Saddam Hussein: The Last Great Tyrant
by Robert Fisk
The Independent, 30 December 2000

When the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Heikal visited Iraq during the
early
years of Saddam's rule, he met the minister for industry. Heikal was
impressed by the intense, hard working, intellectual man running Iraq's
dynamic industrial output. So on his next visit, Heikal asked to meet
him
again. Officials explained that they had no information about the
minister
and all enquiries should be addressed to His Excellency the President.
So
when at last Heikal turned up for his interview with the dictator of
Iraq,
he asked about the minister for industry.

"He's gone," Saddam said. "Gone?", asked Heikal There was a pause. "We
scissored his neck ­ he was suspected of being a traitor." But was
there any
evidence of this, the appalled Heikal asked. Was there any proof? "In
Iraq,
we don't need proof," Saddam replied, "suspicion is enough." In Cairo,
he
went on, Egyptians might have a white revolution. "In Iraq we have a
red
revolution." Heikal was horrified. But should he have been surprised?

There is about Saddam Hussein a peculiar ruthlessness, an almost
calculated
cruelty, perhaps even an interest in pain. It wasn't enough to order
the
murder of his sons-in-law after their return from exile in Jordan. They
had
to be dragged away with meat hooks through their eyes. It wasn't enough
to
order the hanging of the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in 1990;
Bazoft
was to be left unaware of his fate until a British embassy official
turned
up at the Abu Ghorraib prison to say goodbye. At Abu Ghorraib, women
prisoners are allowed a party the night before one of them is to be
hanged.
Women are dispatched on Thursdays. Families are asked to bring their
own
coffin when a relative has been executed.
And yet we loved him. In the days when Saddam clawed his way to power,
personally shot members of his own cabinet, or used gas for the first
time
on his recalcitrant Kurds, we loved him. When he invaded Iran in 1980,
we
gave him Bailey bridges and Mirage jets and radio sets and poison gas ­
the
Mirages from France, the poison gas, of course, from Germany ­ and US
satellite reconnaissance pictures of the Iranian front lines. I once
met the
Cologne arms dealer who personally took the photos from Washington DC
to
Baghdad. The Russians poured in their new T-72 tanks. Saddam's war
against
Iran ­ the greatest mass killing in modern Middle Eastern history until
the
UN sanctions of the last decade ­ was designed to appeal to both Arabs
and
the West. For the Arabs who tamely poured their millions into his
armoury,
Kuwait among the most prominent, his Iraqi sons were wading through
anharr
al-damm ­ literally "rivers of blood" ­ to defend the al-bawwabah al
sharqiyah, the "Eastern Gateway" to the Arab world and Saudi Arabia. To
the
West, he was fighting off Khomeini's Islamic hordes. Asked why the
Iraqis
used gas against their enemies, one of his senior confidants replied:
"When
you weed the lawn, you have to use weed-killer."

Blundering, ignorant of Western (though not Arab) history, largely
uneducated, an original Tikriti corner-boy whose first political act
was an
attempted assassination and an escape, wounded, into the desert; how
did he
do it? How come the man who defied George Bush senior is still there to
defy
George Bush junior? How come, 10 years after the "mother of all
battles" ­ a
phrase typical of Saddam ­ and 10 years after UN sanctions that have
killed
at least a million Iraqis, Saddam is still enjoying his palaces and
cigars?

The French are a clue. They idolised Saddam in the late Seventies. He
was
feted on his arrival at Orly, dined out by the Mayor of Paris (a
certain M
Chirac), swamped with champagne as he watched a bull-running circus in
central France. For the French, he was a kind of Jacobin, the
reformer-turned-extremist whose reign of terror had a power all its
own.
Saddam's "red revolution" was always rubber-stamped by the democratic
mockeries of Iraq ­ he asked the Kurds of a northern Iraqi town if he
should
hang Bazoft and their cries of affirmation doomed the correspondent ­
but
somehow, in a crazed way, it was modern and progressive. Iraq's
hospitals
and medical care were on a par with Europe, women's rights were
rigorously
enforced, religious insurrection was suppressed in blood.

And he was ­ and is ­ a very intelligent man. When I first saw him, in
1978,
he was espousing the merits of nuclear power, of binary fission
(technology
courtesy of his beloved France). Self-confident, quoting from Arab
poets and
writers, replying to foreign journalists who snapped at him, with
humour and
history. Asked, in view of his little speech, about the danger of
nuclear
weapons proliferation, he replied: "Ah, you must not ask me about
Israel's
250 warheads in the Negev desert ­ you must ask the Israelis!" He
always
wore a massive wrap-around jacket with too many buttons, but his shirts
and
shoes were always the latest in Paris fashion.

I visited his abandoned palace in Kurdistan in 1991, one of the series
of
massive, fortified royal residences he continues to build across Iraq,
evidence, according to Madeleine Albright, that sanctions haven't yet
brought him low and thus must continue. In truth, they are evidence
that
sanctions clearly do not work ­ because they don't touch Saddam ­ and
thus
should not continue. But what was so evident about his northern palace
was
its tawdry nature, the poor quality of the concrete round the swimming
pool,
the cracked pseudo Grecian columns in the dining-room, the under-weeded
flower beds. In Baghdad, the palace lawns are better tended, but the
same
sense of spent taste and vulgarity pervades the president's imagery.
Saddam
on horseback, in Kurdish clothes, embracing babies and war heroes,
riding on
a charger in medieval armour to confront the Persians at the Battle of
Qaddasiyeh, dressed as Nebuchadnezzar, he who conquered Syria and
Palestine,
sacked Ashkelon and subdued all the tribes of the Arabs. Like the king
of
Babylonia, Saddam decided to rebuild Babylon; and so the ancient city
was
ripped apart and reconstructed, Disney-style, in the image of the great
man.

Even the giant egg-shell monument to the Iraqi war dead of 1980-88 is a
personal museum to Saddam's family. Visit the crypt and beside the
names of
half a million dead you find a photograph of the young, revolutionary
Saddam, on the run from the royal family, of Saddam studying in Cairo
(his
hero was not Hitler but Stalin), of Saddam with his first wife. Now
there is
a second wife ­ the feuding between the wives' two families is one of
the
causes of the ferocious bloodletting within the family. His son Oday,
partly
crippled in an assassination attempt while on his way to a nightclub,
murdered a bodyguard at a party. "My son must be tried like any other
Iraqi," Saddam announced. Then the family of the dead man ­ surprise,
surprise ­ forgave Oday. Unpunished, he continued to run the highest
security apparatus of the state, all the while enjoying the title of
head of
the Iraqi Olympic committee.

Greatness, for Saddam, is a simple affair. Victorious in war, the
people
love you. Strength is all. In an Arab world that sadly admires power
more
than compassion, he was a hero for millions of Egyptians, Saudis,
Kuwaitis,
Lebanese, even Syrians. "He may be ruthless," a Lebanese journalist
remarked
to me in 1990, "but you have to admit he's strong. He stands up to
people."
In reality, Saddam walks tall when his enemies are beaten. He dreams
like a
sleepwalker. I recall huddling with Iraqi commandos in a shell-smashed
city
in southern Iran in 1980 when an officer announced a personal message
from
Saddam to all his fighting forces. They were participating, he
announced, in
"the lightning war". There was even a song that played continuously on
Iraqi
television: "The Lightning War". Like the "Mother of All Battles", it
was a
mockery of the truth.

There were other hints in his war with Iran, had we but known it, of
Saddam's behaviour in Kuwait. In 1983, after proclaiming the
Iraqi-occupied
Iranian city of Khorramshahr a bastion to be defended to the last man ­
Saddam's personal Stalingrad ­ he simply ordered his thousands of
troops to
abandon the fortress and march back to Iraq, just as he ordered his men
to
abandon Kuwait the moment the Western armies broke into Iraq in 1991.
If his
behaviour seems irrational, it is certainly consistent. He believed
that a
strong Iraq must be self-sufficient. It must make its own weapons, its
own
tanks, its own bullets.

A year to the day after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, I was prowling
through
the wreckage of the Iraqi army along the Basra highway when I came upon
an
upturned ammunition truck whose cargo of battalion and brigade
notebooks had
been scattered across the desert, partly buried in sand. "Message from
the
Supreme Commander," it said in one. And there, page after page, was the
text
of a secret Saddam speech to his high command. Iraq, he said, must
abandon
its traditional confidence in other nations; it must set up its own
arms
factories, invent its own secret weapons. There it all was, in blue
Biro,
the authentic voice of Saddam speaking from beneath the very floor of
the
desert.

It is not so difficult to struggle into the mind of Saddam when you
read
this. He had invaded Iran and the West loved him. Why should they
object ­
or fight him ­ when, threatened by Kuwaiti demands for the billions of
dollars in "loans" used to pay off the Iran war and with the Kuwaitis
apparently "stealing" Iraqi oil from beneath the Rumailah field, he
invaded
Kuwait? Only four months earlier, just after Bazoft's hanging, a group
of
American senators visited Saddam in Baghdad and assured him that
"democracy
is a very confusing issue ­ I believe that your problems lie with the
Western media and not with the US government" (this from Senator Alan
Simpson). Senator Howard Metzenbaum, announcing himself "a Jew and a
staunch
supporter of Israel", went on to tell Saddam that "I have been sitting
here
and listening to you for about an hour, and I am now aware that you are
a
strong and intelligent man and that you want peace."

So what had Saddam to fear from the US? In that last fateful interview
with
US ambassador April Glaspie, less than a month before the invasion of
Kuwait, Saddam told Ms Glaspie that Kuwait's borders were drawn in
colonial
days. Saddam had always been an anti-colonialist. "We studied history
at
school," the luckless Glaspie replies. "They taught us to say freedom
or
death. I think you know well that we... have our experience with the
colonialists. We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your
border disagreement with Kuwait." In a post-war press interview, as the
writer Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, Glaspie gave the game
away. "We
never expected they would take all of Kuwait," she said.

The Americans were going to let Saddam bite a chunk out of the Kuwaiti
border. Saddam thought he had permission to gobble up all of Kuwait.
And so
we went to war with the Hitler of the Euphrates. And so he lives on in
his
palaces and bunkers while his people die for lack of clean water and
medicines under the UN sanctions that are supposed to harm Saddam. We
still
bomb him every day ­ our war with Saddam has lasted 10 years now ­ and
slowly, the Arabs, dismayed by the bloodshed in the Palestine-Israel
war,
are warming once more to the man who never gave in. Jordan, Lebanon,
Syria,
the Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia ­ almost all of them
America's
allies in 1991 ­ are now breaking the air embargo by flying into
Baghdad.
Saddam lives.