Saddam Hussein has always had a liking for doing the unpredictable. Within days of taking power in Iraq in 1979, he said: ”What is politics? Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another.” He added: ”Then you do neither what you said or what you intended.”
In what appear to be the last days of his regime, after 24 years of actions that have often defied logic, the world again waits for the unpredictable: the eleventh-hour concession that past experience suggests is still to come or some other sudden, inexplicable move.
Appearing in military uniform yesterday – though he has no military background, having been turned down as unsuitable when younger by the Iraqi military college — he rejected an ultimatum issued 12 hours earlier by the US president, George Bush, to quit the country or face an overwhelming onslaught by US-British force.
According to Iraqi television, he boldly told his military commanders and cabinet that he was ”ready to confront the invading aggressors and repel them”.
Watching from the west, it seems a foolish gesture, another in a long list of miscalculations. Facing certain defeat, why not just hand over the alleged weapons of mass destruction and ensure survival? Or surrender, or fly with his family into exile?
Sayid Majid al-Khoie, one of Saddam’s most implacable opponents, who met him twice before fleeing Iraq in 1991, predicts Saddam will stay.
”He does not truly believe the Americans will do it. He will think that he has divided the United Nations security council, the European leaders and the world,” said Khoie, son of the grand ayatollah of Iraq. ”He will think that in the end the US will bomb and then, like 1991, they will let him continue. He said this on television a few days ago, speaking to the army.”
In spite of President Saddam’s public defiance yesterday, Iraqi opposition sources claim that the strain is already showing within the inner circle. There has been speculation for weeks in Baghdad that the elite has been sending its families for safety to Syria and Jordan and that, in the last week, President Saddam and his brother have spectacularly fallen out, and that President Saddam has become an even lonelier figure than in the past, with not even the comfort of his dysfunctional family.
Khoie sees a nervousness in President Saddam and this extends to his inner circle. His main advisers on international affairs are Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, and Naji Sabri, the foreign minister, neither brave enough to confront him with hard reality.
According to a biography of President Saddam by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, Aziz in 1990, unable to dismiss his president’s proposed occupation of Kuwait as suicidal, suggested continuing the invasion to Saudi Arabia in the hope that he might come to realise the foolishness of the whole exercise.
President Saddam’s distorted view of foreign affairs, and US intentions, comes not only from his fearful advisers but his lack of experience of the world. Apart from a trip to France in 1975, he has spent little time outside the Middle East. Although he watches CNN and the BBC, he does not speak English, watching only the pictures, and relies for information on Arab television, not the best source for US intentions.
‘He will stay’
A few Iraqi exiles describe President Saddam as cowardly and predict that he will, in the end, seek exile rather than die.
But most Iraqi exiles think he will remain in Baghdad to the end. Hussein al-Shahristani, who was head of the Iraqi civilian nuclear programme and who knew President Saddam, said yesterday from Kuwait, where he was preparing a humanitarian programme: ”He will not leave Iraq. He will hide in one of the tunnels under his palace.”
All the indications from Iraq suggest that President Saddam is preparing to fight, especially his decision to divide the country into four military zones, with one of his sons, Qusay, in charge of the one that includes Baghdad and Tikrit. He will not necessarily regard the start of the war as marking his own end but the start of a process that will throw up options the longer it goes on.
A recent delegation to Iraq was told privately by a senior Iraqi that the country will prove to be the ”graveyard of US hegemony”. There is a view among some pro-Saddam Iraqis, often spoken about in public, that the US is soft and that if enough casualties are inflicted on its soldiers, through conventional fighting or suicide bombers or chemical or biological weapons, it will withdraw, as it did in Somalia.
That may be wishful thinking and President Saddam’s strategy may be much more limited in its ambitions. He appears to be preparing for a prolonged siege of Baghdad that may win world sympathy. US-British bombing on the scale of the threatened ”shock and awe” campaign would wreck electricity, water supplies and the sewage system on the opening day: a week or two of those conditions, shown on CNN and the BBC, would undermine the US-British position.
A coup or revolt against him remains a strong possibility but he has long been able to suppress these through one of the most ruthless security systems in the world and through playing on the fears of the ruling minority Sunni Muslims of Shia Muslims wreaking bloody revenge. But the US-led invasion could spark uprisings, as in 1991.
The US may get lucky and catch President Saddam with a bomb early in the campaign or, with Baghdad about to fall, he may opt for a martyr’s death. Although disliked by fellow Arab governments, he is popular among ordinary Arabs for standing up to the US .
George Galloway, the British Labour MP who met President Saddam last year, said it was ironic that the west had turned someone who was essentially a ”tinpot dictator” into the closest the Arab world has to a Saladin: ”The first thing to bear in mind is that Saddam is prepared to die. He is not the sort of man who will run away. His mindset is messianic.”
President Saddam likes comparisons with Saladin, the Kurd who led the Arabs against the Crusaders and who was also from Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, Tikrit.
There is yet another alternative: surrender. He would then face trial, probably in a special criminal court such as those set up to deal with Rwanda and Yugoslavia. He would live, but in ignominy.
Baghdad and the other towns and cities of Iraq are today full of statues and posters of President Saddam. In spite of his defiant words yesterday, it cannot be much longer before his image will be hitting the ground.
Showing how some Iraqis feel about the choice between being invaded by the US and continuing under Saddam, graffiti in one Iraqi town last week said: ”We would rather 1 000 Americans than one Tikriti.” – Guardian Unlimited Â