Saddam Hussein's Complaint

...Iraq, virtually landlocked and more distant, The man who has ruled Iraq for twenty-two years got his start in life as a political assassin...

...Let there be no mistake: Saddam Hussein is no Qaddafi...

...Another 400 Kurds are believed to have been executed in March 1988 when they too had sought help in Suleimaniyah, following gas attacks...

...The hostilities were carried out at several "hot points" along the border between the two countries, where Iraqi settlements were bombed, shelled, and strafed by Iranian forces...

...Is he a potential negotiator in the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...And over the next five years, before the Baathists successfully grabbed power on July 17, 1968, Saddam Hussein became the party's principal organizer, forging the Baath into a powerful, clandestine apparatus capable of staging a military coup and holding power thereafter...

...In the same speech, delivered to the Central Council of the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions, Saddam acknowledged that Iraq had deployed ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel, and specified that they were "directed west, not east...

...It was all a Zionist conspiracy intended to prepare public opinion for an airstrike against Iraqi military installations, such as the one carried out in June 1981 by Israeli planes to destroy Iraq's "Osirak" nuclear reactor...

...The day after the six-day trial, the executions were carried out...

...In possession of a respectable strategic arsenal, however, as now appears the case, they become infinitely more disturbing...

...For this is how he sees the recent sting operations by U.S...

...The military instrument the Baathists inherited from the previous regime was ill-disciplined and poorly equipped...

...He is a blunt, calculating but astute politician...

...Iraq was being attacked by Israel and the United States via Iran, they said, because it was leading the Arab struggle for development...

...Information recently leaked by the Pentagon to the Washington Post confirms that Iran must be held partly responsible for the Halabja massacre, a fact reported by specialized publications such as Mednews more than a year earlier...

...Assad insisted on taking the top slot for himself...

...He soon showed himself to be a genius for organization...

...This is the cross he bears through every trial, the humiliation he secretly nourishes after every slight in the press...

...The provocation was carried directly into Iraq via Tehran Radio broadcasts in Arabic, which as early as January 1980 called for the overthrow of the secular Baathist regime...

...The Baath party, or the Party of Arab Renaissance, was committed to creating a single, united Arab nationstretching from North Africa to the Iranian border...

...In the domestic arena, this has led to the creation of an extensive police and security apparatus, Kenneth R. Timmerman lives in Paris, where he edits Mednews, a newsletter devoted to Middle Fnst defense issues...

...Within months, however, the Baathists were ousted by a new dictator, Abdel Salim Aref...

...A few days earlier, he reiterated warnings to visiting U.S...

...Then the Baathists would seize power and purge the Communists in their turn...

...Iraq has always insisted it was Iran that started the Gulf War, through months of provocation, subversion, and outright hostilities...

...These were standing orders, he said, since the Iraqi High Command would probably be wiped out in the initial exchange...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 17...

...But personal rivalry between the two men—Saddam Hussein and Hafez al Assad—made the venture collapse...

...Does Sad-dam Hussein possess the maturity and the self-composure to pull back from Armageddon in times of stress...

...One document named 315 children from the renegade Barzani clan in Iraqi Kurdistan who had been executed by the regime in 1983-84...

...Driven by a powerful vision of Arab unity, he has also almost single-handedly lifted his country out of backwardness and tribalism and brought it into the modern world...

...Syria was poor but was on the front line with Israel, benefiting from a long Mediterranean coast...

...But the Iraqi branch of this international party, which Saddam Hussein would soon forge into a personal political tool, was vigorously anti-Communist and anti-Soviet...

...Iraqi officials, and editorials in the state-controlled press, abounded with "I told you so" remarks...

...It is his ultimate shortcoming, and he is sometimes smart enough to know it...

...T wenty years later, Saddam Hussein 1 would continue to eliminate his political rivals—sometimes, his opponents allege, even slaying them with his own hand...

...In one of the cases reported by Amnesty, 300 Kurdish civilians were slaughtered in October 1985 in Suleimaniyah and Arbil, in northern Iraq, in reprisal for the murder of two army officers by Kurdish peshmergas opposed to the regime...

...When the Baathists briefly came to power in 1963, he assumed command of the party's military organization...

...The Arabs—especially the unruly Iraqis—need discipline, they reason...

...In exchange for the favor, the Shah demanded that Iraq cede partial sovereignty over the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, making it the southern border between the two countries...

...The lack of due process, the kangaroo courts used to try members of the Baath party accused of conspiring against the regime, and the reign of terror perpetuated by the ever-present moukhtabarat (security police) frequently figure in reports on human rights violations compiled by organizations such as Amnesty International...

...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 was sitting atop a sea of oil...

...Iran's armed forces were in no state to launch an offensive against Iraq, and the Revolutionary Guards had not yet been transformed into a fighting force...

...Only two weeks after seizing power in July 1968, Saddam pulled off a palace coup that would establish him as the regime's strongman, despite his nominal number two role...

...In the meantime, the Iraqis had purchased MiG 29s from the USSR (thus compromising an eventual follow-up Mirage 2000 sale for the French...

...They should hold their breath and think again...

...As a self-styled Arab nationalist, Saddam Hussein feels it is his sacred duty to aid in the struggle to win back Arab territories occupied by Israel...

...On March 6, 1975, he met with the Shah of Iran in Algiers and signed the agreement that would later provide the casus belli for the Gulf War...

...In mid-April 1987, Amnesty noted, 360 Kurds who had been gassed in an army attack on the village of Skeikh Wasanan were ex-ecuted after they had sought medical assistance at a government hospital in Arbil...

...The only ones who occasionally take him seriously are the Israelis, for obvious reasons...

...In April 1989, Amnesty published a special report solely devoted to the torture and execution of children in Iraq...

...No one in his right mind could portray a man who has personally liquidated many of his political opponents as a lover of democratic process...

...There was only one way out, and reluctantly, Saddam took it...

...He unilaterally abrogated the Algiers Treaty and put his troops on alert...

...They also earned him the nickname featured in a recent Newsweek story: the Butcher of Baghdad...

...In fact, negotiations were deadlocked over one item: who would preside over the new union...

...But wary to the end, Saddam Hussein personally drove him to the airport and escorted him to the jet waiting to take him to Rabat, Morocco...

...Union with Syria was out of the question...

...Saddam Hussein is using similar logic today when he excoriates the "British, American, and Zionist campaign" against Iraq's attempt to acquire embargoed high technology for its nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons...

...While Saddam and the Iraqi diplomats charged with arguing the case may be technically right—there was Iranian provocation and it was significant—their reply (a full-scale militaryinvasion) was incommensurate with the threat...

...For as long as Iraq remained a conventional military power of the third sort, such statements could be shrugged off as mildly amusing...

...In the early days of his reign, Sad-dam Hussein believed Iraq could only achieve these goals by forging a pan-Arab union—preferably, a union led by Iraq...

...Don't forget: the pistol is inside my coat...

...Having identified a clique of pro-Soviet army officers he suspected of seeking to destabilize the new regime, he cornered their chief, Colonel Razaq al-Nayef, and threatened to execute him on the spot if he didn't go into exile...

...If Israel realizes it will be struck," he told Senator Dole, "it might refrain from striking...

...He was, in short, the "Arab de Gaulle," who single-handedly had forged a disparate nation into a united, independent whole...

...After all, they were led by branches of the Arab Baath party, and complemented each other in many ways...

...Our air force had only three bombs left...

...Both had long-standing military relationships with the USSR, but had managed to mark the limits of their dependence...

...The Colonel agreed to leave Iraq...

...T he man who has ruled Iraq for 1 twenty-two years got his start in life as a political assassin, and he is proud of the fact...

...That rivalry had already emerged in 1978, when to Assad's regret Baghdad hosted the radical "Front of Refusal" Arab summit, which excommunicated Egypt from the Arab fold for having signed the Camp David peace with Israel...

...Formed in 1947 as a response to Arab despair over the emergence of Israel, the Baathists are often lumped together with panArabists such as the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser...

...French in October 1989, it was on his terms, not theirs...

...The plan was tolay an ambush on Baghdad's main thoroughfare, Rasheed Street, as Qassem drove through the narrow shopping district...

...So far, Saddam Hussein has shown he merits both epithets...

...In the ensuing melee, Saddam was wounded in the left foot...

...Within weeks of signing the Algiers Accord, the Kurdish rebellion collapsed for lack of arms...

...We have given instructions to the commanders of the air bases and the missile formations that once they hear Israel has hit any place in Iraq with the atomic bomb, they will load the chemical weapon with as much as will reach Israel and direct it at its territory...

...Khomeini's words were more deadly than his divisions...

...Qassem had already launched a nationwide purge against the Baathists, throwing many in jail _ and executing others...

...From then on, he set out to diversify his arms purchases, buying extensively from France, Italy, Great Britain, Brazil, China, and a dozen other nations...

...livo weeks later, the Iraqi vice-president exposed a Syrian "plot" to compromise him...

...With it, answering these questions could become a matter of life or death for millions in the Middle East and beyond...

...A report presented by Amnesty to the United Nations on August 17, 1988, drew attention to widespread mass reprisals against Kurdish civilians in the north of the country, including the use of chemical weapons against entire villages, well before the infamous massacre at Halabja in March 1988...

...They kidnapped foreign workers, and attacked army garrisons...

...As he explained to Senator Dole and his colleagues, Iraq sought to develop chemical and biological weapons (at least partially) in response to Israel's nuclear arsenal...

...Besides, the figures quoted are exaggerated and imprecise...

...As for the remainder of the 520 political executions detailed by Amnesty, the Iraqi government "asserts there has not been a single execution in Iraq for political motives...

...While this is true, it has not been without a price...

...The result was an arms embargo in 1974-75 that nearly brought Saddam and the Baathists to their knees...

...That night, having managed to hobble to a safe-house in Baghdad, the future leader (legend has it) extracted the bullet himself with a knife...

...But he insists, nevertheless, for such is his way...

...addam's ambition is monumental...

...It helped that the purveyor of this particular pretension was a Frenchman, Charles Saint-Prot...

...They act this way because they have realized the Arab nation is witnessing a resurgence and renaissance," Saddam Hussein said in an April 18 speech...

...For three years, the planes remained in cocoons in Bordeaux while the French Ministry of Finance negotiated with its Iraqi counterparts...

...For Saddam Hussein and his colleagues, an open democracy with an unbridled opposition is a weakness particular to the West...

...This is why it backed the Iranian war effort, and had launched a veritable international conspiracy to destroy Iraq...

...This is because he sees them as the tools of power...

...Iraqi leaders reject the Amnesty claims, and maintain that they have granted their Kurdish population more rights, including its own regional assembly and Kurdish universities, than any other country in the region...

...No single supplier had the power to cut him off...

...T he Kurdish revolt was one of a 1 palette of troubles that has plagued Saddam Hussein and his Baathist colleagues since they seized power in 1968...

...and brute power, in its most raw, and-often most cruel form, is what motivates this highly political animal...

...The experience with the Soviet arms embargo taught Saddam Hussein a lesson he was not about to forget: depending on a sole source of arms supplies puts unacceptable limits on national sovereignty...

...Born on April 28, 1937, in the village of Tikrit to the north of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein joined the newly formed Baath party in 1956, and committed his first political murder—the slaying of a policeman—two years later...

...Butcher of Baghdad, or Arab de Gaulle...

...The sycophantic tone of Saint-Prot's portrait may fail to convince, but it does expose in stark colors what can only be called Saddam's complaint...

...Senator Robert Dole that Iraq would launch binary chemical weapons against Israel if attacked withnuclear bombs...

...The real threat was political, subversive, not military...

...Taking advantage of a fluid border with Iran, they received arms and aid from the Shah, the U.S., and Israel...

...And when Saddam finally signed the third debt rescheduling agreement with the...

...The most likely candidate was neighboring Syria, whose capital, Damascus, Iraq helped defend in 1973...

...The Iranians replied by intensifying border skirmishes, with particularly violent incidents occurring on September 4. Even today, the Iraqis point to this date as the start of the war, and not September 22, when their troops crossed the international border...

...Finally, by early September, Saddam had had enough...

...Iraq is not known to produce cyanide, whereas Iran does...

...Eventually, it could mean all of Israel, "usurped" from the Arabs in 1948...

...At the very least, this means recovering the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, taken by Israel in 1967...

...capable of reporting on the activities of ordinary citizens, the military, and even political allies, to quash revolt before it even begins...

...His glowing portrait of the Iraqi dictator published in February 1987 was distributed free of charge in Iraqi embassies throughout the world...

...Apparently none of the would-be assassins had trained sufficiently on their new machine guns to aim properly, since Qassem survived their combined fire...

...In another case, between 100 and 200 Kurds were summarily executed in November 1987 in the village of Jiman...

...Saddam realizes full well the West has rejected this argument, and refuses to allow the issue of nuclear weapons to cloud discussions of chemical disarmament...

...Israel could not tolerate the idea of Iraq becoming a modern, technologically advanced state...

...Plans were soon drawn up to unify the two countries...

...Their trial, according to Amnesty, was held in camera, and the accused were not allowed to have lawyers or to appeal the sentence...

...More than anything else, Iraq does not want to suffer the humiliation of another preemptive Israeli strike...

...As Saddam himself put it, "In every civilian and military factory, a piece of the missile is made...

...In October 1983, Amnesty published a report on human rights violations in Iraq, which documented 520 cases of political executions between 1978 and 1981...

...To make matters worse, the army's primary supplier, the USSR, was bent on making the young Baathists pay for their gut-level anti-Communism (and, one might add, their earlier attempt to eliminate the Iraqi Communist party by force...

...On July 17, 1979, he officially assumed the presidency from his erstwhile colleague, Hassan Al Bakr...

...They remain bitter enemies today...

...The proof hinges on the presence of cyanide gas among the victims...

...And Saddam is best qualified to administer it...

...Saddam refused...

...The Iraqi intention, which has been carefully and repeatedly explained through the press, is to deter an Israeli attack, not to provoke one...

...If anyone thinks he can achieve the welfare of his people and keep the Arabs barefooted, then he is mistaken," Saddam concluded...

...But as one of the diplomats who negotiated the deal told Christine Helms for her book Iraq: Eastern Flank of the Arab World (Brookings Institution, 1984): "It was either that or lose the north of the country...

...If the West truly wants peace, [Iraq's] behavior is for the sake of peace...

...As he would have another biographer write, he intended to show the world that he alone was the guarantor of Arab dignity, the champion of Arab rebirth...

...Iraqi commanders were therefore instructed to launch a retaliatory strike even "if they do not receive an order from a higher authority...

...In 1979, it exploded...

...At the time, he was convinced that the only way to put an end to the Kurdish revolt was to get Iran to cut off its support to the rebels...

...Now, after eight years of war with Iran, he is turning all the resources of his oil-rich state toward one goal: forging the region's most powerful military machine, capable of deterring an Israeli attack and imposing Saddam as undisputed leader of the Arab world...

...Assad came to Baghdad on June 16 for a three-day negotiating session, to put the finishing touches on the Treaty of Union between Syria and Iraq...

...that is, in the direction of Israel...

...Eighteen months later, Syria would side with Iran in the Gulf War...

...Following a brief stint in jail in 1958 for the police murder, Saddam Hussein was given a far more elevated task by his Baathist colleagues in October 1959: the assassination of Iraq's revolutionary (but pro-Soviet) leader, Abdel Karim Qassem...

...As Saddam himself would put it later, the Soviets had so thoroughly cut off weapons and ammunition supplies that the army "had almost no more heavy artillery shells...

...and British Customs which led to blocking a shipment of nuclear detonators and sections of a giant ballistic cannon bound for Iraq...

...For several years, the Kurds virtually controlled a third of the country, where much of Iraq's oil reserves lay...

...It was a hard pill toswallow: the narrow Shatt-al-Arab was Iraq's sole outlet to the Gulf, and shared sovereignty meant Iran could block it at will...

...Without a strategic arsenal, the answer is clearly no...

...Not the West, not the Iranians, not the Soviets, not even the Arabs...

...Will [the Israelis] strike at every factory in Iraq, visible and invisible...

...As the war ground on, Iraq viewed mounting evidence of Israeli arms sales to Iran with a sense of déjà vu...

...After a long, dangerous journey by foot and horseback to the Syrian border, the 22-yearold Saddam Hussein finally managed to flee the country...

...Lodged in the mountain fastnesses in the north of the country, Kurdish separatists violently disputed the central authority in Baghdad...

...Among those executed by order of a Revolutionary Court (permanent "special" courts for political offenses,established when the Baathists returned to power in 1968) were twenty-two members of the Baath party accused of taking part in a pro-Syrian conspiracy against the regime...

...He had the conspirators arrested and put to death...

...In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Communists and Baathists frequently engaged in bloody street battles in cities and towns throughout Iraq...

...Although he is not a military man and harbors profound distrust for the professional soldiers on whom he must rely, Saddam Hussein has always been obsessed with military force and weaponry...

...But unlike many Third World leaders, Saddam Hussein is not in it for the money...

...As far as can be known, he has not made a habit of confusing the public purse with numbered bank accounts in Switzerland, and has severely punished government officials suspected of taking bribes...

...In the end, it was the manufacturer, Dassault, who suffered the most...

...But the day is coming when he—and History—may have to choose...

...The experience with the Soviet arms embargo taught Saddam Hussein a lesson he was not about to forget: depending on a sole source for arms supplies puts unacceptable limits on national sovereignty...

...In the international arena, it has led to dangerous games: war with Iran, adventurism in Lebanon, and, most recently, Saddam's threat to "burn half of Israel" in retaliation for an eventual Israeli attack on Iraq's strategic weapons or production facilities...

...Ruthless, strong-willed, determined, unforgiving: these are the adjectives that best describe the dictator who since 1968 has ruled Iraq with an iron fist...

...Even the French, who supplied the backbone of a revamped air force (delivering 138 Mirage F-1 fighter-bombers from 1980-89, and every type of missile produced in France), could not influence their Iraqi client...

...Today its strategic weapons and military production facilities have been dispersed throughout the country...

...And that price is total allegiance to the regime...

...Does he have the stuff of which international statesmanship is made...

...Sad-dam's trouble is that no one takes him seriously...

...Just act normally," Saddam is reported to have hissed to his rival as they passed through the military checkpoints...

...According to Saddam's official biographer, Fouad Mater, the future Iraqi president was only supposed to cover the four-man hit team as they made their escape in a getaway car parked nearby, but he was "too enthusiastic to control himself' and opened fire with the others on Qassem's motorcade...

...He is all bludgeon, and no finesse...

...From now on, Iraq was on its own, with Saddam at the helm...

...Even his blustering threats to launch binary chemical weapons against Israel were carefully couched in a framework resembling the "mutually assured destruction" theory that used to govern superpower relations...

...The Pentagon leak was undoubtedly intended to convince Iraq that the Bush Administration does not intend to encourage the type of "Iraq bashing" now prevalent in certain quarters...

...The subversion came that spring through Iranian support of the al-Dawa Islamic militants then gathering strength inside Iraq, and culminated in an assassination attempt against Deputy Premier (now Foreign Minister) Tarek Aziz while he was delivering a speech at Baghdad University...

...Working underground was a capital experience that would form the basis of his political method later on, leaving him with a strong taste for secrecy and an uncanny ability for spotting potential enemies and destroying them before they could THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 15 mount a challenge to his power...

...In late 1986, upset by the mountain of unpaid Iraqi debt, the French attempted to pressure Baghdad by withholding delivery of the remaining twenty-four Mirage aircraft...

...In a detailed response to Amnesty's allegations, the Iraqi government called these executions "questions which involve the interior rules of the Party [and therefore] can not become the subject of discussion with your organization...

...The Baath retains its secretive cell structure to this day...

...In exile first in Damascus, later in Cairo, Saddam quickly climbed the ranks of the clandestine apparatus of the Baath party...