The scene is set for psychoanalysis. The comfortable sofa is oatmeal. A box of tissues is within easy reach, held in place by two wooden dolls — one crying, the other with its arms crossed, sulking. A collection of ethnic masks hangs grimacing from a wall.
The psychiatrist himself, Dr Jerrold Post, is in his customary seat, patiently stroking Coco, a miniature wirehaired dachsund. Everything is in place except his patient — a deeply troubled man who is 9 600 kilometres away in Baghdad, trying to decide whether or when to unleash or surrender his weapons of mass destruction.
As Saddam Hussein’s shrink, it is Post’s job to assess what he is going to do next — arguably the most urgent question facing the western world today. It certainly weighs heavily on the Bush administration, currently locked in a poker game of towering stakes with the Iraqi dictator.
Government officials, who Post is not allowed to name (he describes them collectively as a ”senior policy audience”), come to him for insights into Saddam’s state of mind. As US ships and tanks are moved into place on the Gulf chessboard, it is a subject that takes up an increasing amount of his time, when he is not considering Osama Bin Laden’s unresolved issues with his father — another of Post’s specialities.
His diagnoses are listened to carefully because he is not only a psychiatrist. He is also a former high-ranking CIA official, who spent 21 years assessing the inner workings of America’s enemies — a shrink among spooks.
Aged 68 and retired from the Agency, you might call Post a spook among shrinks. He still has a few normal clients who turn up in person at his pleasant home in the wooded outskirts of Washington, but many of his subjects are referred to him by the US government. He still plies most of his trade at the controversial intersection of politics and psychology — an increasingly dangerous crossroads peopled by unpredictable terrorists and tyrants.
To help Post in his work, the government has allowed him to interview many of its captives from the ”war on terror”, to chat to defectors and pore over intelligence reports.
But right now, his analysis provides little comfort to an American leadership contemplating a decisive battle with the country’s latest and perhaps most dangerous foe.
Post, who is also a professor of political psychology at the capital’s George Washington University, believes Saddam will never give up his chemical and biological weapons, or his nuclear programme, and will lash out with everything he has in his arsenal if he feels he is cornered, launching toxins and germs at invading US-British forces, and at Israel.
This is a widely shared opinion among national security pundits. What sets Post apart are his reasons for thinking that way, which involve Saddam’s
”wounded self”, and which stretch back to his traumatic upbringing, his infancy and even beyond.
”It all goes back to his mother’s womb,” Post declares with some professional satisfaction. ”During the mother’s pregnancy with Saddam Hussein, his father died, and another son died when he was only 12 years old. She both tried to commit suicide and to have an abortion.”
As the story goes, Saddam’s mother, Subha, was prevented from killing herself and her unborn child by a compassionate family of Iraqi Jews. That family is now reported to be living in Israel, where it may think itself the tool of some huge cosmic joke. In any case, it does not seek publicity for its act of kindness.
Back in late 1930s Tikrit, 160 kilometres north-west of Baghdad, Subha, still in a deep depression, could not bring herself to look on her new-born son. He was handed over to her brother, Khairalla Msallat, until the infant was three.
But even when the toddler Saddam was reunited with his mother, her treatment of him hardly improved. She had remarried and allowed her new husband to abuse the little boy.
”His stepfather was brutal both physically and psychologically,” Post says. ”His mother’s failure to nurture him and his stepfather’s abuse deeply wounded his self-esteem. In psychological terms, it is known as ”the wounded self”.
”Typically, after such traumatic experiences, people can sink into despair and hopelessness. But it can also produce compensatory dreams of glory,” Post argues.
Such dreams were duly provided by Uncle Khairalla, who took back responsibility for Saddam’s care when he ran away from home at the age of eight. Khairalla, a bitter man whose career was ruined after he took part in a pro-Nazi revolt against British rule, told the young Saddam he would follow in the footsteps of the country’s legendary heroes: Nebuchadnezzar, the ancient king of Babylonia, and Saladin, who recaptured Jerusalem for Islam in 1187, by defeating the crusaders. When Saddam went to secondary school, a third name was added to the Pantheon.
”The whole school was aflame with talk of Nasser [the Egyptian nationalist leader of the 50s],” Post says.
Saddam’s rise to the top through coups, intrigue and assassination have convinced him he has inherited the same myth-laden mantle of leadership — and that belief has deepened with every layer of sycophantic, frightened followers who have gathered around him.
”It has produced that most dangerous political personality — malignant narcissism,” Post says. This particular brand of personality disorder exhibits itself in an extreme lack of empathy for others, paranoia, the absence of conscience and a readiness to use violence to achieve goals. Post believes Bin Laden is suffering from the same malady.
This does not mean that either man is ”crazy”. Rather, both act with a cool rationality which is primarily limited by the yes-men around them. In his profile of Saddam, Post argues: ”While he is psychologically in touch with reality, he is often politically out of touch with reality.”
Consequently, Saddam was caught by surprise when virtually the entire planet united against Iraq after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It also helps explain why he thought his army could hold back the coalition forces.
Post predicts that faced with the threat of UN inspections, Saddam will try to repeat the evasions and subterfuge of the past decade in an attempt to avoid a war. ”He is not a martyr. He is a quintessential survivor,” the psychiatrist insists. But on the other hand, he will never give up his arsenal of mass destruction, which Post says are essential to his self-image as a world-class leader. ”Big boys have big toys,” as he puts it. ”Without the weapons, he’s nothing.”
Threatened with extinction, Post predicts Saddam will probably both set fire to the Iraqi oilfields, as he did in Kuwait 11 years ago, and order the use of chemical and biological weapons against the invading troops and against Israel.
This is also the CIA’s analysis. Moreover, Post agrees with his former employers at the agency in saying that, in the absence of an existential threat, it is not in Saddam’s nature to loan out his toys to terrorists. ”That would mean a loss of total control,” he says.
His take on Saddam seems to raise worrying questions about the Bush strategy, if confronting Saddam head-on would produce the one set of circumstances in which he would pose a direct threat to American lives.
Not necessarily so, Post says. If Saddam was allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, he might not court martyrdom by using it, but its presence would back up his threats and fire his grandiose ambitions of dominating his region and following in Saladin’s path towards Jerusalem.
The arguments are familiar from a year of constant debate over Iraq and it is arguable how much light the insights of psychoanalysis throw on an ugly situation. Even with a compliant patient on the couch, psychoanalysis is an inexact science, and the jury is still out on the usefulness of psychoanalysing world figures at a distance through their speeches and accounts of their disturbed childhood. ”I think it’s a valid exercise, but it has limited power. If you don’t have the person there in front of you, its utility really is circumscribed,” said Mark Mills, a Florida ”forensic psychiatrist”, who gives expert testimony on psychological issues in court disputes.
Before Bin Laden popped up with apparently new recorded threats on Tuesday, Post had predicted he was dead because the al-Qaeda leader’s malignantly narcissistic personality would not tolerate ”being out of the limelight for long. It is inconsistent with his psychology.”
To be fair, Post also suggested that, for a while, Bin Laden might have been too badly wounded even to talk into a microphone, and that remains a plausible scenario. In any case, he insists, he can only sketch out patterns of behaviour, not predict individual actions.
Post still seems to have the ear of the Pentagon. A collection of his profiles of terrorists, rogue heads of state and other awkward leaders are to be published this month under the title Know Thy Enemy by the US Air Force Counter-Proliferation Centre, as a primer for decision-makers.
He may still be riding on the credit for his greatest coup, 23 years ago — tipping off the Carter administration that Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat’s deeply contrasting personalities left an opening for an intermediary — an observation that helped pave the way to Camp David, and vindicated his personal project, the creation of the CIA’s Centre for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behaviour.
Most of the work he did there is still so secret that even he has been denied access to his old work files, so we shall probably never know what the agency really thought of Chairman Mao or Leonid Brezhnev, Harold Wilson or Margaret Thatcher. But through Jerrold Post, we do more or less know what the Bush administration expects of Saddam Hussein — a highly dangerous man who will think the unthinkable and do the unspeakable if cornered. And that is exactly what the US plans to do. It may not just be Saddam who needs his head examined. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001