Saddam : His Rise and Fall (41 page)

Little attention was paid at this time to Saddam's nuclear program, mainly because most experts believed that Israel's attack against the Osirak plant in 1981 had destroyed Iraq's nuclear ambitions. But by the late 1980s American and British intelligence officials had reached the conclusion that Iraq was continuing to make good progress with its nuclear research program, with the result that by the early 1990s Baghdad would be in a position to build its own atomic bomb. Confirmation that Saddam was still determined to become the Arab world's first nuclear superpower emerged in 1989 when British and American investigators uncovered an Iraqi scheme to obtain a number of krytons—high-voltage switches that can be used for detonating nuclear weapons.

The progress on the program to make Iraq self-sufficient in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction was matched by the Iraqis' success in developing their own delivery systems. During the war with Iran the Iraqis, with Egyptian help, had managed to develop an enhanced version of the Soviet-built Scud-B missile with a 180-mile range that was capable of hitting Iran. The Iraqis were also working on development of the Badr-2000, a 375-mile-range missile based on the Argentine Condor-2. And in December 1989, to demonstrate its technical prowess, Iraq announced that it had launched a three-stage rocket capable of putting a satellite into space and had tested two missiles with a range of 1,200 miles. By far the most intriguing military project the Iraqis undertook at this time was the development of a “supergun” that would supposedly be capable of launching nonconventional warheads for thousands of miles. The project was brought to an abrupt halt in March 1990 with the murder in Brussels of Dr. Gerald Bull, the Canadian ballistics expert responsible for designing the “supergun.” Israel's Mossad intelligence service was widely blamed for the murder, although there was no shortage of other suspects. A few weeks later British customs officials confiscated eight large steel tubes that were destined for Baghdad, which were thought to form the barrel of the “supergun,” and shortly afterward other parts of this ingenious project were located in Greece and Turkey.

Despite all the evidence that Iraq was guilty both of gross human rights violations and developing weapons of mass destruction, no serious attempt was made by the West to isolate Saddam at this juncture. While Western
politicians made various statements condemning Iraq's behavior, Western businessmen were actively encouraged to trade with Baghdad. In Washington the Reagan administration continued to block any attempt by Congress to take action against Baghdad, while in Britain Trade Minister Tony Newton reponded to criticism of Saddam's treatment of the Kurds by doubling British export credits to Iraq from £175 million in 1988 to £340 million in 1989. And when, in April 1989, Saddam held a military trade fair in Baghdad, which was organized and hosted by his son-in-law Hussein Kamel, hundreds of Western companies sent representatives in the hope of picking up lucrative contracts.

Sir Harold Walker, who became Britain's ambassador to Baghdad in February 1991, recalled that his brief was to maintain Britain's relations on an even keel with Iraq so that British companies could “do good business.” The West was still more concerned with Iran than Iraq, and there was a growing perception that Iraq could actually become a stabilizing factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict. “I'm afraid the whole human rights issue was brushed under the carpet. The main priority was trade,” said Sir Harold.
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Maintaining normal diplomatic contacts with the regime, however, was no easy matter. From the mid-1980s onward Saddam decided to stop greeting foreign ambassadors when they arrived on the grounds that he was too busy with the war. The practice continued after hostilities had ceased, and new ambassadors were required to present their credentials instead to Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, at the Presidential Palace. Walker recalled that when he went to the palace in early 1991, long after the cease-fire with Iran had been implemented, he was taken aback at the level of security. He had to pass through several security checkpoints, and when he arrived at the final checkpoint, he found all the guards were wearing gas masks, as if they expected the palace itself to come under chemical weapons attack.

Saddam, however, remained deeply frustrated at the generally negative press he was receiving, particularly in the West. Western ambassadors, on the rare occasions they were called in to see him, were generally treated to a long list of complaints about media coverage of Iraq. The BBC's Arabic Service was a particular source of irritation, and successive British ambassadors received long lectures about what Saddam perceived to be the bias shown by the BBC to Baghdad.
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Nor could he comprehend the international outcry that had greeted the evidence that Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Kurds. Saddam dismissed the criticism as a “Zionist”
plot to discredit Iraq's “glorious victory” over Iran, and he launched a propaganda campaign that was designed to portray the relocation of the Kurds as a humanitarian act. Saddam's persecution complex was not helped by the overthrow, and brutal execution, of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. Like Saddam, Ceausescu was a despot whose rule depended on the ceaseless promotion of a personality cult and the efficiency of his security apparatus, the formidable East German–trained Securitate, to maintain himself in power. And like Saddam, Ceausescu had become increasingly removed from his people, retreating within the sanctuary of his opulent and heavily fortified palaces to protect himself from the reality of his impoverished and discontented people. Saddam was deeply shocked by Ceausescu's overthrow, and he ordered his security chiefs to study the videotapes of Ceausescu's demise to ensure that he did not suffer a similar fate.

Any hopes Saddam may have entertained of rehabilitating himself with the West, however, were irretrievably destroyed by his treatment of Farzad Bazoft, a British journalist who was arrested on espionage charges as he made his way to Baghdad airport in September 1989. Bazoft, who had been born in Iran and was working as a freelance journalist for the
Observer
newspaper in London, had been investigating a mysterious explosion that had occurred at a military plant at al-Hillah, south of Baghdad. The explosion had been so huge that it had been heard in Baghdad and, although Saddam ordered that news of the incident be kept secret, it soon emerged that the explosion had occurred at a missile production line. The blast killed scores of Egyptian technicians employed on the top-secret missile project, and Bazoft, hoping to secure a big scoop, traveled to al-Hillah dressed as an Indian doctor to investigate. Soon after his return he was arrested as he tried to leave the country and charged with espionage. In a subsequent televised confession clearly made under duress, Bazoft said he had been working as a spy for Israel. By making the confession he had hoped that he would be treated leniently. But this was not Saddam's way. Throughout his rule he had used the tactic of extracting false confessions to justify the purging of his opponents, as he had graphically demonstrated during the first days of his presidency in 1979 when he conducted a widespread purge of his colleagues in the Baath Party. On March 15, 1990, after a one-day trial at which the prosecution failed to produce any convincing evidence of his guilt, Bazoft was executed by firing squad.

Of all the acts of brutality that had been perpetrated under Saddam's auspices since the Baathists seized power in 1968, the summary execution of
Farzad Bazoft was the one that finally caught the attention of the West and drew its scrutiny to the barbaric nature of Saddam's regime. Whether it was because Bazoft's position as a journalist meant his case attracted more attention than Saddam's myriad other victims, or because his execution occurred at a time when international concern was already being expressed about Iraq's human rights abuses and development of weapons of mass destruction, Bazoft's judicial murder proved to be a watershed in the West's relations with Baghdad. The Western view of Iraq under Saddam Hussein in 1990 was succinctly summed up by Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister: “Iraq was a country which had used chemical weapons—not just in war but against its own people. Saddam Hussein was not only an international brigand, he was also a loser who had done immense damage both to the Palestinian cause and to the Arabs and who over eight years had vainly thrown wave after wave of young Iraqis into the war against Iran.”
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With the economy in ruins, his attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction subjected to constant sabotage, and the frequent discovery of new coup attempts, Saddam was very much on the defensive in the spring of 1990. By executing Bazoft he had no doubt calculated, as he had done on so many occasions in the past, that he would send a defiant signal to potential enemies, both at home and abroad, that all those who plotted against him would pay the ultimate price. And it was in this advanced state of paranoia, when Saddam genuinely believed that there was an international conspiracy to destroy his regime, that he began to contemplate a dramatic new initiative that would both restore the country's finances and the people's faith in their leader.

During the first six months of 1990 Saddam had been increasing the diplomatic pressure on the Gulf states, in particular Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to help alleviate Iraq's economic plight. Since the end of the war with Iran the Iraqis had been lobbying Gulf leaders to write off the $40 billion financial aid they had given to Baghdad. The low oil price of the late 1980s was also a serious concern for the Iraqis, as oil accounted for 95 percent of the government's revenue. In February 1990, at a summit meeting of the Arab Cooperation Council in Amman to mark the organization's first anniversary, Saddam virtually demanded that the Gulf states bail him out of his financial difficulties. Apart from an immediate moratorium on the wartime loans, he wanted fresh loans of $30 billion to pay for reconstruction work. “Let the Gulf states know,” he declared, “that if they [do] not give this money to me, I [will] know how to get it.”
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Tensions between Iraq and the Gulf states increased during the spring of 1990, particularly after Saddam became convinced that Israel, with American backing, was planning to attack his weapons of mass destruction facilities, similar to the Osirak attack of 1981. But the Gulf states took no notice of Saddam's threats and, to make matters worse, continued with their policy of exceeding their OPEC oil production quotas, which only served to deflate the international oil price at a time when Saddam could least afford it. At an Arab summit convened in Baghdad in May 1990, ostensibly to discuss the impact the recent influx of Soviet Jews to Israel would have on the region, Saddam launched a direct attack on the Gulf leaders, especially the Kuwaitis, who were deliberately exceeding their OPEC quotas. This policy, Saddam announced, was tantamout to a declaration of war on Iraq. But still the Gulf states refused to be intimidated. The emir of Kuwait was insistent that he would neither reduce oil production nor forgive his wartime loans to Iraq nor provide additional grants to Baghdad.

Although Saddam's anger was directed at all the oil-producing Gulf states, he was particularly irritated by the stance of the Kuwaitis, who, in his view, had a historic obligation to support Baghdad. Ever since Iraq's creation successive Iraqi regimes had complained that Kuwait, which had formed part of the administrative district of Basra during the Ottoman period, had been illegally separated from Iraq. Given the limited nature of Iraq's coastline on the Gulf, Kuwait's well-developed shoreline was looked upon with envy in Baghdad, particularly after the discovery and development of the region's oil fields. The arbitrary demarcation of the border between Iraq and Kuwait, which had been drawn up by Sir Percy Cox in the 1920s, was another source of complaint, as the Iraqis claimed it unfairly gave the Kuwaitis access to the lucrative Rumaila oil field.

Iraq had threatened action against Kuwait on several occasions in the past. In 1937 the Iraqi monarch King Ghazi had upset his British overlords by advocating its annexation. When Britain granted Kuwait independence in 1961, President Qassem had responded by insisting that it was an integral part of Iraq, and even announced the appointment of a new Iraqi ruler for the “province.” And in the early 1970s a dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over the two Kuwaiti islands of Warbah and Bubiyan had resulted in them being occupied by the Iraqi armed forces. The islands dominate the estuary leading to the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, and possession of them would have increased the size of Iraq's
Gulf shore and provided it with the opportunity to develop a much-needed deep-water port on the Gulf. The Iraqi troops were eventually persuaded to vacate the islands following the intervention of the Arab League and Saudi Arabia, but Iraq continued to press its claim to them.

In a final attempt to intimidate the Kuwaitis, in July, on the twenty-second anniversary of the Baath revolution, Saddam handed Kuwait a list of demands, which included the stabilization of the international oil price, a moratorium on Iraq's wartime loans, and the formation of an Arab plan similar to the Marshall Plan to assist with Iraq's reconstruction program. If the Kuwaitis failed to oblige, he warned, “we will have no choice but to resort to effective action to put things right and ensure the restitution of our rights.”
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Dr. Ghazi Algosaibi, a Saudi Arabian diplomat who acted as a close adviser to King Fahd during the crisis of the summer of 1990, said that the Saudi monarch was deeply disturbed by Saddam's attitude toward the Kuwaitis and his other Gulf neighbors. “The king was worried about Saddam's state of mind. He was convinced that Saddam was about to do something catastrophic.” According to Algosaibi, neither the Saudis nor the Kuwaitis had any realistic expectation that the war loans would be repaid, but both countries thought it would set a bad precedent if they were to announce publicly that they had written them off. However, with Saddam in a bellicose frame of mind and with the largest army in the Middle East at his disposal, the Saudis were prepared to make an exception, and urged the Kuwaitis to do the same. Throughout July King Fahd was in constant telephone contact with the Kuwaiti emir. Eventually he persuaded the emir to accept Saddam's conditions. The king phoned Saddam and told him, “I have incredible news for you. The emir has agreed to all your terms.” But to King Fahd's surprise, rather than being relieved that the crisis had been resolved, Saddam gave the impression that he was not impressed with the Saudi initiative. “At that moment the king realized the Kuwait was doomed,” said Algosaibi.
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