Saddam : His Rise and Fall (26 page)

Iraq's worsening relations with Moscow was one of the main subjects of discussion when Saddam agreed to be interviewed on the anniversary of the July 17 revolution, exactly a year before he was to seize power from Bakr. When asked whether the Iraqi officers had been executed as a warning to Moscow to keep out of Iraq's internal affairs, Saddam replied unhesitatingly: “Yes, it was.” Then, giving vent to the visceral hatred of communism that had been the most compelling feature of Saddam's career in the Baath, he remarked: “They [the Soviets] won't be satisfied until the whole world
becomes Communist.” And asked whether, in view of Baghdad's uncompromising hostility to Israel, he believed that war was the only solution, Saddam replied simply: “Correct.” He also predicted that in ten years time—i.e., by 1988—the Arab states would be strong enough to defeat Israel. “The Arabs won't always be weak. Their strength is growing daily. In ten years you will see a completely different equation.”
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This was a clear reference to Saddam's secret project for Iraq to develop its own nuclear arsenal, a project about which the outside world still knew very little.

While Camp David prompted the Iraqis to undertake a reassessment of their foreign policy goals, it was the waning fortunes of the shah in neighboring Iran that was to be the decisive factor in Saddam's calculation that the time had arrived for him to make his move against President Bakr. Saddam came to the conclusion that the aging Bakr would be unable to deal with the menace posed by the new radical Islamic government in Teheran. All the reforms carried out by the Baathists during the 1970s were designed to turn Iraq into a modern, secular state, albeit one governed by an autocracy. The prospect of an Islamic revolution enveloping neighboring Iran filled the Iraqi Baathists with deep conern. As the world's largest Shiite Muslim nation, an Islamic regime in Teheran would inevitably destabilize Iraq's large Shiite community in the south, which felt alienated from the Sunni Muslim, and secular, Baathist regime in Baghdad. Despite the Baathists' cynical attempts to buy them off with free television sets and refrigerators, the Shiites, like the Kurds and the communists, remained a perpetual thorn in the side of the regime. In 1977 bloody confrontations had broken out in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, which was then the home of the exiled Iranian Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Clashes between the Shiites and the government resulted in eight Iraqi clerics being arrested, tried by a revolutionary court, and executed. More than two thousand Shiites were arrested, and an estimated two hundred thousand were expelled to Iran by Saddam on the grounds that they were non-Iraqis. In October 1978 the Iraqis, at the request of the shah, expelled Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been living in exile in southern Iraq since the 1960s. In an attempt to shore up the shah, Saddam received Empress Farah in Baghdad, amid much pomp. Although the shah had not always been well disposed toward Iraq's Baathist regime, he was nevertheless the signatory, with Saddam, of the Algiers Agreement on the Shatt al-Arab dispute, and Saddam believed that maintaining the agreement, and therefore keeping the shah in power, was crucial to his own survival.

By now all these gestures of support were of no avail as it soon became clear that the Pahlavi dynasty was doomed. In February 1979 Khomeini returned in triumph to Teheran, signaling the start of the revolution that was to turn Iran into one of the world's most uncompromising Islamic regimes. The challenge posed by both the Camp David agreement and the emergence of a radical Islamic government in Iran persuaded Saddam that he could no longer afford to run the country from his position as “Mr. Deputy.” The challenges ahead would require firm government, and Bakr was no longer capable of providing the leadership needed. Due to the gradual erosion of his authority by Saddam, Bakr was now reduced to a rather pathetic figure signing the pieces of paper Saddam placed on his desk. Bakr had become so ineffectual that Saddam was overheard complaining that Bakr did not even merit the salary he was receiving. A measure of the contempt Saddam felt for Bakr at the end of their professional relationship is provided by one of his biographers: “The military man spends his spare time on things that have no bearing on affairs of state. He wakes up early in the morning and goes into his garden; he waters the plants and trims the bushes. When he tires, he rests awhile in the company of his grandchildren. He lives with his memories.”
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All the patience, all the hard work, all the plotting and scheming, all the betrayals, murders, executions, and assassinations finally paid off in July 1979 when Saddam became president of Iraq. The announcement was made, with exquisite timing, by the outgoing president, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, on the eve of the annual celebrations to mark the July 17 revolution. The date had been carefully chosen by Saddam to symbolize the continuity of the revolution, and was the culmination of months of carefully considered plotting. Saddam kept the precise details of his accession a closely guarded secret; the highly suspicious “Mr. Deputy” knew that a last-minute hiccup could ruin everything. Saddam's masterstroke, however, was to persuade Bakr himself not only to consent to the handover, but to appear on Iraqi television and portray his own purging as a natural transition of power. “For a long time,” the sixty-five-year-old president told his listeners, “I have been talking to my Comrades in the Command, particularly cherished Comrade Saddam Hussein, about my health, which no longer allows me to shoulder the responsibilities with which the Command has honored me. My health has recently reached the stage where I could no longer assume responsibility in a manner that satisfies my conscience.” In a voice shaking with emotion, Bakr went on to nominate Saddam as “the man best qualified to assume the leadership.” Before bowing out of public life, Bakr paid a final tribute to Saddam, his erstwhile protégé.

“During the bitter years of struggle prior to the revolution, Comrade Saddam Hussein was a brave and faithful struggler who enjoyed the respect
and trust of the party's strugglers. On the eve of the revolution, he was at the head of the brave men who stormed the bastions of dictatorship and reaction. During the revolution's march he was the brilliant leader who was able to confront all the difficulties and shoulder all the responsibilities.”
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At the age of forty-two (or thereabouts) Saddam had taken control of one of the wealthiest countries in the Middle East. Buoyed by the oil wealth, Iraq was rapidly emerging as one of the region's dominant political, military, and economic powers. The government could boast some $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves, and the oil riches were beginning to permeate every aspect of Iraqi life. The armed forces were expanding rapidly and starting to benefit from the new, sophisticated equipment purchased from countries such as Spain and France. The Baathists had created the Arab world's first welfare state, with free education for all children from kindergarten to university, and a free national system of health care. The standard of living for ordinary Iraqis was gradually rising; basic foodstuffs were plentiful and cheap. For Iraqis who did not challenge the Baathist system, there had never been a better time to be an inhabitant of Iraq. The Baathists' success in diverting the new oil wealth toward building a modern, industrialized nation, a nation that was strong militarily and politically united, had prompted some commentators to describe Iraq as the Prussia of the eastern Arab world. Saddam could not have chosen a better moment to assume control of the country. Unlike his predecessor, however, Saddam had no intention of sharing power. His was to be an absolutist dictatorship. Apart from his position as president of the republic, Saddam held all the country's top positions: he was chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, secretary-general of the Baath Party Regional Command, prime minister, and commander of the armed forces. Modeling himself on Stalin, Saddam had become the supreme leader of Iraq.

Precisely how Saddam managed to get Bakr to step down has always been regarded as something of a mystery. The issue of Bakr's declining health, the official reason given for his “retirement,” cannot be entirely dismissed. Rumors were constantly in circulation among Baghdad's gossip-driven diplomatic community about Bakr's physical well-being. As early as 1971 Bakr had been hospitalized for what was reported in the Iraqi media as a “slight indisposition.” In 1974 he was said to have suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, which prevented him from attending his wife's funeral.
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His indisposition had also meant his being unable to receive French prime minister Jacques Chirac when he visited Baghdad; Saddam, that great Francophile, had effortlessly
filled the breach. In May 1977 a distinguished medical team from George Washington University had flown in secret to Baghdad to treat “a top Iraqi official,” whom everyone took to be Bakr.
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Apart from his poor health Bakr had also had to contend with a number of deeply upsetting personal bereavements through the deaths of his wife, son, and son-in-law.

Even so it is unlikely that Bakr would have resigned his position without a fight and, according to former Baath Party members interviewed for the first time by this author, the meeting at which Bakr was persuaded to stand down quickly became acrimonious. Having decided to assume power on the anniversary of the revolution, Saddam, together with his cousin Adnan, the defense minister, and his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, went to see Bakr in his office at the Presidential Palace on the evening of July 16, 1979. “They essentially presented him with a fait accompli,” recalled one former Baathist. “They told him: ‘You step down voluntarily and nothing will happen to you. But if we are forced to take action it could be very unplesant.'” At this point Bakr's son Haytham, who was in the room with his father, drew his gun and fired a shot in the air as a warning to Saddam's group, whom he denounced as traitors. But he was quickly overpowered and disarmed, and Saddam and his backers were able to get their way.
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The next day Saddam assumed the presidency and Bakr made a dignified resignation speech.

Bakr should have anticipated Saddam's move. He had received plenty of warnings about Saddam's ambition to replace him and, earlier in the year, had revived the idea of unifying the Iraqi and Syrian Baath Parties, a plan devised in part to undermine Saddam, who was strongly anti-Syrian. Apart from putting Saddam in his place, the other, more pressing, motivation for the proposed union was the desire of the regimes in Damascus and Baghdad to present a united Arab front that could challenge Egypt's historic peace agreement with Israel, which had been negotiated at Camp David the previous year. Iraq and Syria, which were ideologically and vehemently opposed to the existence of Israel, regarded the Camp David agreement as a sellout, not least because it left the Palestinian issue unresolved. With Egypt no longer an ally in the struggle to destroy Israel, the Syrian and Iraqi Baath Parties in October 1978 agreed to set aside their own long-standing ideological differences in order to establish a “joint charter for national action”—i.e., against Israel.

Saddam was given personal responsibility for negotiating the deal to unite the two countries with Syria's president Asad, and in January Saddam became the first senior Iraqi politician to visit Damascus in ten years, during which he
signed a deal to merge the two countries' respective ministries of foreign affairs, defense, and information. This was regarded as a first step toward a total union, which was scheduled to take place the following April. Apart from the challenge presented by Camp David, Iraq was also keen to cement its relationship with Syria as a means of protecting itself from the new threat posed by Iran's Islamic revolution after Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in February 1979. Speaking shortly after Khomeini had seized power, Saddam spoke enthusiastically about the proposed Iraq-Syria merger, declaring that “this unity was not a system, but rather the principal part of the entire Arab revolution.” He also made a conciliatory gesture toward the new regime in Teheran, saying that “Iraq would support whatever the Iranian people decided.”
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The Iranian revolution had undoubtedly unsettled the Baathists, and even Saddam was prepared to set aside his natural anti-Syrian sympathies to build a united front against the Islamic extremists who had taken control in Teheran.

Even though Saddam was responsible for negotiating the union between Iraq and Syria, he was unable to overcome his strong reservations about the enterprise, which became more pronounced the longer the negotiations continued. His biggest concern appears to have been that a linkup with Syria would limit his power. Saddam therefore set about undermining the proposal, while at the same time giving the appearance that he was deeply committed to the union project. When President Asad, for example, came to Baghdad on June 16, 1979, to discuss the latest proposals, Saddam snubbed him by refusing to go to the airport to meet him. Bakr went in his place, and after three days of talks, Bakr and Asad announced a declaration of unity under which the governments of the two countries would be merged as a means of confronting “the Zionist-imperialist-Sadat onslaught.”
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Under the terms of the proposal, Syria and Iraq would become a loose federation, with Bakr at its head, Asad as deputy, and Saddam as number three. This arrangement was unacceptable to Saddam. As things currently stood in Baghdad, Saddam was already the de facto number one, and the prospect of being relegated to the position of number three in the newly merged nation did not appeal to him, particularly as he knew that, given Bakr's indifferent health, Asad would become the main power in the new union, in the same way that Saddam had become the undisputed power in an independent Iraq. If the union went ahead, moreover, Asad would purge Saddam in the same way that Saddam had dispensed with his own rivals. The only way for Saddam to prevent the federation from taking place, and remove the threat to his own career, was to seize power himself. No matter
how much Bakr might desire the Iraq-Syria union, the initiative had come too late; from the mid-1970s onward, Saddam had effectively been running the country, and his vaulting ambition was not about to be inconvenienced by the new constitutional arrangements being advanced by his Baathist colleagues. The Syrian writer Patrick Seale wrote that, shortly before Saddam assumed control, Bakr sent a message to Asad, asking him to speed up the proposed union between Iraq and Syria because “there is a current here which is anxious to kill the union in the bud before it bears fruit.”
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No prizes for guessing the identity of the “current.”

The brutal truth of the matter was that, by the summer of 1979, Bakr was powerless to reclaim the authority that he had gradually allowed to devolve to Saddam during the past decade. Former Baathist officials insist that the support Saddam received in his quest for supreme power from Khairallah Tulfah and his cousin Adnan was a decisive factor in persuading Bakr to step down. They were able to put pressure on Bakr to resign “for the good of the clan.”
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At any rate a special closed session of the Revolutionary Command Council was convened on July 11, 1979, at which it was decided to replace Bakr the following week, and for all his powers—and most of his titles—to be transferred to Saddam Hussein. Bakr's humiliation did not end with his removal from office. Three months after Saddam's takeover, Bakr was stripped of his last remaining title, that of deputy secretary-general of the Baath Party, which he had been given as an honorary title after being deposed as president; it was the same position that he himself had given the young Saddam in the late 1960s. Bakr died three years later in 1982 in complete obscurity during one of Iraq's darkest moments in the Iran-Iraq War, and amid rumors that he should be restored to power. According to previously unpublished information obtained by this author, Bakr was killed by a team of doctors who worked for Saddam's security apparatus and were sent to treat him when rumors began to circulate that Bakr was preparing a comeback. Apart from a heart condition Bakr was known to suffer from a variety of ailments, such as diabetes, hypertension, and kidney problems. His usual doctors were banned from attending to him for a month. During this period the team sent by Saddam injected Bakr with a large dose of insulin, which caused him to go into a coma. He never regained consciousness, and Saddam's doctors stayed by his side until they were sure he was dead.
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In this way Saddam repaid the generosity, encouragement, and support of the mentor and kinsman who had been the most important influence on his life and career.

If Saddam's accession to the presidency was seamless, that is not to say it was unopposed. During the special meeting of the RCC at which it was decided to remove Bakr, Muhie Abdul Hussein Mashhadi, the RCC's secretary-general, summoned the courage to protest against Saddam's promotion. During the discussions Mashhadi had “suddenly stood up and demanded that they vote on the question of President Bakr relinquishing his responsibilities in the Party and the State to Saddam Hussein. He insisted that the decision be carried unanimously. ‘It is inconceivable that you should retire,' he told Bakr. ‘If you are ill why don't you take a rest?'”
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Opposition such as this had to be eliminated, and Saddam acted quickly. On July 15, the day before Bakr was to resign, it was announced that Mashhadi had been relieved of all his duties at the RCC.

Even by the standards of Stalin's great purges in the 1930s, the process by which Saddam clinically set about removing any surviving Baathist rivals in the wake of his accession added a whole new dimension to the concept of state-inspired terror. Mashhadi had not been alone in opposing Saddam's accession, and many senior Baathists had supported Bakr's attempts to revive the union with Syria as a means of thwarting Saddam, irrespective of their feelings about the Camp David Accords. They had begged Bakr to provide them with the breathing space to put in place a strategy to counter Saddam's seemingly unstoppable march on the presidency, but Bakr was too old, weak, and exhausted to countenance a confrontation with his deputy. This last attempt by the Baath Party to bring the Saddam juggernaut to a halt therefore succeeded only in making the president-in-waiting aware that his popularity did not extend to all areas of the Baath.