A rchive Date
[ 23-03-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-619491,00.html
Saddam believes he can win even when staring defeat in the face
By Andrew Cockburn
IN QUIETER times, Saddam Hussein starts the day with a digest of the foreign press. Right now, he may be too busy to read international speculation about his possible demise in the raid on Wednesday night, but he would certainly regard any suggestion that he is finished with derision.
The former hitman from Tikrit has never shown any sign of caving under pressure, still less turning tail, and there is no reason to believe that he will change now.
“He’s keeping his nerve,” one Iraqi opposition activist said disappointedly after watching Saddam’s post-raid television broadcast. “He did not ask for this fight, in fact he made every concession he could to avoid it. But now it has been forced on him, he will fight to the end.”
There is a story Saddam likes to tell about an episode during the war with Iran that is revealing about his reactions to a stressful situation. Early in the war, the Iranians mounted a devastating counter-attack and broke through Iraqi lines. Saddam went to review the situation, but found a horde of panic-stricken Iraqi soldiers running for the rear. He stopped a soldier and demanded his gun. “Then,” says Saddam, “with a gun in my hand, I was ready to face the world.”
That was only one of the tight corners from which Saddam has extricated himself in the past, which may account for the optimism that is one of his most enduring features.
Fleeing, wounded and alone, after his failed attempt to kill the ruler of Iraq, General Abdul Kassim, in 1959 was a low point, as was the time in 1964 when he was again on the run after his Baath Party had been ejected from power in a military coup. On that occasion he found himself trapped in a house with two companions, heavily outgunned by the security forces. His companions urged surrender. “No,” said Saddam. “We will fight to the last bullet and then try to get away.” That is indeed what he did. Although he was captured and jailed, he escaped to fight another day.
Such experiences have taught Saddam a thing or two, and if his skills grew rusty during the years after he took power, they were refreshed during the last Gulf War. Then, America was no less eager to hunt him down with precision-guided bombs and missiles, targeted with the aid of an intense intelligence effort.
Although his bunkers and palaces were obliterated, Saddam confounded the effort by staying above ground, mainly in the middle-class district of al-Tafiya, which was quiet because most of its inhabitants had fled Baghdad. Rather than summoning important commanders to meet him, he would turn up to see them.
Wafiq al-Samarrai, who was then chief of military intelligence, says that the boss would turn up without notice at military Intelligence headquarters (the location of which was never discovered by the Americans during the war) “in a cheap car, with just one bodyguard, a colonel”, who himself wore no insignia of rank.
Such elusiveness proved successful last time. Obviously, life becomes harder for Saddam if the CIA now has a source in his inner circle willing and able to pinpoint his location at any time. Such an asset is by no means beyond possibility.
Uday, for example, Saddam’s unloveable elder son, was shot and badly wounded in an ambush in December 1996. His would-be assassins knew where to strike because his cousin Luai revealed Uday’s planned movements to a friend, a former officer in the presidential guard who had secretly turned against the regime and was in league with the assassins.
Although the CIA has never had that much success in penetrating Saddam’s inner circle, I have reason to believe that at least one member of the leader’s extended family, an officer in the Special Republican Guard, was at one time a fruitful source for US Intelligence.
If Saddam does suspect that someone is betraying him — and he is not someone who believes in giving the benefit of the doubt — then his reaction will be to administer horrible punishment to the unlucky suspect and, more importantly, to restrict his contacts exclusively to men linked to him by especially close ties of blood, as well as complicity in unforgiveable crimes.
Foremost among these is his younger son Qusay, long entrusted with control of the security services, which he seems to have conducted with impressive competence, and now officially co-president.
As for his complicity in crimes, suffice it to say that as children, he and his brother Uday told playmates that their father would send them to the prisons to observe and, they hinted, participate in torture sessions in order to prepare them “for the tasks ahead”.
Uday, the elder son, has never exhibited his sibling’s proficiency in administration. He is famously brutal, but Saddam, who once threatened to have Uday executed for murdering the presidential food taster, knows his limitations and would be unlikely to give him meaningful power.
Cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, the next most important member of the inner family, was recently entrusted with the defence of southern Iraq. A diabetic with a menacing, rodent-like face and a straggly moustache, who suffers from hypertension and spinal infections, he has never shown much military skill but has, on the other hand, garnered a reputation for ruthlessness.
The Kurds call him “Chemical Ali” for his role in gassing them in the 1980s. These and others especially close to the centre, such as the tribal leader Izzat al-Dhouri, will almost certainly remain loyal, as will others from his clan and tribe who believe that their future post-Saddam would be brief and unpleasant. Saddam may well believe that a few thousand die-hard loyalists, bedded down in Baghdad, may be sufficient to cause enough US and British casualties, not to mention collateral carnage among Iraqi civilians, for a consequent international outcry to make President Bush stop short of victory.
After all, Saddam has repeatedly stated that he actually won the last Gulf War. To someone with such a rosy take on life, even present circumstances may not seem so dire.
Andrew Cockburn is co- author of Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (Verso)
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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