by Con Coughlin
Although the Annan mission was successful in defusing the immediate crisis, in the long term it signaled the end for UNSCOM. Annan’s intervention confirmed that UNSCOM was no longer the sole interlocutor with Iraq on weapons issues, as Saddam knew he could now appeal above Richard Butler’s head. Butler’s authority had been usurped by Annan and the bickering members of the Security Council, a fact that Saddam was quick to exploit.
Following Annan’s mission, the United States tried to back away from its confrontation with Saddam because the Clinton administration realized that, apart from bombing Baghdad, there was little it could do to enforce the UN resolutions. And rather than have the impotency of the West’s position with regard to Iraq exposed, Washington put pressure on the UN to be less confrontational in its approach to the inspections. Butler in turn ordered Scott Ritter, the chief inspector of the UN team in Baghdad, to call a halt to the inspections, eventually causing Ritter to resign in protest, complaining of interference in his work from officials in London and Washington. Before departing, Ritter revealed that Saddam would have as many as three nuclear weapons ready for use as soon as he had laid his hands on the necessary fissile material (uranium 235 or plutonium). Ritter also severely damaged UNSCOM’s credibility by revealing that he had worked closely with Israeli intelligence for much of his seven-year tenure with the supposedly independent UN inspection teams.
In August Saddam provoked yet another clash with Washington by demanding a speedy conclusion to the UNSCOM mission and threatening grave retaliation if sanctions were not lifted. In October the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress, which was becoming increasingly restless about President Clinton’s disinclination to confront Saddam, voted the Iraqi Liberation Act into law on October 1, in which it pledged $97 million to Iraqi opposition groups working to overthrow Saddam. Saddam followed this in November by suspending all cooperation with UNSCOM’s monitoring program. The inspectors were withdrawn, the United States and Britain prepared to bomb Iraq, and at the last moment Saddam allowed the inspectors back. Butler continued with the inspections, but the Iraqis were sufficiently obstructive for him to report back that Saddam was not fulfilling his UN commitments. By now Annan had concluded that both the Clinton administration and Saddam were intent on fomenting the long-awaited bombing attack. The timing especially suited Clinton, who was desperately seeking a diversion to draw attention away from the impeachment proceedings against him that had commenced in Washington.
On December 17 American and British warplanes launched Operation Desert Fox. Augmented by cruise missiles, the Allies conducted 400 bombing missions against targets that the weapons inspectors had been prevented from visiting. The bombing made little impact on Saddam. Ninety-seven targets overall were attacked, of which only nine were reported by the Pentagon to have been fully destroyed; of eleven chemical and biological weapons facilities targeted, none was destroyed. Saddam, as he had no doubt predicted, emerged from the seventy-hour bombing campaign unscathed, and declared that Iraq had emerged victorious from the confrontation. “God rewarded you and delighted your hearts with the crown of victory,” Saddam said in a televised address that was broadcast throughout the Arab world. President Clinton also claimed victory with a more downbeat assessment: “I am confident we have achieved our mission.”
The reality was that the bombing constituted a political victory for Saddam. Desert Fox ended UNSCOM’s operations, and Iraqi officials insisted that there would be no more cooperation with UN weapons inspectors. Furthermore, unlike the international consensus that had presided over Kuwait, Clinton’s decision to launch Desert Fox provoked international condemnation from France, Russia, China, and much of the Arab world. The UN Security Council was hopelessly divided on the future of UNSCOM and the issue of Saddam. Furthermore, the only policy left to the United States and Britain, the only countries that were still fully committed to forcing Saddam’s regime to observe its international obligations, was the maintenance of UN sanctions. Even this policy was now under fire. Although the sanctions had been amended in 1996 to allow an “oil for food” deal, relief agencies continued to publish harrowing reports on the plight of Iraq’s undernourished children.
A UNICEF survey in March 1998, a year after the oil-for-food arrangements had taken effect, showed that a quarter of Iraqi children were chronically malnourished, and almost one in ten was acutely malnourished. Even though Saddam’s policies were mainly to blame for this appalling state of affairs, public opinion in the West held that the UN sanctions were responsible. The difficulties of the American and British governments were compounded at the end of 1998 when Denis Halliday, the Irish Quaker who had been appointed by the UN to supervise the oil-for-food program, resigned, denouncing a policy that he claimed caused “four thousand to five thousand children to die unnecessarily every month due to the impact of sanctions.”
While Western public opinion began to turn against the continued implementation of sanctions, the crucial issue of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction arsenal lay unresolved. When the UNSCOM inspections ended in 1998 Saddam had still not accounted for 20 tons of complex growth media, essential for the production of biological weapons such as anthrax, together with 200 tons of precursor chemicals for the production of VX nerve gas. The UN still did not know the full extent of Iraq’s capability to produce long-range missiles. The strong suspicion remained that Saddam had a number of undisclosed Scud-type missiles that could be fitted with anthrax or VX warheads.44 In addition the Iraqis, at the very least, retained the ability to conduct active research and development of nuclear weapons and an effective delivery system.45 Scott Ritter, the former UNSCOM inspector, believed that Iraq had the capacity to make several bombs, which could be moved from one secret storage facility to another in specially modified vehicles.46 Saddam had already demonstrated his readiness to use weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians. The challenge that faced the West was to make sure that Saddam would never again be in a position to use these weapons.
THIRTEEN
The Menace
On April 28, 2002, the main road leading to Tikrit was jammed with lines of ramshackle buses and black-windowed Mercedes. Crowds of military personnel with thick mustaches, sheikhs in flowing robes, and farmers in shabby pants were congregating at an expansive parade ground in the center of the city for the official sixty-fifth birthday celebrations of Saddam Hussein, the Anointed One, the Glorious Leader, direct descendant of the Prophet, president of Iraq, chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, field marshall of its armies, doctor of its laws, and great-uncle to all its peoples.
The parade ground had been specially built for occasions such as this, when the people were given a rare opportunity to express their devotion to their president. It contained a reviewing stand, where specially selected guests were provided with high-backed chairs. As the crowds waited patiently for the guest of honor to arrive, groups of schoolgirls, including some who were dressed as suicide bombers, performed a series of dances that were dedicated to Saddam’s “pulse of life.” This was followed by a long procession of some ten thousand local soldiers and security officials. As each group passed the reviewing stand, they chanted, “Happy year to you, President Saddam Hussein, who brought victory to us.” Eventually a convoy of sleek, bulletproof Mercedes swept into the parade ground and stopped in front of the reviewing stand. A hush fell over the crowd as the security guards helped the long-awaited guest of honor out of the car.
The only problem was that the man emerging from the back of the presidential limousine was not Saddam Hussein, but his cousin, General Ali Hassan al-Majid, the man known throughout Iraq as “Chemical Ali” for his brutal suppression of the Kurds in the late 1980s. After twenty-three years as the undisputed ruler of Iraq, by 2002 Saddam rarely showed himself in public, not even for special occasions such as his birthday. Fearful that one of his many enemies might take the opportunity to stage an assassination attempt, Saddam preferred to confine himself to the safety of the numerous
presidential bunkers he had constructed throughout the country. Most of his appearances took place on television, where he would broadcast his message to the people from a secret location. Saddam’s well-wishers in Tikrit were disappointed by his absence, but the crowd nevertheless continued with their birthday celebrations. As Ali Hassan raised his right arm with the palm open in imitation of Saddam’s salute, the crowd chanted their slogans as if they were addressing Saddam himself. “We sacrifice our souls, our blood for you, Saddam.”
Saddam’s birthday celebrations lasted a full week. In deference to the suffering of the Palestinians, who were then being subjected to Israel’s Operation Defensive Wall strategy to root out suicide bombers from the West Bank, Saddam asked the dancing girls who were to have entertained his thirty-five hundred guests at a special banquet in Baghdad to stay at home. “In Palestine they are demolishing villages and killing people,” one of Saddam’s officials explained. “This is not a time for dancing.”1 Saddam did, however, allow himself the luxury of having one of his plays performed at Baghdad’s elegant new theater. Zabibah and the King was a play based on one of two novels written by Saddam. The play related the story of a lonely monarch who falls in love with a virtuous commoner. Unfortunately for the monarch, the object of his desire is raped on January 17—the same day that the United States–led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm—and is killed by a jealous husband. The king resolves to avenge the woman’s honor, but dies in the struggle. Although Saddam himself was not present for the gala opening, the play was well received by the audience, who had no difficulty in identifying the allegorical qualities of the plot. Zabibah represented the Iraqi people, who come to realize that their king, Saddam, was acting in their best interests and, if necessary, was prepared to sacrifice his life for them.
In the three and a half years since the UNSCOM inspectors had left Baghdad and President Clinton had launched his largely ineffectual air strikes in Operation Desert Fox, Iraq had undergone something of a transformation. With most of the Arab world openly ignoring the UN sanctions, trade was flourishing. There were regular flights from Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon to Saddam International Airport, where visitors were met with gaudy, bloodred “Down with America” slogans. All the capital’s buildings, bridges, and roads that were damaged in the 1991 war had been rebuilt. A combination of the legitimate foreign currency earnings generated by the UN’s oil-for-food program and the enormous profits from Saddam’s illicit oil-smuggling activities meant that for the first time in more than twenty years signs of prosperity had returned to the streets of Baghdad. In the upscale al-Mansour district of Baghdad, the shops were filled with the latest designer fashions; in the poorer districts the markets were filled with plentiful supplies of food and cheap electrical goods imported from China.
For most of the 1990s, as Iraq wrestled with the UN over disarmament issues, Saddam had ruthlessly exploited the suffering of his people to persuade Western public opinion to abandon the UN’s uncompromising sanctions. Now that he was no longer troubled either by the intrusive attentions of the weapons inspectors or the worst effects of the sanctions, Saddam had decided to ease the economic constraints, mainly to prevent the long-suffering people from rebelling against him. Medicines were widely available, the electricity supply had been restored to normal, and ordinary Iraqis were starting to recover from the appalling privations that they had endured for most of the 1990s.
Apart from improving the welfare of the people, Saddam still had sufficient funds to indulge his obsession with grandiose schemes. In addition to the construction of more palaces, Saddam devoted enormous resources to building several giant mosques. One of the biggest, and the most expensive, was the Umm al-Maarik, or “Mother of all Battles,” mosque in central Baghdad, which had been completed in time for Saddam’s birthday celebrations in 2001, the tenth anniversary of the Gulf War. Whether by accident or on purpose, the minarets were designed to resemble Scud missiles sitting on launchpads. Each of the four minarets—representing the Scud missiles Saddam fired at Israel during the Gulf War—was 43 meters high to mark the 43 days that Operation Desert Storm lasted. One of the mosque’s more remarkable artifacts was a copy of the Koran that had been written in Saddam’s own blood. All 605 pages were displayed for posterity in glass cases. The custodian of the mosque explained that Saddam had donated 24 liters of blood over three years. The blood was then mixed with ink and preservatives, producing a reddish-brown color with a tinge of blue. A pool located at the foot of one of the minarets contained a 24-foot mosaic blob, which was supposed to be Saddam’s thumbprint, and inside the thumbprint was a magnified version of Saddam’s signature.2
Saddam’s obsession with massive contruction projects, be they palaces, mosques, or nuclear weapons, was a product of his childhood in Tikrit where, when he was a young boy, his family could not even afford to buy him a pair of shoes. It fitted in with Saddam’s self-image as a giant of Arabian history. Like Saladin, the conqueror of the Crusaders, who also, according to legend, came from Tikrit, Saddam believed his destiny was to be remembered and revered as the leader who restored Iraq and the Arab world to their rightful glory. Accordingly Saddam’s latest palace featured columns topped with his own head bearing Saladin’s helmet.3
As Saddam grew older, he came to believe, as had Hitler, in providence. Just as Hitler had refused to accept the advice of his generals that the Third Reich was doomed, so Saddam refused to countenance the concept of defeat, even after he had suffered the catastrophic losses that had been inflicted on Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. By the time he reached his sixties Saddam had become more detached from reality than ever. No doubt the constant disruption of moving from one palace to another, of never being able to tell anyone in advance, not even his own family, where he might be, would have taken its own psychological toll. On those rare occasions when he had time to reflect on the course his life had taken, he would have been haunted, like Macbeth confronting Banquo’s ghost, by the bloody images of his murdered friends, such as Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly and Adnan Khairallah. Then there was the havoc his success had wreaked on his once happy family—an estranged wife and two daughters, two murdered sons-in-law, and one psychotic elder son, not to mention the pathological tendencies of his other relatives, such as Ali Hassan al-Majid, and his half brothers, Barzan, Watban, and Sabawi.
Whichever palace or bunker Saddam slept in, he only needed a few hours’ sleep a night. Often he would rise at 3 A.M. and go for a swim. In a desert country like Iraq water is a symbol of wealth and power, and all Saddam’s palaces were filled with fountains, pools, and waterfalls. Saddam suffered from a slipped disk, and his doctors had prescribed swimming, together with walking, to help ease the condition. All Saddam’s pools were scrupulously maintained, both to keep the right temperature and to ensure that the water had not been poisoned. Given that so many of the regime’s enemies had suffered thallium poisoning, it is perhaps not surprising that Saddam had a deep-rooted fear of being poisoned. Consequently the security arrangements surrounding his food had reached almost surreal proportions. Twice a week fresh food was flown in to Baghdad, mainly lobster, shrimp, fish, lean meat, and dairy products. Before being taken to the presidential kitchens the shipments were first sent to a team of nuclear scientists, who x-rayed them and tested them for radiation and poison.4 Saddam had about twenty palaces that were fully staffed and where three meals were prepared for him every day, even when he was absent.
Despite his age, Saddam remained a vain man, and his daily exercise regime was designed as much to keep him looking trim and fit as to help his bad back. Saddam wanted to look his best and had reverted to wearing smart, tailor-made suits rather than the olive green Baath Party uniform that he had worn throughout most of the 1990s. Saddam changed his sartorial attire after Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, suggested that a smart suit would vastly improve his image as a statesman. Saddam continued to dye his hair black, and he refused to wear his reading glasses in public. When he delivered a s
peech, his aides would print it out in huge letters, with just a few lines on each page. Because his back injury forced him to walk with a slight limp, he avoided being seen or filmed walking more than a few steps. Saddam continued to work long hours, as he had done since the early days of the Baath revolution in 1968. The only difference to his routine was that he got into the habit of stealing short naps during the day. He would abruptly leave a meeting, shut himself off in a side room, and return refreshed half an hour later. For relaxation Saddam liked to read, mainly books on Arab and military history, or watch television. He enjoyed monitoring cable news channels such as CNN, al-Jazeera, and the BBC, and was also partial to watching movie thrillers that involved intrigue, assassination, and conspiracy. The Day of the Jackal was a particular favorite.