must be that each family produces five children and that families failing to produce at least four children deserve to be harshly reprimanded.” He strongly advised female students to choose childbearing over studying. The heavy losses suffered during the Fao counterattacks saw the Iraqi authorities resorting to desperate measures such as forced blood donations, trying to mass recruit the staffs of some leading tourist hotels, and forcing empty taxis going north from Basra to carry corpses inside the vehicle or on the roof racks.

  It was at this juncture in the conflict that Iraq’s military commanders, frustrated at Saddam’s constant interference in their conduct of the war, came close to staging a mutiny. An example of the military’s growing disillusion with Saddam manifested itself in the winter of 1986, when he clashed with General Maher Abdul Rashid of the Seventh Corps. Rashid, a fellow Tikriti and the father-in-law of Saddam’s second son, Qusay, was one of Iraq’s genuinely successful officers. Rashid had a reputation for speaking his mind, and the huge loss of Iraqi life at Fao, which he thought could have been avoided, caused him to criticize publicly Saddam’s tactics. In a candid interview published in the Kuwaiti press, Rashid stated unequivocally that the high number of Iraqi casualties incurred during the Fao battle had been unnecessary. Saddam was incensed, and ordered Rashid to Baghdad to explain himself. Well aware of what the order meant, Rashid’s officers transmitted a warning to Saddam, implying that they would refuse to continue the war effort should anything untoward happen to their commander. On arrival at the Presidential Palace, Rashid was decorated by a beaming Saddam, who deferred his vengeance for later. After the war Rashid was forced to resign his commission and was put under house arrest.

  It is significant that, unlike previous military coups in Iraq, the officers were not seeking political power in their confrontation with Saddam; they simply desired to be able to use their own professional judgment to prosecute the war against Iran. And for the moment they were successful. For the rest of the war the commanders were able to insist that they were running the war, not the politicians. Saddam was seen less and less at meetings of the Supreme Defense Council, the body overseeing the war effort, and though he continued to visit frontline positions, it was plain that his trips were to raise morale among the troops, and the fiction that Saddam was personally directing successful operations was quietly dropped.

  Indications that Saddam was getting more and more irrational in his conduct were not confined to the military arena. In the mid-1980s it was reported that he had sacked Hamed al-Jubari, his foreign minister, after the workaholic Saddam had twice telephoned the minister’s office and received no reply. Assuming that the minister was late for work, Saddam dismissed him the moment he arrived at the office. Saddam refused to rescind his decision even after the minister informed him that he had a perfectly legitimate reason for not being at his desk—he had been at Baghdad airport receiving an official delegation. Despite the venality of his own family, Saddam also initiated a big anticorruption drive against Iraqis accused of taking illicit commissions on government contracts. Since the 1970s corruption had been regarded as a serious offense by the Baathists, but during the boom years of the late 1970s and early 1980s a blind eye had generally been turned to the Iraqi entrepreneurs who were making small fortunes for themselves in commissions on large foreign contracts. The austerity of the mid-1980s saw Saddam revive much of the anticorruption legislation with the result that Abdul Wahab Mufti, the mayor of Baghdad, who had taken over from Khairallah Tulfah, was hanged following allegations that he had received bribes from a British company supplying Baghdad with refuse trucks and fire engines.

  The collapse in the oil revenues resulted in the Iraqis having to default on payments for their arms supplies. Until the start of the war with Iran, Baghdad had enjoyed a reputation as a prompt payer, which was one of the main reasons that Western governments had been so keen to do business with the Baathists. By the mid-1980s, however, money was scarce and Saddam was unable to meet the payments on the arms shipments he needed to sustain the war effort. The French and the Russians were the worst affected, though their constant complaints on the Baghdad diplomatic circuit that they could not get the Iraqis to settle their debts evoked little sympathy from their fellow diplomats. “I think we all took the view that, particularly with the French, that they got what they deserved,” commented one former Western diplomat.16

  Realizing that his position was getting increasingly desperate, Saddam made yet another attempt to sue for peace. But the ayatollahs remained insistent that one of their key conditions for halting hostilities was Saddam’s removal from p
ower. As Saddam’s entire raison d’être was his own survival, the Iranians’ demand was clearly out of the question. Saddam responded with a ferocious aerial assault against Iran’s main population centers—Teheran, Isfahan, and Kermanshah—and renewed the assault on the ayatollahs’ economic infrastructure.

  In one of the most significant developments of the war, in August 1986 Iraqi aircraft mounted their first successful raid on the Iranian oil terminal of Sirri Island, just 150 miles north of the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf, thereby demonstrating to Teheran that none of Iran’s strategic targets was beyond Iraq’s operational reach. By extending the conflict to the lower reaches of the Gulf, Saddam was making another attempt to escalate the conflict in a manner that would invite international intervention. In particular he was hoping to provoke the Iranians into a reaction that would make the Gulf unsafe for shipping, thereby closing one of the world’s most important oil arteries. At first the Iranians would not be drawn into Saddam’s trap, and the Strait of Hormuz remained open. As Saddam maintained his assault on Iran’s economic infrastructure, however, the Iranians came to the view that they had no alternative other than to respond in kind. In late 1986, the Iranians began intimidating the Kuwaitis, who were assisting Iraq with its oil exports, so much so that the Kuwaitis approached both superpowers with a request for protection. The Soviets were the first to offer their services, and the prospect of the Soviet navy assuming responsibility for policing the Gulf shipping lanes prompted the United States to intervene on Kuwait’s behalf. By early 1987 both superpowers, and a number of Western countries such as Britain and France, had deployed some fifty warships in the Gulf. Saddam had gotten his way and managed to embroil the world’s powers in a dispute they had been desperately hoping to avoid. Moreover Saddam in effect had the might of the world’s navies protecting him from attacks by Iran while he remained able to attack Iranian targets with relative impunity. Even when an Iraqi Super Étendard mistakenly fired two Exocet missiles at the American frigate USS Stark, killing thirty-seven American servicemen, there was no letup in the international protection effort.

  The international intervention to protect Iraqi oil supplies, together with the maintenance of Saddam’s intensive bombardment of Iranian cities, gradually combined to sap Iranian morale and gave the regime in Teheran a growing sense of isolation. There was a sharp drop in the number of young Iranians volunteering for the front, particularly after the costly failure to capture Basra in late 1987. The constant Iraqi bombing had caused many Iranians to flee the main cities. The peace lobby in Teheran became more vocal as the pattern of the war changed from being a defensive campaign to repel the Iraqi invaders to an offensive assault to capture Iraqi territory and overthrow Saddam. Saddam correctly calculated that one big offensive was all that was required to force the Iranians to the negotiating table, and in February 1988 the Iraqis launched their most ferocious campaign of the entire war. During the next two months about 150 missiles and numerous air raids were launched against Iran’s major population centers. In April the Iraqis launched their first ground offensive in nearly six years, and managed to recapture the Fao Peninsula. Apart from receiving the assistance of U.S. military intelligence, the Iraqis received direct military assistance from the United States, which sent teams of military advisers to assist the Iraqi top brass direct operations at the front. Emboldened by this success the Iraqis launched more offensives during the spring and succeeded in driving out the Iranians from all the Iraqi territory they had captured since 1982. In early July the Iraqi forces drove the remaining Iranian forces out of Kurdistan and even managed to capture a small strip of Iranian territory in the central part of the Iran-Iraq border, the first Iraqi incursion into Iran since the heady days at the start of the conflict in 1980.

  Throughout this period the Iranians were incapable of providing an adequate response to the Iraqi assaults. The lack of volunteers for the front meant they were unable to consider launching a ground offensive and their air force was grounded through lack of spare parts. The only tactic available to them was to attack Iraqi shipping, but as Saddam had now inveigled an array of Western navies to protect all Gulf shipping, any Iranian move would run the risk of provoking a direct confrontation with the United States and its allies. Small detachments of Revolutionary Guards did manage to attack several ships by using small, high-speed boats and also succeeded in mining the main shipping lanes. These tactics made the Iranians appear the main threat to Western interests, and the high state of alert that was being maintained by the American forces against the possibility of an Iranian attack resulted, in early July, in the USS Vincennes accidentally shooting down an Iranian civilian airliner, with the loss of more than three hundred lives.17

  A combination of all these factors enabled the peace camp in Teheran finally to persuade Ayatollah Khomeini that it was time to bring hostilities to a halt; the aging ayatollah reluctantly agreed that Saddam Hussein, his mortal enemy, would not be overthrown during his lifetime. On July 18, 1988, Iran accepted UN Security Council resolution 598 for a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War and a month later the guns along the common border fell silent. Khomeini claimed that agreeing to the cease-fire was like drinking from a poisoned chalice. Saddam simply declared himself the victor. A war that had cost an estimated one million fatalities, had wrecked the Iraqi economy, and had come close to destroying Saddam’s presidency was now proclaimed a triumph for the Iraqi people. And in many respects the conclusion of the war did represent a significant achievement. In spite of the brutal totalitarianism that characterized his regime, Saddam had managed to persuade the outside world that a secular and progressive Iraq was infinitely preferable to the fanatical hordes of the Iranian revolution. He had managed to attract the financial and moral support of his Gulf neighbors and even had the world’s superpowers competing against each other to ensure his success in the war with Iran. Domestically he had demonstrated that he was not afraid to engage in repression, even in time of war. He had made it abundantly clear that no sacrifice was too great to keep him in power.

  The only blemish on his victory was Saddam’s proclivity for using nonconventional weapons in conventional warfare. For most of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam used chemical weapons sparingly against the Iranians, for fear of turning international opinion against Baghdad. Thus chemical weapons were used against the Iranians on isolated occasions, such as when Iraq was confronted by the massive human-wave attacks by suicidal volunteers, or to dislodge the Iranians from strategically sensitive targets, such as the Majnun Islands. Apart from the 1984 UN report on the use of mustard gas and Tabun nerve agent, the Iraqis were accused by UN inspectors of using chemical weapons in both 1986 and 1987. The inspectors concluded that “chemical weapons have been used once again by the Iraqi forces against the Iranian forces and resulted in many casualties.” Even so, Saddam was relatively restrained in his use of nonconventional weapons, enabling him to secure the support of most Western powers, who turned a blind eye to the damning evidence produced by the UN inspection teams.

  If Saddam was sparing in his use of chemical weapons against the Iranians, the same did not hold true when it came to dealing with his own people. Throughout the conflict the Kurds had been hoping to take advantage of the hostilities to pursue their own goal of total independence. At one point Saddam became so exasperated with them that he actually colluded with the Turks and the United States to allow a Turkish offensive against Kurdish territory. From 1983 the Iranians, aware of the vulnerability of Saddam’s forces in the region, concentrated part of their effort on trying to make a breakthrough in Kurdistan. Saddam initially responded by repeating his offer to grant the Kurds limited autonomy. The Kurds spurned the offer, and Saddam reacted by launching a ferocious campaign to subjugate the area. The assault was led by General Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s cousin, who was to become known as “Chemical Ali” for his preference for using nonconventional weapons. Al-Majid, who was Saddam’s first cousin by his natural father, had been in charg
e of the Mukhabarat, the state security service, since Saddam’s falling-out with Barzan al-Tikriti and the Ibrahim branch of the family. As the situation with the Kurds deteriorated, Saddam appointed al-Majid his viceroy to the north and ordered him to use any means necessary to resolve the Kurdish problem.

  The campaign started with the execution of eight thousand Kurdish prisoners, who had been captured and held since 1983. The government also attempted to reinstitute its policy of uprooting the rebellious population and moving them to areas where they posed less of a threat to Baghdad. By the end of the war in 1988, it is estimated that more than half of the towns and villages in Kurdistan had been razed and their populations deported to the main towns, or else to concentration camps in the southwestern Iraqi desert. When the population tried to resist, Majid resorted to using a wide range of chemical weapons against the defenseless civilian population.

  The first chemical attacks were reported in May 1987, when about twenty Kurdish villages were gassed in an attempt to deter the local population from collaborating with the advancing Iranian forces. The most infamous attack, however, took place in March 1988, when the prospect of an Iranian breakthrough in Kurdistan prompted Saddam to employ chemical weapons on an unprecedented scale against the Kurdish village of Halabja. As the thick cloud of gas spread by the Iraqi planes evaporated into the clear sky, Western television crews were rushed into the town by the Iranians and the world was shown the full extent of the massacre. Five thousand people—men, women, children, and babies—were killed that day, and nearly ten thousand were wounded. They had been gassed with a hydrogen cyanide compound that the Iraqis, with the help of their German advisers, had developed at their new Samarra chemical weapons plant.18 The new death agent bore a striking similarity to the poison gas the Nazis had used to exterminate the Jews more than forty years before. The attack on Halabja provided Saddam with another dubious record in the unhappy history of chemical warfare. Having been the first war leader to authorize the use of nerve gas on the battlefield (during the battle at Majnun Islands), he could now lay claim to be the first national leader to use chemical weapons against his own people. Finally, the outside world was being forced to confront the reality that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.