4
Saddam was never a soldier. That omission in the story of his life may help to explain much about his behaviour as he grew to manhood and afterwards. It had been his ambition to train as an officer at the Iraq Military Academy in Baghdad but he lacked the education even to attempt the entrance exam. He resented his exclusion and conceived what was to prove a lasting jealousy of contemporaries who did secure commissions. He believed that they were unfairly privileged and probably with reason. As was not the case in many developing countries, the composition of the officer corps in Iraq was class-based. The military profession was a middle-class occupation, dominated by families which had often supplied officers to the old Ottoman army. Indeed, many of the leading figures in mandate and post-mandate Iraq, such as Nuri al-Sa’id, Prime Minister at the time of the overthrow of the monarchy, had been Ottoman officers. They were favoured by the British and often Anglophile in consequence.
There was an alternative, nationalist tradition in the army, represented by such officers as Rashid Ali, who led the attempt in 1941 to form an alliance with Nazi Germany and the brief military action against the British army and RAF garrison. Saddam’s uncle, Khairallah, was a supported of Rashid Ali but, like other officers who took part in the action, suffered by doing so. He was sentenced to a lengthy term of imprisonment. The leaders were hanged. The British successfully quashed the nationalist trend in the officer corps after 1941 and it was not to revive until the appearance of the Free Officers movement in Egypt in the 1950s inspired Arab officers all over the Middle East to espouse the anti-colonialist cause.
Saddam’s hostility to professional officers may, however, have bitten deeper as he rose higher in Ba’athist politics and perhaps became a dominant sentiment once he achieved power. Self-made dictators are often so affected. Hitler nurtured a deep suspicion, eventually amounting to hatred, of the German regular officer class, particularly those qualified as staff officers. His attitude may have been differently based from that of Saddam, since he had been a frontline soldier who regarded staff officers as shirkers. Stalin, Saddam’s idol, probably better anticipated his attitude. Stalin, though closely involved in warfare from the beginning of the Bolshevik seizure of power, was also never a soldier; instead he served as a political commissar, imposing party control over the decisions of commanders. The generals of the First Cavalry Army, with whom he served on the southern front during the Russian civil war, retained his favour, irrespective of their military talents, after he became ruler of the Soviet Union. Others, all too often the most promising, became the victims of his suspicion and died in the great military purge of 1937. Saddam betrayed the same trait. He identified successful generals as potential rivals and had them removed and often killed once they achieved popularity.
Events presented Saddam with ample opportunity to humiliate and victimize Iraqi generals for, under his dictatorship, his country was almost continuously at war. His first war, against Iran, began almost immediately after his seizure of power in 1979 and lasted from 1980–88. His second, now known as the First Gulf War, effectively began with his annexation of Kuwait in August 1990 and culminated in total defeat in February 1991. His third war, the subject of this book, began on 20 March 2003 and resulted in the capture of Baghdad on 9 April, the collapse of the Iraqi armed forces and Saddam’s disappearance (but eventual discovery in hiding on 13 December). Even the years between 1991 and 2003 had failed to bring peace to his country; immediately after the army’s collapse on 28 February 1991, the UN imposed restrictions on Iraq’s freedom to operate military aircraft in the Kurdish zone, north of the 36th parallel; in 1992 the United States, Britain and France announced the imposition of another ‘no fly zone’ in the Shi’a region south of the 32nd parallel. The bans on the operation of military aircraft were enforced by the coalition air forces and by missile forces, which attacked radar stations, air bases and anti-aircraft sites.
Saddam was entirely responsible for setting his country on the path of this twenty-year war. In the period before the seizure of power when, as deputy to President Bakr, he had had control of Iraqi foreign policy, he had correctly judged that the Shah’s Iran, then supported by the United States, was too powerful a neighbour to be opposed. Its armed forces outnumbered those of Iraq, as did its population, and it had allies who were not to be crossed. It was for those reasons that Saddam had in 1975 judged it necessary to yield to the Iranian demand for a realignment, in Iran’s favour, of the Iraq–Iran frontier on the Shatt el-Arab waterway, to follow the Iraqi shore instead of the Thalweg (centre line); the adjustment had been announced as a unilateral act by the Shah in April 1969.
Saddam’s reconciliation with the Shah in 1975 was brought about entirely through his calculation that a cession of national territory in the south was necessary if the north of the country was not to escape from Ba’athist control. During the early seventies the Iraqi Kurds, who regarded the nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company as a usurpation of their oil-bearing regions around Mosul, and who in any case felt excluded as non-Arabs from the country’s political system, completely dominated as it was by the Sunni Arab minority, initiated an insurgency which rapidly turned into a bitter internal war. It was a conflict that the Iraqi army, trained as a national defence force, was ill-equipped to fight; tanks and artillery were not the weapons needed to win a guerrilla war in the Kurdish mountains. Moreover, the Kurds were supported by the Soviet Union which saw their resistance as a means of bringing pressure on Saddam to desist from his persecution of the Iraqi Communist Party. The calculation was well-judged. In January 1970 Saddam visited Moscow and agreed to scale down operations in Kurdistan if the Russians would cease supplying weapons to the guerrillas (the Iraqi army was also a major beneficiary of Soviet army supplies).
Inevitably, given his devious nature, Saddam found ways round the agreement. The Iraqi army was not withdrawn from Kurdistan, and a serious assassination attempt was even mounted on the life of the Kurdish leader, Mustapha Barzani. Nevertheless, the security situation improved in Kurdistan until in 1974 the Shah, who had many Kurdish subjects of his own, chose to intervene on his own account. He, as leader of the largest Shi’a community in the Middle East, was affronted by Iraq’s mistreatment of its Shi’a majority; he also sought means to force Iraq to accept his claim to the west bank of the Shatt el-Arab. The Iranian intervention was decisive. At a meeting in Algiers on 6 March 1975, Saddam, acting as President Bakr’s deputy, conceded the territorial adjustment, though it effectively gave control of Iraq’s tiny coastline on the Persian Gulf to Iran, in return for an Iranian promise to withdraw support from the Kurds. ‘It was either that’, Saadoun Hammadi, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, was reported to have said, ‘or lose the north of the country.’
The situation remained, nevertheless, highly unstable. The Kurds were not reconciled to the régime, nor were the Shi’a. The Soviet Union remained a powerful patron of the Iraqi Ba’athists but continued to feel concern for the country’s surviving Communists. The Shah was as involved as before in the welfare of Iraq’s Shi’a community, which, in the province of Khuzistan, spilled over into his own country. Ultimately it was Iranian rather than Iraqi politics which determined the next twist of events. The Shah’s programme of modernization had alienated the religious leadership of his own Shi’ites, who regarded it as a violation of Islamic orthodoxy. The imams found secular education and the emancipation of women particularly repugnant. Theirs was an attitude that was gaining strength throughout the Muslim world and emboldening traditionalist leaders in many states. The most influential of the Iranian traditionalists, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been expelled from his homeland, was in 1977 living in Najaf, one of the holy cities of the Shi’a sect in southern Iraq. At the Shah’s request he was expelled again, finding refuge in the West, but within Iran the demand that he should be allowed to return became irresistible and in February 1979 he was welcomed home to Tehran in triumph. His reappearance doomed the Shah but also created the circumstances in which Saddam, once installed as Iraq’s President, should embark on a disastrous war.
Although the Ayatollah Khomeini had been given sanctuary in Iraq after his expulsion from Iran, and despite Saddam’s efforts to conciliate his Islamic régime after his return from exile in Paris, he evinced no gratitude. Khomeini was an Islamic fanatic, who had devised a new interpretation of Shi’ism. Pious Shi’ites believe that the successors of Muhammad had disappeared from human view but continued to exist as ‘hidden’ imams. In their absence, and until the reappearance of the latest hidden imam, other religious leaders were forbidden to exercise any political role. Khomeini taught that, despite traditional Shi’a belief, a true mystic inspired by Allah and a master of religious law – implicitly himself – was entitled to teach and rule. His preaching and his dominating personality captured the imagination of millions of Iranian Shi’ites and brought him to power. He at once initiated an internal Islamic revolution, which caused the deaths of thousands of the Shah’s modernizers; but his vision went farther. He saw his mission to be that of spreading the revolution throughout the region and that entailed confronting secularists everywhere. The nearest, who was also a notorious persecutor of Shi’a believers, was Saddam Hussein. While in exile in Paris Khomeini had named his enemies as ‘First the Shah; then the American Satan; then Saddam Hussein and the infidel Ba’ath Party’.
Immediately after Khomeini’s return home, Saddam attempted to ingratiate himself with the Islamic régime in Iran by declaring a policy of ‘mutual respect and non-interference in internal affairs’. He began to pray in public, to show consideration for Shi’a religious practices and holy places and generally to demonstrate his respect for Islamic belief. Khomeini was quite unmollified, correctly judging Saddam’s sudden demonstration of piety as merely expedient. He called on the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam and openly supported Shi’ite resistance to Ba’athist rule. Iranian involvement in an attempt to assassinate Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister and, anomalously, an Eastern Rite Christian, was barely disguised.
During 1980 Saddam was progressively driven to conclude that all attempts to placate the régime of the ayatollahs were pointless; Iranian Islamicism was not only hostile but also dangerous to Ba’athism, while, as long as Khomeini ruled, there could be no hope of settling the Shatt el-Arab dispute. Force alone, Saddam decided, could rectify the situation. Objectively, moreover, the resort to force was a logical option. Khomeini’s revolution had devastated the Iranian armed forces, a leading element of the modernization programme, and a disproportionate number of the victims had been senior officers. Military morale had been heavily depressed as a result, as had operational efficiency. Saddam had good reason to conclude, therefore, that Iraq’s armed forces, though only half the size of those of Iran, were capable of achieving a quick and cheap victory.
Saddam began the Iran–Iraq war on 22 September 1980 by launching squadrons of his air force, equipped with French Mirage fighter-bombers, against ten Iranian air bases. His hope was to repeat the success of the Israelis on the first day of the 1967 war when, by co-ordinated surprise attacks, the air forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria had been destroyed in a few hours on their airfields. His hope was not achieved. As Saddam was later often to complain, geography was against Iraq. Iran is a large country and its military bases were distributed all over its territory, many distant from the frontiers; Israel’s targets in 1967, by contrast, had all been concentrated close behind enemy frontiers in easy reach of attack. In 1980 much of the Iranian air force survived the initial strikes and was able to mount retaliation on the same day, not only against Iraqi air bases but also against Iraqi naval units and some oil facilities, which were to prove critical targets throughout the ensuing eight-year war.
Nevertheless Saddam had been correct in his prewar judgement that the disorganization brought about by the ayatollahs’ purge of the secularist, but efficient and well-trained, Iranian military leadership would make it difficult for Iran to mount an effective defence. Within a month of the start of the war the Iraqis had advanced into Iran on a front of 600 kilometres (373 miles), to a depth varying from 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) in the north to 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) in the south. They had captured several towns and got within artillery range of Dezful, a key transportation centre in the northern oilfields. In the south, after a bitter battle in the streets, the city of Khorramshahr had been taken, but at a cost of 7,000 dead and wounded. The Iraqis had, however, failed to take nearby Abadan, the old Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s refinery centre through which most of the country’s oil was exported down the Gulf; without Abadan, moreover, they were ill-positioned to recapture the east bank of the Shatt el-Arab.
Having achieved his initial advance, Saddam, who was acting as supreme commander despite his complete lack of military experience, ordered the army to dig in on a defensive line. He apparently wished to avoid inflicting casualties, in the belief that the Iranians would give in if offered the chance to do so; he also calculated that the ground captured could be used in bargaining for a settlement. On both counts he was wrong. The Iranian people had been seized with patriotic fervour and, as events would demonstrate, were prepared to accept very heavy casualties to avoid defeat, while the Iranian government had no interest in negotiating a settlement on any terms favourable to Iraq.
Saddam’s pause had the farther effect of allowing the Iranians to regroup, reorganize, and induct hundreds of thousands of new recruits into the army. In May 1981 they were able to launch a counteroffensive which forced the Iraqis to pull back from Abadan to Khorramshahr and in October they were driven across the Karun River, one of the first objectives. In November the tide of battle turned markedly in the Iranians’ favour. They began to organize mass attacks, sending human waves of untrained juveniles to march into Iraqi minefields and barrages of automatic fire. Step by step, during the rest of the 1981 campaign and into the spring of 1982, the Iraqis were forced to give ground, losing thousands of prisoners in the process. Saddam was unable to mount an effective defence, let alone a counter-offensive, and in June 1982 declared a cease-fire, claiming that Iraq had achieved its objects.
Iraq was in fact close to defeat, less because of military losses, grievous though they were, than financial difficulties. The fighting in the south, at the head of the Gulf, had severely diminished Iraq’s ability to export oil, but not so Iran’s which, with outlets onto the lower Gulf and the Indian Ocean, could continue to earn oil income. Iraq, as the war became protracted, was increasingly dependent on subsidies from neighbours, particularly Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to which Saddam successfully represented the war as a struggle against Islamic fundamentalism in which he fought to protect not only his régime but also theirs. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia both transported essential supplies to Iraq and provided oil credits to foreign suppliers, which paid, among other things, for war material. After two years of fighting, Iraq was effectively sustaining its war by borrowing and the loans, unsecured, unserviced and mounting, were putting the country into an increasingly unfavourable financial position. Its financial situation was to worsen throughout the following years and collapse to be staved off only by persuading neighbours to lengthen credit and, eventually, the United States to lend its support. During the 1980s Iran was regarded by the United States as the most dangerous of its Third World enemies, because of the violent anti-Americanism of the ayatollah régime and for its seizure of the staff of the American embassy in Tehran, in gross violation of international law. The extension of support to anti-Iranian Gulf States was a natural consequence; it eventually included the reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers as American ships, hastened after Iran began air attacks on tankers in 1984, and the strengthening of the American naval presence in the Gulf to protect them.
Yet despite foreign assistance, the war began to go badly against Iraq after 1982 and the turn of events was not to be disguised. Internally the cost, running at a billion US dollars a month, began to reduce funds available for imports; after an initial boom, deliberately sustained by Saddam to buoy civilian support for the war, the economy began to show signs of recession. Between 1980 and 1983 Iraq’s foreign currency reserves fell from $35 billion to $3 billion, with a consequent drop in imports; the reserves were farther adversely affected by Syria’s action in closing the pipeline to the Mediterranean, in retaliation for Saddam’s rupture of relations with the Syrian Ba’athist party. The human as well as financial costs were high, with casualties running at 1,200 a month, a figure that rose sharply during offensives. Militarily, from 1982 onwards, Iran was able to mount offensives with increasing frequency. During the summer of 1982 Iran embarked on a major offensive designed to cross the Tigris and reach Basra, Iraq’s second city and capital of the Shi’a south. The methods were as before: mass attacks by waves of untrained, under-age volunteers. After the initial shock, however, the Iraqis proved equal to the strain. Their engineers constructed extensive and deep lines of fortifications, in places creating artificial lakes which funnelled the direction of the Iranian thrusts. Behind strong defences the Iraqis fought well, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers; if ground was lost, it was recaptured by ground–air counter-attacks. The Iranian air force had difficulty in operating, because of American refusal to supply spare parts for its aircraft, while the Iraqi air force, flying French and Russian aircraft, was not so penalized; it was also equipped with large numbers of helicopters which Iran lacked. Moreover the Iraqi ground forces, encouraged by their defensive successes, displayed markedly improved morale; even the Shi’a conscripts, deterred at the thought of the ayatollahs exporting their joyless regime in the wake of victory, found a sense of patriotism and battled with a will.
Between 1982 and 1984 the struggle degenerated into a war of attrition, with the Iranians maintaining the offensive but Iraq inflicting the heavier casualties. Although by 1984 the total of Iraqi war dead had reached 65,000, with up to 60,000 taken prisoner, the equivalent Iranian figure was 180,000 dead and half a million wounded. Moreover, the Iranians were not gaining ground. The exception to their consistent failure to do so came in early 1984 when, by a cunningly organized night attack, Iranian amphibious forces succeeded in surprising the garrison of the Majnun Islands, near Basra. Despite repeated attempts to recapture the islands, the Iraqis failed. Saddam therefore decided to resort to unconventional methods. He was already manufacturing chemical weapons at two plants, at Salman Pak and Samarra, and now used two products, mustard gas and Tabun, in helicopter attacks on the Iranian positions. Mustard gas is a blistering agent, developed and widely used during the First World War, Tabun a nerve agent developed by the Nazis for use in extermination camps.
Chemical agents are notoriously unsatisfactory as weapons of war. They are difficult to deliver with precision and, once launched, are wholly subject for effect on the vagaries of the local weather; low humidity robs the agents of effect quickly, high humidity causes them to persist; favourable wind direction carries them into the enemy positions, unfavourable wind direction causes ‘blow back’ or results in dispersion away from the battlefield. The Iraqis in the Majnun Islands encountered all those conditions; the Iranians, by contrast, soon acquired protective clothing and antidotes which rendered the use of chemical agents pointless.
In the long run, Saddam’s resort to chemical weapons was to do him nothing but harm. Not only did his chemical warfare campaign fail to achieve its intended results; it also alerted the attention of the United Nations. The use of chemical weapons had been outlawed by the League of Nations during the 1920s and the ban had been sustained with remarkable consistency throughout the Second World War and afterwards. As one of the few demonstrable successes of international arms control, the United Nations was determined to support it and in March 1984 a team of UN inspectors was despatched to Iran to investigate its complaints. The team confirmed that Iraq had broken the ban, a report that prejudiced most countries previously favourable to Saddam against him. For a time Saddam was brought to desist; in 1987–88, however, he resumed his use of chemical weapons, in that period against his own people in Kurdistan, in an attempt to terrorize them against co-operating with Iranian incursions into their area. Notoriously, at Halabjah in March 1988, his use of chemical agents killed at least 5,000 Kurdish civilians in an operation directed by his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, later to be known as ‘Chemical Ali’.
Between 1984 and 1988, however, Saddam’s distasteful reputation as a chemical warmaker was offset in foreign opinion by what appeared to be the much more threatening behaviour of his enemies, both in Iran and in the wider Middle Eastern world. The ayatollahs made no attempt to placate either the West or the Soviet Union. They persisted in persecuting the Tudeh, Iran’s Communist Party, and they made little effort to disguise their links with Islamic anti-Western terrorists. The Syrians, meanwhile, were continuing to provide refuge and training facilities to a number of violent Islamic terrorist groups and President Gaddafi so provoked the United States by his support for terrorists that it launched airstrikes against Libya in early 1986. In these circumstances it was comparatively easy for Saddam to represent himself as a force for stability in a troubled region. He was, from the middle of the Iran–Iraq War, certainly so treated. The small Gulf States, terrified that Iran might infect their populations with anti-monarchist and fundamentalist feeling, increased their donations to Iraq’s war chest, eventually to the tune of $25 billion. The Soviet Union began to supply high-technology equipment, including intermediate range missiles, capable of reaching Iran’s major cities from Iraqi bases. Egypt recycled some of its Soviet equipment to help Iraq with spare parts. France, if on a strictly financial basis, delivered dozens of high-performance strike aircraft, enhancing Iraqi capability to attack the Iranian tanker trade.
Most tellingly of all, the United States, which had throughout the years of Saddam’s rise kept Iraq on its list of countries suspected of supporting international terrorism, now decided that a shift of policy would be advantageous. Saddam’s enemies were also America’s, a perception heightened by anti-American terrorist outrages in Lebanon in 1983, when, in what was to prove the first instalment of suicide bombing, a Marine barracks was truck bombed with great loss of life, following a devastating attack on the US embassy in the city. Saddam’s Foreign Minister was invited to Washington; in December 1983 his visit was returned by Donald Rumsfeld, then acting as a special Middle Eastern adviser to President Reagan. David Mack, a former State Department official who accompanied Rumsfeld to Baghdad, explained later that ‘we wanted to build a Cairo–Amman–Baghdad axis’. The warmer relationship thus established did not lead to the US supplying arms to Saddam (though in 1982 it did send sixty military helicopters designated as crop-sprayers, which Saddam peremptorily had adapted to fire anti-tank missiles), but Washington used its good offices to facilitate the construction of new pipelines to port outlets in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, thus easing Iraq’s financial difficulties, and it also began covertly to supply intelligence to Baghdad, derived from satellite overflights and surveillance by American AWACS aircraft operating from Saudi Arabia.
Despite Saddam’s success in attracting foreign support after 1984, he was not at first able to shift the balance of the war decisively his way. He began by using the advanced weaponry with which he had been supplied to intensify his attacks on Iranian cities. The Iranian air force responded in kind but its stock of warplanes had been so reduced by losses in combat that the contest proved unequal. Iraqi missile strikes actually provoked demonstrations against the war in the affected cities. Saddam had better success by using his French-supplied strike aircraft, Super Étendards equipped with Exocet sea-skimming missiles, to intensify attacks on Iranian tanker traffic and the terminals at which the tankers loaded; there were seventy missile strikes in 1984–85. Iran responded by shifting its attacks to Kuwaiti tankers, in retaliation for Kuwait’s financial support of the Iraqi war effort, a move which, as mentioned above, led to an extensive reflagging of the tankers as American ships. This strengthening of the American position against the ayatollah régime was set back in a bizarre fashion when evidence came to light that Washington was simultaneously supplying Iran with weapons – the Iran–Contra affair – in an effort to secure the release of American hostages held by Islamic terrorists in Lebanon; the repercussions severely shook the Reagan administration. It did not assist Saddam’s position, in any case, when a damaging attack on the USS Stark in the Gulf, on 17 May 1987, was revealed to be the result of an Iraqi Exocet strike.
Nevertheless Saddam’s efforts to involve Western and other navies in the protection of Gulf tanker traffic against Iranian attack had become so comprehensive that even the Stark affair did not dent the defence they offered. His finances, despite the punishing costs of the war, also continued to hold up. Although by 1987 Iraq’s foreign debts amounted to $50.5 billion, or thrice its gross domestic product, with another $45–55 billion owed in loans from client Gulf states, sympathetic treatment by American, Saudi and even Soviet institutions allowed it to make interest payments and find purchasing power abroad. Iraq was effectively bankrupt but was able to continue fighting because no interested state, outside a small coterie of Islamic and anti-Israeli countries, wished to see it defeated.
Then in February 1988 the shift in advantage, for which Saddam had always worked, at last swung Iraq’s way. The terrible suffering brought by the war to Iran, which had sustained nearly a million military casualties, out of a population of 9 million males of military age, combined with the unremitting air attacks on its cities, which had caused a widespread flight of the civilian population, had so weakened the ayatollah régime’s power that it could no longer mount an effective defence. Saddam opened his decisive counter-offensive with renewed air and missile attacks on Iranian centres. In April, assisted by intelligence support, he unleashed a ground offensive on the Fao peninsula, lost to Iran in 1986; it was captured and by early July so was all Iraqi territory lost to the Iranians since 1980. The Iraqis also expelled the remaining Iranian forces from Kurdistan and even succeeded in seizing a foothold across the enemy border.
As Iran was also undergoing damaging attacks by Iraqi aircraft on its tanker traffic and coastal oil outlets, which it was unable to counter, reality forced the ayatollah régime to accept that the war could not be won and could only be prosecuted farther at increasing and pointless loss. Since 1982 Ayatollah Khomeini had insisted that only Saddam’s relinquishment of power – ‘régime change’ as it would later be known – would induce him to enter into a settlement. He was now brought to recognize that he could not achieve that outcome. On 18 July 1988, therefore, Iran announced to the United Nations that it would accept Security Council Resolution 598, calling for a cease-fire, and it came into effect a month later. Ayatollah Khomeini died the following year, at the age of eighty-seven.
Saddam, still only in his early fifties and in vigorous health, had therefore won a sort of victory; but at terrible cost. Besides the war dead, totalling perhaps over 100,000, the conflict had also severely weakened the Iraqi economy. War debts, largely owed to the Gulf States and to Saudi Arabia, amounted to $80 billion; reconstruction costs were calculated at $230 billion. Ordinary state expenditure exceeded income from oil, about $13 billion a year; there was no other significant export except dates. The country could not service its debts, was surviving after 1988 only by begging for time to pay from its creditors and was effectively bankrupt. At the outset of Saddam’s taking power, Iraq was a prosperous country with an excellent credit rating. By 1988 it was mired in borrowing which it could not manage. Moreover, Saddam’s institution of an austerity programme at home, designed to reduce government spending, brought him unpopularity. Large numbers of soldiers were demobilized into unemployment, the number of state employees was abruptly reduced, state spending projects were curtailed, with a farther loss of jobs, and the sale of state enterprises was seen to benefit only a small group of Iraqi capitalists.
Saddam had other difficulties. Despite the departure of Iranian troops from Kurdistan, Kurdish resistance continued, provoking him, unwisely, to resort to the use of chemical weapons against the rebels. In March 1988 he had deluged the township of Halabjah, the last place to be occupied by the Iranians, with hydrogen cyanide, killing 5,000 of the inhabitants and injuring 10,000 more. During the summer of 1988 he subjected another sixty-five Kurdish villages to chemical attack, causing heavy casualties and the flight of a quarter of a million Kurds to Iran or Turkey. He was meanwhile persisting with his efforts to develop an Iraqi nuclear weapons programme, despite the success of the Israelis in destroying the Osirak reactor centre in 1981. The West, generally so exigent in its efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, as indeed was the Soviet Union, at first displayed a careless indifference to Saddam’s lust to acquire unconventional weapons, including the missile systems necessary to deliver them. The West’s unconcern, originally conditioned by its estimation that Saddam, for all his known faults, was preferable as an agent of power in the Gulf region to the incomprehensible ayatollahs, persisted into the post-Gulf War period. Then, the balance of opinion, unpredictably fickle as it so often is, swung against him. He made what proved to be the grave mistake of arresting and executing a Western journalist, after a travesty of a trial, for reporting on his unconventional weapons programme. Suddenly international opinion took against him. The United States was already suspicious of his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, a clear threat to its client state of Israel; the judicial murder of the Observer journalist, Farzal Bazoft, attracted the condemnation of Margaret Thatcher, who, as British Prime Minister, was the principal non-American influence on the outlook of President Ronald Reagan.
Saddam had by that stage of his career killed so many critics of his régime that he no doubt failed to comprehend why one more elimination of a troublesome individual should have serious international repercussions. Had he allowed the dust to settle it might not have done so. Almost immediately after the Bazoft affair, however, he embarked on a new foreign policy initiative which farther provoked Western disapproval. The matter was, politically if not morally, of far greater weight. Saddam made it clear that he was bent on recovering the crippling costs of the Iran war.
Though he had attacked Iran without any thought that he might be biting off more than he could chew, the first two years of the war had shown him otherwise. As difficulties developed, he turned to the other Gulf States for help, in the expectation that repayment would be neither difficult nor inconveniently demanded. As the war drew out he had found that loans and subsidies were made with increasing reluctance, and eventually arranged only out of fear of an Iranian victory. By the time the ayatollahs conceded, the cost to the Gulf States, Kuwait foremost, of sheltering behind Iraq equated, in financial if not human terms, to what might have been incurred had they fought themselves.
Saddam’s ‘victory’ thus left a bitter aftertaste. He expected, if not gratitude, at least financial understanding from his neighbours. They, however, wanted their money back. Both parties pitched their terms too high. Saddam began to demand not only the cancellation of his debt, $40 billion by 1988, but a large farther subsidy, $30 billion, to pay for reconstruction. His creditors, increasingly doubtful of his willingness or ability to repay, began to recompense themselves by increasing oil production, in breach of OPEC agreements to stabilize quotas. As oil prices on the international market were falling at the time, the Gulf States’ policy doubly disadvantaged Iraq, which found its income shrinking in consequence. The Emir of Kuwait, despite the evidence of Saddam’s growing displeasure, nevertheless emphasized that he would not reduce oil output, would not grant new loans and would continue to demand repayment of Iraq’s debts.
That was foolhardy on a number of counts. Whatever else was wrong with Saddam’s international position, lack of military force was not one of his postwar weaknesses. He controlled the largest and most experienced army in the Gulf region and the sixth largest air force in the world. Moreover his difference with the Emir of Kuwait was not born of any recent and material dispute but went back to the early days of Iraqi independence. Under the Ottomans, who had ruled Mesopotamia since the sixteenth century, Kuwait had been administered as part of the province (vilayet) of Basra. Under the tutelage of the British, who had run an undeclared empire over the Gulf States through the government of India and the Royal Navy throughout Victoria’s reign, Kuwait had acquired a sort of independence from the Turks. This was not accepted by the Iraqi political class which, as soon as the mandate was ended in 1932, began to articulate a claim to Kuwait as part of the national territory. The claim was in part nationalist but was perhaps more strongly driven by Kuwait’s oil wealth, contained in fields which straddled the common border, and by Kuwait’s better access to the waters of the Gulf across its longer coastline. Whatever the merits of the Iraqi case, and they were not widely supported in the international community, it was a popular cause at home.
Saddam, moreover, was determined to persist in pressing his demands. During July 1990 Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, put his country’s case forcefully to the secretary of the Arab League, arguing that both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were depriving Iraq of a considerable portion of its legitimate oil income through depressing the price by overproduction; ‘a drop of $1 in the price of a barrel of oil leads to a drop of $1 billion in Iraqi revenues annually’. He went on to argue that Iraq had, during the war with Iran, fought to protect the whole Arab homeland. It had spent in hard currency $102 billion on weapons and had lost $106 billion in income because of disruption of production. Yet Kuwait and the UAE were still demanding repayment of loans. ‘How can these amounts be regarded as Iraqi debts to its Arab brothers when Iraq made sacrifices that are many times more than these debts in terms of Iraqi resources during the grinding war and offered rivers of blood of its youth in defence of the [Arab] nation’s soil, dignity, honour and wealth?’
The threat, particularly to Kuwait, was made more explicit in a television broadcast by Saddam Hussein on 17 July. ‘Raising our voices against the evil of overproduction is not the final resort if the evil continues. There should be some effective act to restore things to their correct positions.’ What that act might be he indicated to the American ambassador, April Glaspie, in Baghdad on 25 July. In a letter he gave her to be sent to President Bush, he warned, ‘We don’t want war … but do not push us to consider war as the only solution to live proudly and to provide our people with a good living.’
The dialogue that followed has been minutely dissected. Supporters of April Glaspie hold that she made clear to Saddam Washington’s disapproval of an attempt to settle the dispute with Kuwait by force. Critics believe that her exposition of American policy was ambiguous. The strongest point she made was that his deployment of troops (30,000 had just been concentrated on the Iraq–Kuwait border) made it ‘reasonable … to be concerned’. Weakly, she conceded that ‘we have no opinion on the Arab–Arab conflicts, like your border dispute with Kuwait … we hope that you can solve this problem via [the Arab League] or President Mubarak [of Egypt]’. Saddam responded by saying that he wanted a meeting with the Kuwaitis and that that might settle the matter. ‘But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.’ On that note Saddam and Glaspie parted, she apparently believing that she had merely been present at another instalment of Arab rhetoric. She would later tell The New York Times, ‘Obviously I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.’
Glaspie seemed to be attempting to excuse her misinterpretation of Saddam’s despatch of a large army to the Kuwait border by suggesting that the troops might have occupied only the disputed Rumeila oil field and the oil-bearing islands of Warba and Bubiyan. It was an odd evasion of responsibility by a professional diplomat; even partial annexations of foreign territory are infractions of international law. Whatever her thinking, and however muddled or not, her exchange with Saddam can only be described as disastrous and rightly led to the extinction of her career.
Saddam had already made his intentions clear, in a communication to Kuwait which must have been made known to Washington. On 17 July, the twenty-second anniversary of the ‘Ba’athist revolution’ that had overthrown President Arif, he had demanded a stabilization of the oil price, the renunciation of the war loans and the creation of an Arab ‘Marshall Plan’ to rebuild Iraq. In the event of Kuwait’s failure to accept, Saddam threatened that ‘we will have no choice but to resort to effective action to get things right and ensure the restitution of our rights’. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, also one of Saddam’s creditors, urged the Emir of Kuwait to capitulate and was eventually able to tell Saddam that the Emir was willing to do so. Saddam, however, chose to disbelieve him. ‘At that moment’, said one of Fahd’s closest advisers, ‘the King realised Kuwait was doomed.’
That indeed appears to have been the case. Saddam, acting as Stalin or Hitler might have done in dealing with a stiff-necked neighbour, had simply decided that he wanted to have his way. He had also concluded that he would not be opposed. It is significant that Saddam appears to have known more about Stalin than Hitler. Hitler overreached himself, in attacking Poland in 1939. Stalin never did. By one of the great injustices of history he got away with all his aggressions. Saddam probably calculated that he could do the same. It was certainly in a spirit of invulnerability that he set out on his annexation of Iraq’s ‘nineteenth province’ on 2 August 1990.
The Iraqi army was experienced and plentifully equipped. Fully mobilized, it numbered a million men, organized into sixty divisions, including twelve armoured and mechanized. Seven of the divisions belonged to the Republican Guard, better equipped and chosen for political reliability. These, however, were paper strengths; the coalition identified only forty-three divisions on the ground. Equipment figures were better verified: over 4,000 tanks, over 4,000 infantry fighting vehicles and over 1,000 self-propelled guns. On paper the Iraqi air force had over 700 fighter and strike aircraft, at various levels of serviceability. In the event, at an early stage, it was flown to refuge in Iran and took no part in operations after the twelfth day (28 January 1991). The Iraqi navy was tiny and of no military importance, except for its minelaying before the war. The coalition eventually discovered that 1,200 mines, both of contact and influence types, had been laid, which required a heavy clearance effort; two major US warships suffered serious mine damage.
The Kuwaiti army was only 16,000 strong and was swept aside by the initial onslaught, mounted by three Republican Guard divisions. They were shortly followed by 100,000 other troops which took up positions on either side of the Iraq–Kuwait border and began to construct entrenchments. In the first shock of the Iraqi invasion, however, what Saddam’s enemies in the wider world feared was not his consolidating his conquests but extending them. The forward elements of the Republican Guard immediately established outposts on the Kuwait–Saudi Arabian border, thereby positioning itself to advance also towards Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Nearly half the world’s oil reserves had fallen under the shadow of Saddam’s power.
The unprovoked and illegal occupation of Kuwait – from which 300,000 people at once fled into Saudi Arabia – was of itself enough to galvanize the powers into activity; not only the powers but lesser nations also and the international organizations. The UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions, in August, September, October and November, condemning Iraq’s actions, calling for withdrawal and imposing sanctions and embargoes of various severity. On 2 August, the day of the invasion, it passed Resolution 660, not only condemning the invasion but also demanding that Iraq withdraw and begin negotiations. Resolution 661, on 6 August, embargoed all trade with Iraq. Resolution 665, on 25 August, imposed a naval blockade. Resolution 670, on 25 September, called on all member states to restrict flights to Iraq and to detain Iraqi-flagged ships that had been breaking sanctions. Finally, Resolution 678, on 29 November, the last of twelve, approved ‘all necessary means’ to drive Iraq from Kuwait if it had not left by 15 January 1991.
Against the background of UN diplomacy, President George Bush, strongly supported by the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was meanwhile assembling a coalition of states that would be prepared to send troops to an international liberation force and, if necessary, to fight. Initially it was Mrs Thatcher who supplied the spark; the President did not think Saddam would attack Saudi Arabia and hoped to settle the crisis by negotiation. His outlook was influenced by a current domestic dispute with Congress as to who controlled foreign policy. Mrs Thatcher convinced him that negotiations would entail delay without an eventual solution and that military preparations were essential. Once persuaded, the President was relentless in pursuit of supporters of his coalition, telephoning constantly around the world and extracting promises of troops, ships and aircraft. There was dissent: the USSR, China and France initially opposed the use of force but, in the event, did not oppose Resolution 678. The European Union revealed its weakness as an instrument of pan-European policy-making; the Western European Union had to be enlisted as a strategic instrument, and it co-ordinated a mine-hunting operation by six member states. Eventually, under one guise or another, sixteen states contributed naval forces, eleven air elements and eighteen ground troops, including Egypt, Syria and Pakistan; the adhesion of these Muslim countries to the coalition and the size of their contributions – Egypt sent two divisions – was of the greatest importance in depriving Saddam of title to represent himself as a champion of Arab nationalism or a Muslim religious leader. Saddam tried hard nonetheless; despite his secular past as a committed Ba’athist, he began to have himself filmed at prayer. He also concocted a spurious genealogy, falsely showing his descent from the Shi’a imams Hussein and Ali. Above all he worked strenuously to establish a link between his quarrel with Kuwait and his hostility to Israel. During the coming war he would attempt to widen the conflict, and detach from the coalition its Arab supporters, by bombarding Israel with Scud missiles.
His diplomacy did not avail; even his effort to mend his relationship with Iran, by offering to return the last scraps of occupied territory and the west bank of the Shatt el-Arab, failed to extract any support from the ayatollahs, despite their continuous hostility to America and the West in general. As the crisis persisted and he stubbornly refused to withdraw from Kuwait, he found himself increasingly isolated. After 13 September, when 400 Islamic leaders meeting in Mecca authorized the Kuwaitis to proclaim a holy war against him, he was entirely alone.
It was in those circumstances that on 16 January 1991 the First Gulf War opened, at 2330 GMT. The first phase, that was to last until 24 February, was fought by the coalition exclusively as an air campaign. The coalition was completely dominant and was scarcely opposed; after 26 January, when the Iraqi air force fled to Iran, it was not opposed at all, except by anti-aircraft missile and gun defences. The lack of opposition was not surprising; at the outset, though Iraq possessed 700 aircraft, the size of the coalition air force was 2,430 aircraft and by 24 February it reached 2,790.
The air campaign fell into four phases. The first was designed to destroy Iraq’s military and civil communications systems – radars, cable networks, radio and television stations – its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons research and development centres, its military industry, such as it was, and its main transportation points, bridges, railroad stations and freight yards. Targets also included civil and military headquarters, ministries and government offices. The principal weapons used in this phase were F-117A stealth bombers and Tomahawk cruise missiles, launched from submarines and surface ships. After the opening day, the British, Canadian, French and Italian air contingents joined in, flying Tornados, Mirages and Jaguars; the US Air Force and naval air force provided the main might of the attack.
In the second and third phases the attack was directed against the Iraqi army’s positions in Kuwait, to destroy equipment and defences and to interdict supply. The burden of the campaign was carried by B-52 bombers delivering patterns of carpet bombing to a round-the-clock timetable.
Phase 4 accompanied the ground attack, to hit targets of opportunity, to disrupt Iraqi ground manoeuvres and to deliver firepower at the point of assault.
During the thirty-four days of preliminary air attack, the RAF flew 6,000 missions and the US Navy 18,000, while the USAF flew about 1,000 missions each day. By the end, a quarter of Iraq’s electricity-generating capacity had been destroyed and another half severely damaged. Supplies to the Iraqi front line had been reduced from 20,000 tons a day to 2,000. As the coalition troops would discover, this reduced many of the invaders to near-starvation.
The most striking feature of the air campaign was the very high degree of precision attained. The war of 1991 was the first in which high-precision weapons – cruise missiles with on-board guidance systems and laser-guided bombs – were deployed. The results, by comparison with those achieved in previous air campaigns, appeared sensational. On-board television cameras showed cruise missiles, at the termination of flight, hitting targets within a margin of error of a few feet. ‘Smart’ bombs achieved similar accuracy. Indeed, almost anything the coalition sought to destroy, from static targets as large as bridges to mobile targets as small as individual tanks – were hit. The only failure in targeting was in the attack on Iraq’s Scud missile launchers. At the outset Iraq possessed about 100 Scuds, a surface-to-surface missile mounting a one-ton conventional explosive warhead, launched from a mobile transporter-erector, to a range of 150 miles. The Scud was a development of the German V-2 rocket of the Second World War; like the V-2 it lacked accuracy and derived its military value from its elusiveness as a target. The missile could be launched from any piece of hard ground and, from arrival to departure, the system needed to be static for less than an hour. For that reason it was difficult to catch both when moving between launch positions or at the moment of launch; when not deployed, it was easily hidden under highway overpasses.
Iraq fired about ninety Scuds, half at US military targets in Saudi Arabia, the other half at civilian targets in Israel. The most successful strike was on an American barracks in Dahran, which killed twenty-eight US servicemen. The attacks on Israel were intended to provoke Israeli retaliation, in the hope that Israel’s involvement would weaken or end Arab support for the coalition; diplomacy was successful in deterring Israel from responding in any way and, in the event, the casualties inflicted – four dead, 120 injured – were too low to provoke an Israeli reaction. American deployment of Patriot anti-missile missiles, which successfully intercepted about thirty-five Scuds, did much to quell alarm.
One of the few recorded failures of the ground forces during the campaign was in the destruction of Scud launchers. Though special forces ranged far and wide behind enemy lines, allegedly as far away as Baghdad itself, their success in finding and eliminating Scuds and their platforms was low. Only sixteen are known to have been destroyed and numbers remained hidden after the conclusion of hostilities.
The conventional ground campaign, however, from its opening on Sunday, 24 February to its termination on Thursday, 28 February, was an unequivocal success. Iraq’s efforts to disrupt the preparation of the offensive before it was launched were ineffective. During 20 January – 1 February 1991 the Iraqis launched a spoiling attack on the town of Khafji, just inside Saudi Arabia, but failed to secure the place and were driven out, largely by forces of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, chosen by the coalition high command to emphasize the multinational character of the alliance. Other border incursions staged by the Iraqis also proved costly and ineffectual. Most of the Iraqi ground forces’ activity in the weeks before 24 February were devoted to fortifying their positions. Saddam’s strategy was determined by his experience in the war with Iran, which he believed had taught that air power was of secondary importance, that fixed positions were the critical element of a successful defence and that the infliction of heavy casualties would halt any offensive. What had been true against the Iranians proved not the case against the coalition. Its air resources vastly exceeded those his troops had encountered in the war of 1980–88, his fortifications were easily penetrated or outflanked by the American and British mobile formations, which deployed mine-clearing and obstacle-breaching equipment of a sophistication not matched by the Iranians, while their ability to inflict casualties exceeded that of the enemy many times. Saddam had simply failed to appreciate the disparity in strength and capability between his own troops and those of the enemy.
The situation at the outset of the coalition attack found the Iraqis concentrated in a narrow sector between the head of the Gulf and a dry desert watercourse, the Wadi al-Batin. Their forward positions were manned by about thirty divisions of the regular army, with six divisions of the Republican Guard holding the ground behind them, both to stiffen their resistance and to act as a counter-attack force if necessary. The coalition forces, by contrast, were deployed on a much wider front. While the heavy formations, largely American armour and Marines, faced the Iraqis between the Gulf and the Wadi al-Batin, more mobile formations – airborne and airmobile divisions, mechanized divisions and the French and British armoured divisions – had been thrown out into the desert to outflank the Iraqi defences and strike at the interior of the country. The coalition plan was to fix the bulk of the enemy in the positions where they stood, meanwhile encircling them by a strike from the desert across their rear from west to east.
The plan worked perfectly. On the first day the 1st and 2nd US Marine Divisions and the Arab forces drove into the Iraqi positions immediately west of the Gulf, breaking through trench lines and destroying much enemy armour in tank gunnery battles. Meanwhile the mobile forces on the desert flank were moving north but also swinging east. On the second day the flank forces, positioning logistic resources as they went, swung to threaten the Iraqi rear. On the third day the Marines and Arab forces continued their advance into the Iraqi main position while the mobile forces in the desert steepened their turn inward against the Iraqi rear. On the fourth day the Marines and Arabs largely overran the territory of Kuwait while the desert force cut across to reach the Euphrates river and complete the encirclement of the Iraqi occupation army.
By that stage the principal problem for the coalition was collecting and caring for the prisoners of the war. The enemy had begun to surrender freely as soon as the fighting started, many of them simply out of hunger. By the fourth day surrenders became a flood, the Iraqi conscripts leaving their positions en masse to come forward with their hands up. By 28 February at least 80,000 Iraqi soldiers had surrendered, while another 100,000 had fled into Iraq or actually been withdrawn from Kuwait in the last days of occupation as the pointlessness of resistance became obvious even to Saddam. Some Iraqi units did fight; elements of the Republican Guard armoured divisions stuck to their positions and exchanged fire with the attackers, until overwhelmed. The disparity in casualties, however, reveals the nature of the conflict. Only 148 American, 47 British, 2 French and 14 Egyptian soldiers were killed in action, against an estimated total of 60,000 Iraqi combat deaths or even more. The British contingent estimated that 2,500 Iraqi tanks, 2,000 infantry fighting vehicles and 2,000 guns had been knocked out. Coalition equipment losses were negligible. The most visible Iraqi losses were suffered during the flight from Kuwait over the Mitla ridge, when coalition air and ground attacks on packed masses of armoured and soft-skinned vehicles produced devastation.
The Iraqi régime had persisted with its diplomacy throughout the war, seeking to arrange interventions by the Soviet Union and to influence resolutions in the UN Security Council. The Soviet peace plan, though it called for the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, was unacceptable to the United States and other members of the coalition because it also demanded the abrogation of all outstanding Security Council resolutions on the situation. The Pope was meanwhile repeating his condemnation of the war; his policy was in part determined by the presence of an historic Christian community in Iraq which he sought to protect. The United States showed no interest in any peace plan which did not insist on instant withdrawal from Kuwait and the payment of reparations to Kuwait for war damage inflicted; Saudi Arabia also demanded reparations.
By 27 February Iraq’s military condition was so desperate that its Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean Christian and so one of the Pope’s flock, communicated to the Security Council Iraq’s readiness to accept the resolutions declaring its occupation of Kuwait null and void and its responsibility to pay reparations. His communication was rejected by the permanent members, who insisted on acceptance of all twelve resolutions on Iraqi conduct passed since 2 August 1990. The following day President Bushannounced that a cease-fire would be instituted if Iraq would end hostilities and stop firing Scud missiles. Iraq accepted the American offer and a temporary cease-fire came into effect at 0500 GMT.
The crisis had lasted 209 days, of which forty-two had been spent in open warfare. Coalition air sorties flown had reached the total of 106,000. During their occupation of Kuwait and retreat from it, Iraq had set fire to 640 oil wells and damaged another ninety. Iraq had suffered not only heavy loss of life, largely through military casualties, but also severe material damage, to its roads, bridges, electricity-generating plant, telephone and television networks and its infrastructure in general.
At the termination of hostilities, it was also thrown immediately into widespread disorder. In the south many of the Shi’a majority rose in revolt, attacking centres of Ba’athist power and killing state and party officials. The revolt began in Nasiriyah but spread swiftly to Basra, Kut, Hillah, Karbala and Najaf, the last two the holy places of Shi’a belief. Saddam reacted with a mixture of violence and conciliation. To retain the loyalty of his own Sunni supporters, he announced a rapid demobilization of older reservists, distribution of cash handouts and an increase of food rations. To put down resistance, he assembled the armoured vehicles that had survived the army’s defeat and concentrated them against the centres of resistance. Confronted by heavy weapons they did not themselves possess, the rebels quickly collapsed. Saddam inflicted crushing reprisals.
In the north the Kurds, who had been in more or less open revolt for many years, seized the opportunity to take possession of the provincial capitals and set up a local administration, hoping for help from neighbouring Iran. The ayatollahs were unwilling to support a movement whose long-term aim was the creation of a greater Kurdistan, partly at Iran’s territorial expense. Even less so were the Turks, whose population included a large and troublesome Kurdish minority. Saddam, after suppressing the Shi’a revolt, transferred his internal security forces to the north; a full-scale repression proved unnecessary, however, because the Kurdish leadership rightly judged that Saddam was open to negotiations, to Kurdish advantage, if the rebellion were curtailed. This redirection of Kurdish policy, strongly underpinned by Western offers of support for the protection of ‘safe havens’ inside Kurdistan, led to the declaration of a cease-fire on 19 April after which began the return of over a million Kurds who had fled their homes to the mountains or to refuge in Iran and Syria. In the aftermath the Western powers, under UN authority, would impose military supervision over Iraqi forces north of the 36th parallel. Similar limitation of military authority would later be imposed over the Shi’a south.
Yet despite these reductions of Iraqi sovereign power, and the undoubted fact of his overwhelming defeat in war, Saddam refused to admit that he had been beaten or even humiliated. In the face of all the evidence to the contrary, he insisted that Iraq had won the war. In support of that extraordinary assertion, he cited the survival of his own régime and the fact that Iraq remained an independent state. Addressing the nation on 29 July 1991, he announced victory. ‘You [the Iraqi people] are victorious because you have refused humiliation and repression and clung to a state that will strengthen the people and the [Arab] nation forever.’
People in the West, leaders and citizens alike, were infuriated by Saddam’s denial of what they saw as undeniable fact; they were also bewildered. How could a man, they asked, sitting amid the debris of a military catastrophe he had brought upon himself, in the ruined capital of a country he no longer fully controlled, despised and rejected by his fellow Arab leaders, continue to proclaim a triumph?
There were several elements underpinning Saddam’s defiance. Two were salient. The first, easily understood in the Arab world, almost incomprehensible to Westerners, is the power that rhetoric exerts in Arab public life. Arabic is a language of poetry – the Koran itself is the greatest work of Arab poetry – which easily tips into extravagance and then fantasy, without, in Arab consciousness, losing touch with reality. Because of the beauty of Arabic as a language, what sounds right is easily accepted as being right. Thus, when Saddam proclaimed triumph, the sheer extravagance of his words, expressing an idea his audience wished to believe was true, seemed true. When he told his fellow Iraqis that, if they did not feel defeated, they were not defeated, he was believed; undoubtedly he believed so himself.
Simultaneously, however, the practical half of Saddam’s mind was supporting rhetoric with calculation. It is a perfectly rational thought that a defeat is only as bad as the victor chooses to make it. If the victor declines to press his advantage to the utmost, the vanquished retains room for manoeuvre, which may win back ground that appears lost. Saddam had led a difficult life, and had been oppressed by many setbacks; by refusing to acquiesce – in the failure of his assassination attempt on President Kassem, of his first attempt to unseat President Arif, of his attack on Iran in 1980, perhaps most of all in the indignity and hardship of imprisonment – he had eventually overcome. Very soon after the rout of his army, he seems to have recovered his resilience again. His enemies gave him cause to do so. They did not demand his removal from office as a condition of terminating hostilities, as the ayatollahs had done; they did not occupy his country; they did not insist on comprehensive disarmament; they even, in an ill-judged concession, gave him permission to fly his helicopters within Iraq, and it was with these that he would reassert a great deal of his power. Saddam may well have discovered their motives: that they shrank from ruling Iraq themselves, particularly from attempting to reconcile Kurds, Sunni and Shi’a; that they continued to regard Saddam as a check on the ayatollahs; that there was no alternative régime to hand; that the Americans in particular wanted no part in a new imperialism.
He may even have guessed that the Pentagon and State Department expected the Saddam problem to be solved within Iraq itself, by assassination or exile, the traditional fate awaiting a loser in that country. It was a reasonable expectation. He took immediate and ruthless steps to see that it was not realized. He ordered exemplary executions of weak and culpable generals. He promoted the harshest of his followers to new responsibilities, making Ali Hassan al-Majid, ‘Chemical Ali’, the man who had gassed the Kurds, Minister of the Interior. He rearranged other governmental positions, to strengthen the representation of his relatives and tribal brothers from Tikrit. He farther elaborated the measures taken to protect his own security, no longer appearing in public, concealing his places of work and residence and moving frequently and unpredictably to disguise his whereabouts.
Finally and most cunningly he contrived a scheme of apparent co-operation with the United Nations to hide and shelter his weapons of mass destruction. The one ingredient of Saddam’s warmaking that had alarmed the coalition was his use of Scud missiles, which threatened both military targets at ranges of 100 miles or more and the extension of the conflict by provoking an Israeli intervention. The Scud risk was heightened by Saddam’s known possession of chemical weapons and suspected determination to develop nuclear warheads. Fear of chemical weapons had actually increased civilian casualties in Israel by causing the population to keep out of cellars and bunkers where chemical agents would have been most effective. The United Nations Special Commission on Disarmament (UNSCOM), a body set up largely at American prompting, arrived in Iraq in May 1991 to begin work on identifying the extent of Saddam’s unconventional weapons programme, the degree of progress achieved, the location of manufacturing and research sites, and the location and size of stocks held. Saddam acquiesced in UNSCOM’s activities at the time because his hands were then fully occupied with suppressing the internal revolts. His acquiescence was secretly conditional, however, on the creation of a programme to delude and mislead UNSCOM’s enquiries. Tariq Aziz was put in charge of the deception scheme, designed to conceal weapon sites, disperse forbidden material, hide critical documents and brief essential personnel to deflect penetrating questions. It was not an exercise for which the Iraqis were unprepared. For ten years before 1991 the country had been subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and had successfully baffled its investigations. UNSCOM was a more rigorous body, its leader, Dr David Kay, being a brave and determined man. The nature of his enquiries was so invasive that the Iraqis were forced to destroy much material to prevent it falling into the hands of the inspectors. Ultimately, however, by Saddam’s transporting documents and material to numbers of his so-called ‘palaces’, (Presidential residences he defined as private homes immune from inspection), Kay and his team were frustrated. UNSCOM was eventually unable to certify that it had eliminated all Iraq’s forbidden military research and development, a state of affairs which would lead to the dispute over ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD) that would precipitate the Gulf War of 2003.