Baghdad’s most notorious prisoner, Saddam Hussein, does not have much to do most days. His one court appearance in 10 months has come and gone. The International Committee for the Red Cross visits him occasionally to ensure that he is not being badly treated.
The monotony of imprisonment is sometimes broken by the visits of his interrogator and the United States military doctors who monitor his health.
Within the rings of US armour, helicopters and troops, the sense of isolation is punctuated only by the noise of the aircraft that corkscrew down towards the airport’s nearby runway to avoid insurgent fire. They are a reminder of how his horizons have shrunk to four walls.
Once Saddam led one of the most powerful and wealthy states in the region. Now he writes and reads romantic novels. During his exercise period, he is allowed to tend a tree inside a walled courtyard inside the facility known as Camp Cropper, inside Baghdad’s sprawling airport complex, under constant suicide watch by a hand-picked team of US military jailers.
When the ”debriefer” comes to see Saddam, it is to continue the lengthy process that began with his capture in December from his spider hole north of Baghdad.
Last week, for the first time, the details of those conversations, and those with other prominent detainees, were revealed in the final report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), set up to search for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
In concluding what has been self-evident for months — that Iraq retained no such weapons — the ISG has also painted a compelling psychological picture of Saddam in the last few weeks and months before his regime was crushed.
It is a picture that — while not absolving the intelligence services of the US and United Kingdom and their political masters of a colossal and wide-reaching failure of intelligence over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — at least offers a partial explanation: that even in Iraq, few really knew the complex truth of Saddam and his weapons.
That explanation is rooted in the psyche of Saddam himself, and of the nature of his inner circle. Of how Saddam led by inference and suggestion, and encouraged the existence of conflicting realities to control his underlings and secure his rule.
There is one passage in the ISG’s report, published last Wednesday, that is as much allegorical as factual in explaining the character of Saddam. And it was supplied by Saddam himself.
The former Iraqi dictator is a man with many identifications — most of them from Arab and Iraqi history. He has portrayed himself as a new Nebuchadnezzar or Saladin.
More extraordinary, as it emerged last week, was his identification with the figure of the old fisherman, Santiago, in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, who fights a useless battle to save a marlin he has caught from the sharks that tear his catch to shreds.
”Saddam tended to characterise, in a very Hemingway-esque way, his life as a relentless struggle against overwhelming odds, but carried out with courage, perseverance and dignity,” the report concluded.
”Much like Santiago, ultimately left with only the marlin’s skeleton as the trophy of his success, to Saddam even a hollow victory was by his reckoning a real one.”
It is a narcissism, believes the report’s author — the former United Nations inspector and head of the ISG, Charles Duelfer — that summed up the regime of Saddam in his last days on the brink of annihilation, blinded to the realities that confronted it and drunk on dreams of the kind of glory only achieved amid defeat.
It is a narcissism, too, that was combined with the recklessness of the self-obsessed and the self-deluded.
It is demonstrated by an exchange between Saddam and his generals recounted to the LA Times by a senior US intelligence officer on the brink of last year’s war — a story that goes to the heart of Saddam’s final deception: that of his own generals.
Shortly before the war last year, Saddam gathered his top generals together to share what came to them as astonishing news: the weapons that the US was launching a war to remove what did not exist.
”There was plenty of surprise when Saddam said, ‘Sorry guys, we don’t have any’ to use against the invading forces,” the official said.
It should not have come as a surprise. As the ISG report makes abundantly clear, not only had military units not had chemical or biological weapons training, but no stockpiles had been deployed or identified for use, for the simple reason that they did not exist.
If that exchange was a mark of how closed — even to his generals — Saddam’s intentions were, now the former dictator has been coaxed over the months into a kind of confessional intimacy.
The incentive during those long debriefings has been Saddam’s opportunity to describe himself in the terms in which he is most obsessed — his place in history.
It is a picture that has not only been supplied by Saddam himself. In addition other senior regime officials in their own debriefings — many perhaps to exonerate their own actions — have also been speaking of the grand illusion that was at the heart of Saddam’s regime.
But it leaves a critical question to be answered. If Saddam knew that he had no stockpiles of weapons, why did he allow his regime to give the impression for so long that he was defying the world?
The reality, according to Duelfer, was that despite the intelligence assessment in the aftermath of the invasion that Saddam had not been told by his generals that he had no weapons of mass destruction, it was Saddam himself who had known since the late 1990s that he had no weapons.
Before that, it was Saddam who had micromanaged the weapons programmes; Saddam who had obsessed about their value. And it was Saddam who, while insisting his country had disarmed to the international community, continued to suggest to his own people that he retained a weapons of mass destruction capability.
According to his former minister of higher education and scientific research, Humam Abd al-Khaliq Abd al-Ghafur, it was precisely Saddam’s ego, and successive errors of judgement, that encouraged him to avoid admitting what had been a fact of years — he had long ago unwillingly complied with the armistice agreements to disarm that had ended the first Gulf War, despite hankering for new weapons if he could get the international community off his back. It maintained a deception that would be lethal to Saddam’s violent regime.
In that respect, according to presidential adviser and Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, it fitted in with one of Saddam’s own favourite military precepts that the ”better part of war was deceiving”. To avoid appearing weak, Saddam gave out confusing messages about the fact that he had disarmed.
But in the end it was only one of a series of fatal miscalculations that Saddam made in the run-up to the US invasion, the most serious of which, as his deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz would explain, was his assessment of US intentions and failure to grasp how the US had changed in the aftermath of September 11.
That miscalculation was described by Aziz in his own interrogation, when challenged over why Saddam and the regime had seemed so ”confident” in the immediate run-up to the invasion.
”I had to say these things because this was my government’s position, but it was true,” Aziz told his interrogator. ”A few weeks before the attacks, Saddam thought that the US would not use ground forces; he thought that you would only use your air force.
”He thought the [US] would not fight a ground war because it would be too costly to the Americans. He was overconfident. He was clever, but his calculations were poor. It wasn’t that he wasn’t receiving the information. It was right there on television, but he didn’t understand international relations.”
The former minister of defence, Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, presents a different interpretation but with the same description of Saddam’s inherent misjudgement.
”We knew the goal was to make the regime fall … We thought the forces would arrive in Baghdad or outside Baghdad in 20 days or a month. We accepted that the cities on the way would be lost. All commanders knew this and accepted it. Saddam Hussein thought that the people would, of their own accord, take to the streets and fight with light arms, and that this would deter the US forces from entering the cities.”
Saddam’s own account — as described in his debriefing sessions — was that he had wanted to develop better relations with the US over the latter part of the 1990s, although this was constantly rebuffed.
By late 2002 — as it became increasingly clear that the US would invade — Saddam, says Duelfer, had persuaded himself, just as he did in before the first Gulf War, that the US would not attack because it already had achieved its objectives of establishing a military presence in the region.
Instead, as US troops gathered on his border, Saddam speculated that the US would seek to avoid casualties and, if Iraq was attacked at all, the campaign would resemble Desert Fox.
As Duelfer’s report makes clear, it was not only the issue of information on weapons of mass destruction — or the lack of them — that was micromanaged by Saddam.
Saddam also personally managed a second key strand of Iraqi policy — the alleged corruption of the oil-for-food programme — by paying huge bribes to those willing to help Iraq, skimmed off the top of the programme.
It was a complex system that ensured that any money paid did not come out of the Iraqi exchequer, but through a complex voucher system, each one personally authorised by Saddam. The vouchers, meticulously recorded by the Ministry of Oil, authorised the named recipient to receive part of an oil shipment, usually handled by traders in the Gulf who would make a payment to a named account.
It is a corruption, say some, that embroiled even senior UN officials involved in running the scheme, a claim that is still under investigation.
But like Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, what has yet to be proved is how real the corruption was. Some Iraqis have suggested that in reality the scheme may in some if not many cases have ended up doing no more than enrich officials at the Ministry of Oil, who pocketed the oil revenues themselves. What is certain is that no one on the list of alleged recipients has admitted receiving Iraqi money.
But even that scheme may have been massively misconceived, persuading Saddam wrongly that he had bought more influence in the international community with his stolen millions than was the case.
But if Saddam was attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to buy influence — particularly in Russia and France, which in the end could do little to prevent a US-led attack — the main focus of his thinking in his last couple of years in power, as Duelfer described it last week, was how to secure the survival of his dynasty inside Iraq.
And it is this, some of his top officials have told their debriefers, that they believe was most responsible for the creeping unreality at the heart of the Saddam’s regime.
By 2001, say senior officials, Saddam had promoted family members to many of the most sensitive jobs in the regime and was in the process of anointing his son Qusay as his heir apparent.
By the time of the UN inspections crisis that immediately pre-dated the invasion, the influence of family and clan members on the ”group-think” at the heart of the regime was such that in his interrogation, vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan would venture: ”The last three years with Saddam bothered me the most.
”There were too many relatives in sensitive jobs. When I was put in charge of [dealing with UN weapons] inspections, I was qualified to do the job. My staff will tell you I could have fixed it.”
He added: ”Saddam was weak with his family members. He punished them, but let them go right back to doing what they were doing in the first place.”
Ali Hassan al-Majid added that the only occasions he saw Saddam yield under ”pressure” was in dealing with relatives. ”He used to stand by their side regardless of any reason.”
And it was Qusay whose influence on Saddam’s hazy grasp on what confronted him seems to have been the most pernicious influence in Saddam’s last days in power.
According to Duelfer, for many senior Iraqis Qusay’s significance stemmed directly from his influence on his father.
”These former senior officials,” wrote Duelfer last week, ”dismiss Qusay’s intelligence and leadership ability.
”The former MIC director, Abd al-Tawab Abdullah Mullah al-Huwaysh, recounted that on one occasion in late 2002 when he met with Saddam and Qusay, Qusay boasted to his father, ‘We are 10 times more powerful than in 1991’.
”Immediately disagreeing, Huwaysh said, ‘Actually, we are 100 times weaker than in 1991, because the people are not ready to fight.’ Saddam did not respond, but Qusay was angry that Huwaysh had contradicted him.”
It was not only Huwaysh who appears to have complained about Qusay’s influence in the last months.
Other officials have told their US debriefers that Qusay was profoundly suspicious of recommendations from within the army and often disregarded them.
It was a disdain that continued until the very eve of war. The former commander of the Nebuchadnezzar Republican Guard Division, Staff Major General Hamid Ismail Dawish al-Rabai, disclosed: ”We thought the coalition would go to Basra, maybe to Amarra, and then the war would end.
”Qusay never took any information seriously. He would just mark on the map. He thought most of us were clowns. We pretended to have victory, and we never provided true information as it is here on planet Earth. Qusay always thought he’d gain victory. Any commander who spoke the truth would lose his head.”
This time there was no imagined hollow victory to try to sell to the exhausted Iraqi people. Only utter defeat. — Guardian Unlimited Â