Saddam : His Rise and Fall (52 page)

Saddam's attempts to consolidate his position in Baghdad were constantly undermined by the waywardness of his eldest son Uday. By the late 1990s Uday was reported to be fully recovered from the injuries he suffered during the 1996 assassination attempt, although in reality he was confined to a wheelchair most of the time. For official photographs and television appearances, he would appear standing, even though immediately afterward he would return to his wheelchair. He was so frustrated by the slow pace of his recovery that one evening, when drunk at a Baghdad nightclub, he demanded that his bodyguards “bring me the head of my surgeon.” The unfortunate doctor was warned of Uday's ire, and fled into exile in Saudi Arabia.
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Rumors continued to circulate about Uday's sexuality, with the oft-repeated allegation that he was impotent. Abbas Janabi, who worked as Uday's private secretary for fifteen years before defecting to Britain, said Uday regained his sexual appetite and often seduced as many as four women in a single day. Sometimes his conquests would be young girls aged twelve or younger.
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Uday's impetuous behavior was reflected in his treatment of Iraq's national football team. If the players lost an important game or played badly, they were taken to the cells at Uday's Olympic Committee headquarters and beaten.
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Another of Uday's former associates, Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, a former brigadier general in the Mukhabarat who defected in early 2001, had personal experience of Uday's brutality. During an anticorruption purge initiated by Saddam in 2000, Qurairy had rather naively sent a secret report to Saddam detailing how Uday was defrauding his father's government in a multimillion-dollar scam. Although Saddam had given his officials his personal assurance that any information he received would be treated in the strictest confidence, the next time Qurairy saw Uday he knew all the details of the secret report. Uday “produced an electric cattle prod from nowhere, and he jabbed me with it between my legs. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was in a red cell in the Olympic Committee prison.”
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Uday remained in charge of the highly lucrative oil-smuggling operation, and opened new routes through Syria. In August 1999 Saddam was deeply embarrassed by his son's venality when a cargo of baby milk and medical supplies that was meant for Iraqi children was discovered being smuggled out of the country in one of Uday's lucrative business deals. Saddam also had to contend with Uday's mounting jealousy of his younger brother, Qusay, who, because he was more conscientious and responsible, was increasingly assuming the role of heir apparent. Uday had already caused one rift in the family, by prompting Barzan al-Tikriti, his uncle and Saddam's half brother, to defect to Switzerland in late 1998. Barzan's defection was provoked by Uday's attempts to take control of the billions of dollars of assets that Barzan controlled through a number of secret Swiss bank accounts. Saddam later effected a reconciliation with Barzan, but Uday responded by turning his attention on his younger brother. Matters came to a head in late 1999 when Uday was held responsible for the execution of Saddam's intelligence chief and cousin, Rafa al-Tikriti. Al-Tikriti was a close ally of Saddam's half brother Watban, and had been waging a campaign against Uday since he provoked the defection of Saddam's two sons-in-law in 1995. Uday responded by framing him for leaking details of Iraq's secret arms deals with Moscow, and al-Tikriti was executed for treason.
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With Iraq effectively closed to the outside world, most of the details relating to the activities of Saddam's ruling family came from the increasing number of defectors who were making their way to the West, a process that was accelerated in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. One of the more revealing accounts of Saddam's clandestine attempts to rebuild his nonconventional weapons infrastructure was provided by Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who escaped from Iraq in the summer of 1991. In his debriefing by CIA and FBI agents, Haideri said he had worked on the renovation of secret facilities for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas, and even the Saddam Hussein hospital in Baghdad.
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Haideri's allegations confirmed the suspicions of arms control experts at the UN who had been attempting to monitor Saddam's activities since UNSCOM's demise. In December 1999 the UN had established a new body to replace UNSCOM, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), which, unlike its predecessors,
reported directly to the UN secretary-general. Because of the stalemate over the future of UN sanctions, Iraq had resisted attempts by UNMOVIC to conduct inspections in Iraq. The UN could only make an informed guess about Iraq's nonconventional weapons capability on the basis of the work conducted by UNSCOM's inspectors and reports provided by defectors. These suggested that Saddam's development of nuclear weapons had been reestablished. Charles Duelfer, UNSCOM's former second-ranking official, said Iraq's known nuclear scientists had moved back to the country's five nuclear research sites.
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Saddam had the equipment to construct a nuclear device—triggers, weapons housings, etc.—and all he lacked was weapons-grade uranium. In June Iraq was accused of smuggling components for constructing uranium-enrichment systems on aid flights after it sent relief to Syria to help villagers affected by the collapse of a dam north of Damascus.
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Most estimates conducted by Western nuclear and intelligence experts concluded in the summer of 2002 that Saddam, left to his own devices, would be able to produce an atomic bomb within five years.

The level of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons development was even more difficult to assess. During the UNSCOM inspections Iraq had never accounted for all the one hundred thousand chemical weapons that it had produced during the Iran-Iraq War, and there were fears that thousands of them, filled either with VX nerve agent or mustard gas, had been hidden. George Tenet, the CIA director, told Congress in February 2003: “Baghdad is expanding its civilian chemical industry in ways that could be diverted quickly to chemical weapons production.”

Certainly, from Washington's point of view, Saddam's obsession with his nonconventional weapons arsenal became, in the radically altered post–September 11 political landscape, the principal casus belli for renewing hostilities against Iraq. As President Bush had made clear in his State of the Union Address in January 2002, the “war on terror” that had been declared in the wake of the September 11 attacks had been extended to include those countries, such as Iraq, that continued to support and harbor terrorists and to develop weapons of mass destruction. Even if the evidence on all these counts was inconclusive, Bush was not prepared to make the same mistake his father had and let Saddam off the hook. In Britain Tony Blair came to much the same conclusion, despite the strong reservations expressed by leading members of his own Labour Party and most other European Union political figures. Indeed by the spring Bush's determination to target Saddam was such
that he took the exceptional step of personally authorizing the CIA to conduct a covert operation to overthrow Saddam, using lethal force if necessary. Bush had effectively given the CIA the green light to assassinate Saddam.

Bush's determination to remove Saddam provoked a characteristically defiant response from the Iraqi tyrant. Immediately after news leaked of Bush's decision to authorize Saddam's assassination, the Iraqi president summoned an emergency meeting of key regime members, which was held on the bottom floor of one of Saddam's heavily fortified bunkers at the Presidential Palace complex in Baghdad. Saddam started the proceedings by making a long, rambling speech, denouncing Bush and declaring that the American position had “left Iraq no room to be tolerant on this issue.” Other ministers were invited to give their views. Ali Hassan al-Majid spoke first. He opened his remarks by declaring that the Americans were “silly and arrogant people.” He then suggested that Iraq “take the fight to their own homes in America.” Taha Yassin Ramadan, Saddam's long-serving vice president, a Baath activist from the 1960s who had helped him set up the People's Militia, responded in similar vein, claiming that “the heroes of Iraq can become human bombs in the thousands, willing to blow up America in particular.”

Saddam nodded his approval to both speakers, and then invited Qusay to address the gathering. “We know, and the brothers here all know,” said Qusay, “that we have—with God's aid—every capability and ability. With a simple sign from you, we can make America's people sleepless and frightened to go out in the streets…. I only ask you, sir, to give me a small sign. I swear upon your head, sir, that if I do not turn their night into day and their day into a living hell, I will ask you to chop off my head before my brothers present.” Qusay continued, “If bin Laden truly did carry out the September attacks as they claim then, as God is my witness, we will prove to them what happened in September is a picnic compared to the wrath of Saddam Hussein. They do not know Iraq, Iraq's leader, the men of Iraq, the children of Iraq.”
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On July 17, 2002, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Baath revolution, Saddam made his own feelings public about the new threat he faced from Washington during his annual speech to the Iraqi people. Speaking in his distinctive peasant accent in ungrammatical Arabic, Saddam declared, “July has returned to say to all the oppressors and powerful and evil people in the world: You will not be able to defeat me this time, not ever, even if you gathered to your side and rallied all the devils too.” Saddam was preparing himself and his
country for the many new crises that he would undoubtedly face in the future. But no matter how serious the challenge, how deadly the threat posed by the enemy, “the one who confronts” would respond in the same way that he had dealt with all the other tumults he had encountered during his many years in power. Survival would always be Saddam's number one priority.

 

Saddam did not have long to wait for the new challenge to materialize. Throughout the summer of 2002 President Bush, backed by the more hawkish members of his administration, had made it clear that he had Saddam firmly in his sights. Indeed, flushed with the success of the victory he had achieved the previous year in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, Bush appeared to have every intention of picking a fight with Saddam at the earliest available opportunity. It was only through the intervention of the more cautious members of the administration such as Secretary of State Colin Powell and allies such as British prime minister Tony Blair that Bush was persuaded to tackle Saddam, and the issue of his various unaccounted for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, through the United Nations.

Even so, few people in the Bush administration had much expectation that the UN could prevent renewed hostilities. As early as March that year
Time
magazine had reported Bush's real intentions when it claimed that he had poked his head into the office of Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. national security adviser, while she was discussing the Iraq issue with three senators and shouted, “Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out.” In the middle of August Dick Cheney, the vice president, indicated his preference for direct military action against Saddam when he openly questioned the wisdom of sending new teams of weapons inspectors back to Iraq. “A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatever of Saddam's compliance with UN resolutions,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville, Tennessee. “On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box.” The hawks in Washington were determined to effect regime change in Baghdad, and this time there would be no escape for Saddam.

The strategy for dealing with Saddam was set in place in August 2002. During a video conference that President Bush held with his senior policy advisers at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, it was agreed that the issue of Iraq's WMD would be handled through the UN, but on the strict understanding
that the UN would not be allowed to delay a war or to dictate terms to Washington. Bush was prepared to allow the weapons inspectors one last chance to flush out Saddam's illegal weapons programs and to test the resolve of America's allies to take military action against Iraq. The strategy was further refined in September when Tony Blair flew to Camp David to discuss tactics. Aware that he needed to overcome the growing antiwar movement both within his own Labour Party and the British public at large, Blair was insistent that Bush involve the UN. At Camp David Bush indicated that he was prepared to take the UN route, and that if it was able to deliver genuine disarmament (which, given its track record over the preceding eleven years, appeared exceedingly unlikely), then he would deal with Saddam through diplomacy. In return Blair promised that, if the UN failed to deliver, then he would join forces with the United States in waging war against Saddam. Blair emphasized the point that Britain, come what may, would remain a loyal ally of the United States. Britain, he said, had no interest in being anywhere other than at America's side.
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Despite his public commitment to involve the UN, Bush had few illusions about what the eventual outcome would be. At the same time that politicians and diplomats in Washington and Europe were gearing up for one last attempt to persuade Saddam to fulfill his long-standing obligations to disarm through the UN, it was revealed in early September, the U.S. Navy was chartering a number of ships to transport tanks and other heavy equipment to the Gulf in preparation for renewed hostilities.