W O R L D
What Saddam Was Really
Thinking
New
disclosures paint a surprising portrait of the Iraqi dictator and his fateful
strategies
By JOHANNA
MCGEARY
KAREN
BALLARD / REDUX FOR TIME Saddam Hussein |
|
Sunday, Oct. 10, 2004
For years, Saddam Hussein showed himself to be a master practitioner of the big
bluff. Everyone outside Iraq and just about everyone inside believed that he harbored a secret stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
So imagine the shock his generals received in late 2002 when U.S. forces were
massing on the country's borders for an imminent invasion, and Saddam suddenly
informed them that Iraq had no biological or chemical or nuclear weapons at
all. Longtime aide Tariq Aziz told U.S. interrogators that military morale plummeted
the moment senior officers learned Iraq would have to fight the U.S. without
those weapons. The dictator's cunning policy of deception had deceived the
wrong side.
Saddam had always hoped to dictate how
history would view him. In his mind, he was the successor to great Iraqi heroes
like Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, to be revered as a giant among them for
millenniums. But the Saddam who emerges from the pages of a new, comprehensive
CIA report on Iraq's alleged arsenal will be remembered for the colossal misjudgments that cost him his rule. The exhaustive detail
compiled by the report's author, Charles Duelfer,
chief U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s and the Bush Administration's top
hunter since January, richly fills in the previous portrait of a paranoid and
brutal dictator who believed that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were the
prime tools with which to advance his extravagant ambitions. Drawn from lengthy
interrogations of the core Iraqi leadership and Saddam during their months in
U.S. custody, the Duelfer report sheds fresh light on
the dictator's inner motivations and artful deceptions.
Saddam was awed by science and impressed
by the way technology conveyed military power. To him, WMD were a telling
symbol of strength and modernity, and he thought any country that could develop
them had an intrinsic right to do so. In his experience, through 25 years and
two wars, WMD had also saved his neck. In the 1980s war with Iran, he concluded
that chemical shells had repelled the enemy's human-wave attacks and that
ballistic missiles had broken the will of its leaders. He was convinced that his
readiness to use WMD during the Gulf War in 1991 had prevented the U.S.-led
liberators of Kuwait from marching all the way to Baghdad to topple his regime.
In a closed-door chat between Saddam and a senior aide just before the Gulf War
began, the report says, he had ordered that "germ and chemical warheads
... be in [military officers'] hands asap" and
targeted to hit Riyadh and Jeddah, "the biggest Saudi cities with all the
decision-makers and where the Saudi rulers live," as well as "all the
Israeli cities." He had squelched the Kurdish rebellion by gassing
villages and put down the Shi'ite uprising in the
wake of the Gulf War with the help of nerve gas.
But by the spring of 1991, Saddam faced a
critical decision. Though defeated on the battlefield, he had kept stocks of
WMD squirreled away and maintained secret development programs. Now he faced
tough postwar U.N. sanctions that would cripple Iraq
unless he got rid of the WMD. Saddam made a calculated decision, says the
report, that getting out from under sanctions was of paramount importance. He
opted for a "tactical retreat" by ordering the elimination of what he
had left: all biological, chemical and nuclear programs were abandoned,
stockpiles destroyed. The vast array of evidence uncovered to date shows that
when the U.S. invaded in March 2003, Saddam had not been armed with WMD for a
decade and that his ability to make new ones had been in a state of continual
degradation.
But according to the
report, former officials say they "heard him say or inferred" that he
"intended to resume" developing his chemical- and nuclear-weapon
capability—though biological warfare no longer interested him—once sanctions
were lifted. The regime had "no formal written strategy or plan" to
do so, but lieutenants say they "understood" that was his goal
"from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm,
verbal comments to them."
To hasten the day, Saddam
turned his cunning to sanctions busting. He bought into the oil-for-food
program in 1996 to acquire hard currency that could salvage his rock-bottom
economy and pay for potential dual-use equipment on the black market. He
personally doled out vouchers, which allowed recipients to buy Iraqi oil at a
cheap price and then sell it for a quick profit, to foreign officials and
companies, notably in France, Russia and China, that were expected to lobby
their governments to lift sanctions. His wiles, said the report, had nearly
scuttled the embargo by 2001.
Duelfer's report also gives
an extraordinary, intimate glimpse into the dictator's behavior. Lieutenants
thought his psychology was "powerfully shaped by a deprived and violent
boyhood in a village and tribal society," especially by the strong
influence of his xenophobic guardian uncle. One aide said Saddam "loved
the use of force," confirming the tale that in 1982 he "ordered the
execution" of a disloyal minister "and delivery of the dismembered
body to the victim's wife."
Meanwhile, fear for his own
survival increasingly ruled Saddam's daily life. He told his debriefer that he
had used a telephone only twice since 1990, so no one could target him. He had
his food tested for poisons at a special laboratory. He justified his orgy of
palace building in the late '90s as a way to make it harder for enemies to spot
him. He grew increasingly paranoid about assassination after attackers nearly
killed his elder son Uday in 1996. In deepening seclusion, the former
micromanager who used to personally ground-check the truth of his underlings'
reports grew less engaged.
A top aide reported it
would "sometimes take three days to get in touch with Saddam," even
in periods of crisis. At one point during the 2002 face-off with U.N.
inspections, Saddam was awol, so a senior official took it on himself to
authorize inspection overflights.
Still, in a regime in which
all important decisions were made by his fiat, Saddam kept tight control of
subordinates. Their influence and willingness to speak up were constrained by
fear of losing their jobs—or their lives. That fear generated a culture of
lying that subverted Saddam's decision making. Top men, said an aide,
"habitually" concealed unpleasant realities from Saddam. In late 2002
military officers lied about their preparedness, according to Aziz, which led
Saddam to miscalculate Iraq's ability to deter an invasion.
Saddam had no clear picture
of the U.S. He told his debriefer he tried to understand Western culture by
watching U.S. movies and listening to Voice of America broadcasts. He loved
Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea because he read in the tale of
the brave but failed fisherman a parallel to his own struggles.
"Even a hollow victory
was by his reckoning a real one," the report says. Far more worried about
Iran, Saddam did not consider the U.S. a "natural adversary" and
throughout the '90s, he had his officials make overtures for a dialogue with
the U.S. He said he was disappointed that Washington never gave him a chance. In
the end, Saddam's failure to figure out the U.S. cost him everything. He never
got the profound impact of 9/11 on U.S. attitudes and stupidly overruled
advisers' suggestion that he issue a message of condolence for the carnage. Well
into 2002, he never thought the U.S. could stomach the casualties of an
invasion to depose him, and then "thought the war would last a few days and
it would be over." Said Aziz: "He was overconfident. He was clever.
But his calculations were poor."
The greatest mystery,
though, was his long game of deception: if Saddam had destroyed his WMD to
escape from sanctions, why did he work so hard from 1991 until he was
overthrown in 2003 to perpetuate the belief he still had them? The reason,
suggests Duelfer, lay in how he saw the "survival of himself, his regime
and his legacy."
While the U.S. was fixated
on Saddam's threat, he focused on his strategies for Iran and considered WMD
essential to keeping his neighbor in check. So he was driven by what the report
calls "a difficult balancing act": getting rid of his WMD to win
relief from the sanctions while pretending he still had them to serve as a
strategic deterrent. "The regime never resolved the contradiction inherent
in this approach," says the report. Saddam privately told an aide the
"better part of war was deceiving," but ironically he was telling the
West the truth. In the end, his big bluff destroyed him—and drew the U.S. into
an engagement that will help determine George W. Bush's fate at the polls next
month.
— With reporting by Timothy J. Burger and Elaine Shannon/Washington