Saddam Hussein: the Politics of Revenge
Saïd K Aburish
Bloomsbury £20, pp406
Buy it at BOL
In the summer of 1996, MI6 and the CIA were planning a joint operation in Iraq. They believed that senior army officers were ready and willing to mount a coup against Saddam Hussein. The CIA provided logistical support, including special mobile phones with direct access to the agency's station chief in Amman.
But Saddam Hussein likes to boast that he knows who will betray him before they know it themselves. He has even set up a special intelligence unit, which has studied every coup of the twentieth century. So Saddam moved first. Hundreds of officers were arrested, tortured and executed. In one raid, an Iraqi intelligence agent found one of the CIA's special phones and used it to place a call. When an American answered he told him: 'Your men are dead. Pack up and go home.'
Saïd Aburish, a distinguished journalist and author of a revealing life of Saddam, has unusual qualifications as a biographer. In the mid-1970s, he was a go-between for Western businesses and arms manufacturers, whom Saddam wanted to work in Iraq. So he played a part in Saddam's long-term, top-secret plan to build an arsenal of chemical and nuclear weapons.
His career as a middle-man gave him unusually close access to Saddam and the way he thinks. His portrait shows a man who may be cruel and ruthless but is also a clear-headed, strategic thinker. Significantly, Saddam was still only vice-president when he embarked on his programme to acquire the weapons of mass destruction that could make Iraq the key player in the Middle East. Why a cultivated Palestinian like Aburish would be willing to work for one of the most blood-stained tyrants of our age says much about Arab psychology.
Like many others, Aburish longed to back a winner and to see one Arab leader grow militarily and economically strong enough to stand up for himself. Saddam's Iraq didn't look like a bad bet. Its large population is comparatively well educated. Its women are relatively liberated. To support Saddam in the 1970s was to support the possibility of a progressive Arab state.
At first, Saddam did not seem to put a foot wrong. He skilfully played Russia and America off against each other. He used Iraq's oil revenues to build up the economy and the military. However, it is no coincidence that he also created one of the region's most ruthlessly efficient secret police forces. As Aburish shows, Saddam's role model is Stalin. His library is lined with books about the great dictator. Like Stalin, Saddam was willing to do anything, kill anyone to modernise his country. Not that he was ever a communist, but then as Saddam sees it, nor was Stalin.
This helps to explain the long and close relationship that Aburish documents between Saddam and the CIA. The agency first spotted him when he was an exile in Cairo, who had just tried to assassinate Iraq's head of state. Saddam became a regular visitor at the US embassy. When Saddam's faction of the Ba'ath party seized power in 1968, the CIA provided his group with a hit list of known and suspected communist sympathisers.
Saddam showed himself to be an enthusiastic, hands-on killer and torturer. When he finally grabbed supreme power for himself, he continued to enjoy wary support from Washington. He may have been a thug, but at least he was not a communist or a religious fundamentalist. As Lyndon Johnson would have put it, we didn't care 'what kind of a bastard' was in power in Iraq, so long as he was 'our bastard'.
The hypocrisy and amorality of Western policy make uncomfortable reading. Saddam's war on Khomeini's Iraq was his bid to be the dominant power in the region. It turned out to be his first great miscalculation. At least Saddam Hussein could count on support from the Americans, whose CIA agents delivered regular packages of satellite photographs and military intelligence to Iraq's top brass.
This beautiful friendship came to an end when the Iran-Contra affair showed Saddam how deeply he had been betrayed by the White House. He seems to have blundered into the Gulf war. But faced with the onslaught of half a million allied troops, he is supposed to have said: 'If I survive, I win.'
In the past decade, Saddam has survived everything the world has thrown at him: defeat in the Gulf war; popular uprisings; sanctions; assassination attempts; UN arms inspectors bent on destroying his weapons; and an air war, in which US and British pilots have flown more sorties over Iraq than Nato flew during the war in Kosovo.
But Saddam survives, an exemplar of dos and don'ts for future dictators. In writing about the life and times of Saddam Hussein, Aburish has set himself a difficult task. Saddam grants almost no interviews, Iraq's official archives remain closed and second sources are in short supply. Despite this, Aburish's unmatched contacts in the Middle East enable him to provide a rare glimpse into the secret world of Saddam.
The definitive, academic history may not be written until long after Saddam's demise. When it does appear, it unlikely significantly to alter or improve on the insights and perspectives found in this chilling biography.
