by Con Coughlin
According to Saad al-Bazzaz, the former editor of Baghdad’s largest daily newspaper who was head of the ministry that oversaw all of Iraq’s television and radio programming, the liberalization measures proposed by Saddam were mainly cosmetic. In 1989, for example, Saad found himself unexpectly summoned to see Saddam. Security officers drove him to a large villa on the outskirts of Baghdad. On arrival he was searched and then invited to sit on a sofa, where he waited for half an hour as people came and went from the president’s office. When it was his turn, he was handed a pad and pencil, reminded to speak only if Saddam asked a direct question, and then ushered in. It was noon and Saddam was wearing a military uniform. Staying seated behind his desk, he did not approach Bazzaz or even offer to shake his hand. First, Saddam complained about an Egyptian comedy show that had been airing on one of the Iraqi television channels. “It is silly, and we should not show it to our people,” he said. Bazzaz duly made a note. Then Saddam came to the issue that was causing him most concern.
Even in the new era of liberalization it was the practice of the state-owned broadcasters daily to air poems and songs that had been written in praise of Saddam. Most of the work was amateurish, written by Iraqis whose admiration of their president was significantly greater than their writing skills. Although the verses were still being broadcast, Bazzaz and his producers had cut down their number, and had become more rigorous in their selection. Saddam had noticed the change in policy and casually remarked, “I understand that you are not allowing some of the songs that carry my name to be broadcast.” Bazzaz was suddenly gripped with terror, and replied, “Mr. President, we still broadcast the songs, but I have stopped some of them because they are so poorly written. They are rubbish.” Saddam was unimpressed by the explanation. “Look, you are not a judge,” he informed the terrified director of programs, who thought he was about to be taken away and shot. “How can you prevent people from expressing their feelings toward me?” All Bazzaz could do was to repeat “Yes, sir” and frantically write down everything the president said. Saddam continued with his tirade, giving new instructions about how the press and the arts were to be administered. Later that day Bazzaz was allowed to return to his office in Baghdad, where he immediately rescinded his earlier policy. That evening there was a full broadcast of poems and songs dedicated to Saddam. 17
Another of Saddam’s key priorities in the immediate aftermath of the war was to improve Iraq’s international standing, especially with the Arab countries that had supported the Iraqi war effort. In February 1989 he helped to set up the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC), comprising Egypt, North Yemen, Jordan, and Iraq. Apart from encouraging economic cooperation, the ACC was conceived to present a unified bloc that would arrest Iran’s expansionist aims, promote the Palestinian cause, and isolate Syria, Saddam’s sworn enemy. The formation of the ACC was welcomed in the West, which noted a sea change in Baghdad’s position, particularly with regard to the Palestinian issue. In this respect Saddam’s prewar “rejectionist” rhetoric was scaled down to the extent that he was credited with helping sponsor the PLO’s historic declaration of Israel’s right to exist, which was made by Yasser Arafat in Geneva in December 1988.
The West, together with most moderate Arab regimes and the Soviet Union, had all backed Iraq toward the end of the war with Iran, and the perceived threat posed by the hard-line ayatollahs in Teheran meant that most of those countries wanted to continue their support for Iraq, if nothing else as a bulwark against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle East. Although most Western powers were inclined to continue doing business with Baghdad, two issues impeded the full normalization of relations—Iraq’s appalling human rights record and its continued development of weapons of mass destruction.
As in 1975, when Saddam’s deal with the shah had enabled him to launch a devastating attack against the Kurds, so the 1988 cease-fire with Iran enabled him to resume hostilities against the Kurds. Within a couple of months of the end of the war about sixty-five Kurdish villages came under the same kind of chemical attack that had decimated Halabja the previous March as Saddam sought to impose a “final solution” on the troublesome issue of Kurdish independence. An estimated 5,000 people died in the chemical attacks, while another 100,000 fled in the direction of the Iranian and Turkish frontiers. By the autumn of 1989 the number of Kurdish refugees in Iran and Turkey had reached 250,000. The persecution of the Kurds provoked international outrage. In the United States the Senate Foreign Relations Committee dispatched two staff members, Peter Galbraith and Christopher Van Hollen, to look at the situation in Kurdistan. When they reported back in October 1988 that Iraq was using chemical weapons as part of a policy to depopulate the region, the U.S. Congress responded by calling for sanctions. In France Danielle Mitterrand, the wife of the French president, took up the cause of the Kurds under the aegis of her Association France-Libertés and organized a Kurdish conference in Paris in October 1989. In Britain the foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, issued a statement condemning Saddam’s treatment of the Kurds.
Concern over Iraq’s human rights abuses was mirrored by the mounting evidence that Saddam, despite the perilous state of the country’s finances, was increasing the development of its military infrastructure in the aftermath of the war rather than concentrating his resources on peaceful reconstruction. In 1989 Iraq’s military imports were running at $5 billion a year, accounting for nearly half of the oil revenues. At the end of the war a new organization was set up, the Military Industrialization Organization (MIO), to oversee development of an indigenous Iraqi arms industry. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the man responsible for putting the bomb on Adnan Khairallah’s helicopter, was placed in charge of the MIO and its vast budget. Saddam had learned from bitter experience that Iraq could not rely on its foreign arms suppliers in times of crisis, and so resolved to continue with his plan, first conceived in the mid-1970s, to make it self-sufficient in the manufacture of weapons, in particular weapons of mass destruction.
In this he seems to have been highly successful, for in October 1989 the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a private research foundation, issued a report entitled “The Genie Unleashed,” which cataloged Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production and suggested that the West might already have lost the battle to halt the proliferation of such weapons. The report stated: “Significantly, Iraq has continued and even expanded its efforts since the cessation of fighting with Iran in July 1988,” and went on to say that international efforts to undermine the chemical weapons program by starving it of raw materials were increasingly irrelevant as Iraq was on the verge of becoming self-sufficient. “Baghdad’s willingness to invest substantial resources in its chemical and biological weapons programs suggests that its leaders believe that these programs will continue to be of tremendous strategic importance.” There were further indications that Iraq’s biological weapons program was well advanced, and that the Salman Pak facility, twenty miles southeast of Baghdad, was producing botulin toxin. The other main biological plant at Samarra was said to be investigating the possible military applications of typhoid, cholera, anthrax, tularemia, and equine encephalitis.
Little attention was paid at this time to Saddam’s nuclear program, mainly because most experts believed that Israel’s attack against the Osirak plant in 1981 had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear ambitions. But by the late 1980s American and British intelligence officials had reached the conclusion that Iraq was continuing to make good progress with its nuclear research program, with the result that by the early 1990s Baghdad would be in a position to build its own atomic bomb. Confirmation that Saddam was still determined to become the Arab world’s first nuclear superpower emerged in 1989 when British and American investigators uncovered an Iraqi scheme to obtain a number of krytons—high-voltage switches that can be used for detonating nuclear weapons.
The progress on the program to make Iraq self-sufficient in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction was matched by the Iraqi
s’ success in developing their own delivery systems. During the war with Iran the Iraqis, with Egyptian help, had managed to develop an enhanced version of the Soviet-built Scud-B missile with a 180-mile range that was capable of hitting Iran. The Iraqis were also working on development of the Badr-2000, a 375-mile-range missile based on the Argentine Condor-2. And in December 1989, to demonstrate its technical prowess, Iraq announced that it had launched a three-stage rocket capable of putting a satellite into space and had tested two missiles with a range of 1,200 miles. By far the most intriguing military project the Iraqis undertook at this time was the development of a “supergun” that would supposedly be capable of launching nonconventional warheads for thousands of miles. The project was brought to an abrupt halt in March 1990 with the murder in Brussels of Dr. Gerald Bull, the Canadian ballistics expert responsible for designing the “supergun.” Israel’s Mossad intelligence service was widely blamed for the murder, although there was no shortage of other suspects. A few weeks later British customs officials confiscated eight large steel tubes that were destined for Baghdad, which were thought to form the barrel of the “supergun,” and shortly afterward other parts of this ingenious project were located in Greece and Turkey.
Despite all the evidence that Iraq was guilty both of gross human rights violations and developing weapons of mass destruction, no serious attempt was made by the West to isolate Saddam at this juncture. While Western politicians made various statements condemning Iraq’s behavior, Western businessmen were actively encouraged to trade with Baghdad. In Washington the Reagan administration continued to block any attempt by Congress to take action against Baghdad, while in Britain Trade Minister Tony Newton reponded to criticism of Saddam’s treatment of the Kurds by doubling British export credits to Iraq from £175 million in 1988 to £340 million in 1989. And when, in April 1989, Saddam held a military trade fair in Baghdad, which was organized and hosted by his son-in-law Hussein Kamel, hundreds of Western companies sent representatives in the hope of picking up lucrative contracts.
Sir Harold Walker, who became Britain’s ambassador to Baghdad in February 1991, recalled that his brief was to maintain Britain’s relations on an even keel with Iraq so that British companies could “do good business.” The West was still more concerned with Iran than Iraq, and there was a growing perception that Iraq could actually become a stabilizing factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict. “I’m afraid the whole human rights issue was brushed under the carpet. The main priority was trade,” said Sir Harold.18 Maintaining normal diplomatic contacts with the regime, however, was no easy matter. From the mid-1980s onward Saddam decided to stop greeting foreign ambassadors when they arrived on the grounds that he was too busy with the war. The practice continued after hostilities had ceased, and new ambassadors were required to present their credentials instead to Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, at the Presidential Palace. Walker recalled that when he went to the palace in early 1991, long after the cease-fire with Iran had been implemented, he was taken aback at the level of security. He had to pass through several security checkpoints, and when he arrived at the final checkpoint, he found all the guards were wearing gas masks, as if they expected the palace itself to come under chemical weapons attack.
Saddam, however, remained deeply frustrated at the generally negative press he was receiving, particularly in the West. Western ambassadors, on the rare occasions they were called in to see him, were generally treated to a long list of complaints about media coverage of Iraq. The BBC’s Arabic Service was a particular source of irritation, and successive British ambassadors received long lectures about what Saddam perceived to be the bias shown by the BBC to Baghdad.19 Nor could he comprehend the international outcry that had greeted the evidence that Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Kurds. Saddam dismissed the criticism as a “Zionist” plot to discredit Iraq’s “glorious victory” over Iran, and he launched a propaganda campaign that was designed to portray the relocation of the Kurds as a humanitarian act. Saddam’s persecution complex was not helped by the overthrow, and brutal execution, of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. Like Saddam, Ceausescu was a despot whose rule depended on the ceaseless promotion of a personality cult and the efficiency of his security apparatus, the formidable East German–trained Securitate, to maintain himself in power. And like Saddam, Ceausescu had become increasingly removed from his people, retreating within the sanctuary of his opulent and heavily fortified palaces to protect himself from the reality of his impoverished and discontented people. Saddam was deeply shocked by Ceausescu’s overthrow, and he ordered his security chiefs to study the videotapes of Ceausescu’s demise to ensure that he did not suffer a similar fate.
Any hopes Saddam may have entertained of rehabilitating himself with the West, however, were irretrievably destroyed by his treatment of Farzad Bazoft, a British journalist who was arrested on espionage charges as he made his way to Baghdad airport in September 1989. Bazoft, who had been born in Iran and was working as a freelance journalist for the Observer newspaper in London, had been investigating a mysterious explosion that had occurred at a military plant at al-Hillah, south of Baghdad. The explosion had been so huge that it had been heard in Baghdad and, although Saddam ordered that news of the incident be kept secret, it soon emerged that the explosion had occurred at a missile production line. The blast killed scores of Egyptian technicians employed on the top-secret missile project, and Bazoft, hoping to secure a big scoop, traveled to al-Hillah dressed as an Indian doctor to investigate. Soon after his return he was arrested as he tried to leave the country and charged with espionage. In a subsequent televised confession clearly made under duress, Bazoft said he had been working as a spy for Israel. By making the confession he had hoped that he would be treated leniently. But this was not Saddam’s way. Throughout his rule he had used the tactic of extracting false confessions to justify the purging of his opponents, as he had graphically demonstrated during the first days of his presidency in 1979 when he conducted a widespread purge of his colleagues in the Baath Party. On March 15, 1990, after a one-day trial at which the prosecution failed to produce any convincing evidence of his guilt, Bazoft was executed by firing squad.
Of all the acts of brutality that had been perpetrated under Saddam’s auspices since the Baathists seized power in 1968, the summary execution of Farzad Bazoft was the one that finally caught the attention of the West and drew its scrutiny to the barbaric nature of Saddam’s regime. Whether it was because Bazoft’s position as a journalist meant his case attracted more attention than Saddam’s myriad other victims, or because his execution occurred at a time when international concern was already being expressed about Iraq’s human rights abuses and development of weapons of mass destruction, Bazoft’s judicial murder proved to be a watershed in the West’s relations with Baghdad. The Western view of Iraq under Saddam Hussein in 1990 was succinctly summed up by Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister: “Iraq was a country which had used chemical weapons—not just in war but against its own people. Saddam Hussein was not only an international brigand, he was also a loser who had done immense damage both to the Palestinian cause and to the Arabs and who over eight years had vainly thrown wave after wave of young Iraqis into the war against Iran.”20
With the economy in ruins, his attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction subjected to constant sabotage, and the frequent discovery of new coup attempts, Saddam was very much on the defensive in the spring of 1990. By executing Bazoft he had no doubt calculated, as he had done on so many occasions in the past, that he would send a defiant signal to potential enemies, both at home and abroad, that all those who plotted against him would pay the ultimate price. And it was in this advanced state of paranoia, when Saddam genuinely believed that there was an international conspiracy to destroy his regime, that he began to contemplate a dramatic new initiative that would both restore the country’s finances and the people’s faith in their leader.
During the first six mon
ths of 1990 Saddam had been increasing the diplomatic pressure on the Gulf states, in particular Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to help alleviate Iraq’s economic plight. Since the end of the war with Iran the Iraqis had been lobbying Gulf leaders to write off the $40 billion financial aid they had given to Baghdad. The low oil price of the late 1980s was also a serious concern for the Iraqis, as oil accounted for 95 percent of the government’s revenue. In February 1990, at a summit meeting of the Arab Cooperation Council in Amman to mark the organization’s first anniversary, Saddam virtually demanded that the Gulf states bail him out of his financial difficulties. Apart from an immediate moratorium on the wartime loans, he wanted fresh loans of $30 billion to pay for reconstruction work. “Let the Gulf states know,” he declared, “that if they [do] not give this money to me, I [will] know how to get it.”21
Tensions between Iraq and the Gulf states increased during the spring of 1990, particularly after Saddam became convinced that Israel, with American backing, was planning to attack his weapons of mass destruction facilities, similar to the Osirak attack of 1981. But the Gulf states took no notice of Saddam’s threats and, to make matters worse, continued with their policy of exceeding their OPEC oil production quotas, which only served to deflate the international oil price at a time when Saddam could least afford it. At an Arab summit convened in Baghdad in May 1990, ostensibly to discuss the impact the recent influx of Soviet Jews to Israel would have on the region, Saddam launched a direct attack on the Gulf leaders, especially the Kuwaitis, who were deliberately exceeding their OPEC quotas. This policy, Saddam announced, was tantamout to a declaration of war on Iraq. But still the Gulf states refused to be intimidated. The emir of Kuwait was insistent that he would neither reduce oil production nor forgive his wartime loans to Iraq nor provide additional grants to Baghdad.