In the ancient Chinese book, The Art of War, we are told that to avoid defeat a general must know himself and his enemy. As the United States appears to be headed into a war against Saddam Hussein, it is appropriate to consider what kind of person the Iraqi dictator is. What is he capable of? What has he done previously?
When Saddam was only a Ba'th Party functionary, in 1968, he was known as a thug. His role was to organize bullies for the Party. They beat up leftists. They stole property. They committed robberies and murders. Socially Saddam was shy, but in committing crimes he was always bold. In 1967 Saddam walked into a popular Baghdad coffee shop and announced that he had just left Party member Hazbar for dead on the al Jadiria bridge. "I beat him over the head with my revolver until he could move no more. You won't be seeing him again," Saddam announced. His Ba'thist listeners, who frequented the coffee shop, gasped with horror. This was not the right way to settle differences of opinion within the Party, they protested. This reaction only made Saddam laugh. To show his enthusiasm for bloodshed, on the eve of the 1968 coup, Saddam personally volunteered to "liquidate" top army officers who assisted in the coup because their ideas differed from the Ba'thists (and they didn't fit into the Party's long-term plans).
The intellectuals who initially dominated the Ba'thist Party underestimated Saddam Hussein. He was big and handsome, he was brave and committed, but his demeanor was that of a backward peasant, an ill-educated person of no standing; and he loved violence. How could such a person advance in the Ba'thist Party? Well, how does such a person advance in any party? It was not a case of ideological sophistication. His ideology was simple. There were three whom God should not have created: Persians, Jews and flies. It was a simple right-wing Arab nationalist perspective that didn't need any refinement. As it turned out, Saddam never lost his peasant accent. But sounding like someone from the bottom of society never stopped him. It only meant that he had one path to power: the path of violence.
Perhaps the key to Saddam's brutal nature lies buried in his childhood. He was born in the decrepit village of al Ouja in the late 1930s. (It was a place known for bandits.) His parents were not properly married. His father abandoned his mother when the pregnancy was discovered. In order to support herself, his mother set up shop as a clairvoyant. She wore black and cultivated a mystical front. But in later years she was described as an ill-tempered woman who swore a lot. Because he was fatherless Saddam was teased and bullied by his peers. According to Con Coughlin's account of Saddam's childhood, "he was so badly bullied that he took to carrying an iron bar ... to defend himself whenever he ventured outside the family home." The story is told that Saddam used to heat this iron bar over a fire and poke animals in the belly with it, bursting them open.
On advice of an uncle, it is alleged that Saddam and his mother went to Baghdad (probably in 1946). There his mother worked as a waitress in a rundown hotel. According to Shyam Bhatia and Daniel McGrory, authors of Brighter Than the Baghdad Sun, Saddam and his mother suffered a "cruel indignity" in the city. Drunken men appeared at the door one night. They raped the mother. When they discovered little Saddam hiding in the corner they raped him as well. "After the assault Saddam became a sullen and withdrawn child," wrote Bhatia and McGrory.
We do not know all the particulars. No doubt some of the stories of Saddam's childhood are false; but we do know that poverty, cruelty and humiliation hardened this man from his earliest days. When he was yet a teenager, in 1955, he joined the Ba'th Party. A muscular young man, he became an enforcer. Implicated in the murder of a government official in 1959, he escaped prosecution when the witnesses against him fell silent. Soon thereafter Saddam was assigned to an assassination squad sent to kill Iraq's president, Abdul Karim Kassem. When the assassination failed due to Saddam's reckless disregard of orders, the squad fled to Syria and then to Egypt. In Syria Saddam met the founder of Ba'thism, Michel Aflaq, who rewarded him with full Party membership. In Egypt Saddam was offered a chance to finish his education. There he developed a reputation for picking fights on any pretext. Being under President Nasser's protection, he escaped punishment for bad behavior.
It was said that Saddam took to reading while in Egypt. The book that fascinated him the most was not a classic in the usual sense. Saddam fell in love with Hitler's Mein Kampf. Saddam's positive attitude toward Hitler can be explained in two ways. First, Hitler hated the Jews, who are today the enemies of the Arab nation; second, Saddam's uncle and foster father was a supporter of Iraq's pro-Nazi movement led by Prime Minister Rashid Ali in 1941. Ali tried to unite Iraq with Nazi Germany, but British troops stopped him before the Germans could render assistance. As it happened, Saddam's chief masculine role model, his uncle Khairallah, was jailed until 1946 for his part in Ali's pro-Nazi plot.
Exile in Egypt came to an end. After returning to Iraq there was more violence and more intrigue. Saddam became a virulent anti-leftist and anti-communist within the Ba'th movement. This was his claim to fame. Since the Ba'th Party was bound to gain full control of the state, the main problem for Saddam was how to gain prestige within the Party. With few exceptions Saddam's colleagues abhorred his tactics and belittled his role as enforcer. They needed him, to be sure. But he was never popular. Perhaps the Iraqi Ba'thists had never read Chairman Mao's dictum that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." But Saddam Hussein was not so ignorant. He knew all about Chairman Mao's little red book. He realized that violence was a shortcut to power. The Ba'thist's sought to use this shortcut, with Saddam as their instrument. But the instrument turned animate and the user traded places with the used.
What initially hurt Saddam's career within the Ba'thist Party was his supposed connection with the CIA. When Saddam was living in Egypt he frequented the U.S. embassy. Why he did this we do not know, but it aroused suspicion at the time. It has been alleged that the CIA gave Saddam a list of Iraqi communists. It is said that possession of this list gave Saddam Hussein a degree of power within the Party, and it also gave him a special clean-up mission that he dutifully performed. Years later when Saddam's mentor, President Ahmad Hassan al Bakr, took power and decided on nationalizing Iraq's oil assets, a double game began that brought Iraq into the Soviet camp. Ironically enough, the country's chief anti-communist became Baghdad's envoy to Moscow. Saddam went to the Soviet Union and personally negotiated the Iraqi-Soviet Friendship Treaty. The liquidator of communism in Iraq sat down with Yuri Andropov of the KGB and Alexei Kosygin of the Communist Party Soviet Union. To be sure, the pact was a cynical bargain, a deal with the Devil, signed and sealed out of pure greed. Two months after signing this pact with "the mother of all communist countries," the Ba'thist government in Baghdad nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company, which was owned by BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil and CFP. The deal with Russia, which effectively put Iraq's security services in Moscow's hands (thereafter tying Iraq to Moscow without any hope of deliverance), served to shelter Iraq from the political and economic fallout that followed the June 1972 looting and robbing of the Western oil interests who had built Iraq's oil infrastructure in the first place. To rob the Western businessmen of their investment, Baghdad needed an Eastern protector.
Treachery is integral to Saddam's political method. He does not keep faith with those he dislikes, or with those who stand in his way. But the Russians are masters of treachery. It is their game and they play it better than half-literate peasant thugs from the banks of the Tigress. They know how to keep reluctant stooges in line. Saddam Hussein discovered, in the mid-1970s, that the Soviets were untrustworthy allies; that the alliance with Moscow was dangerous. As Saddam discovered to his horror, the Soviets were infiltrating the Iraqi military. "They won't be satisfied until the whole world becomes communist," he remarked bitterly in a 1978 interview. At about this time twenty-one communist military officers jailed since 1975 were hauled out and shot. When the Soviet ambassador visited Saddam to lodge a protest, the defiant Iraqi leader had ten more communist officers shot. He also learned that the Russians were taping his private conversations in his residence. And why not, the Soviet embassy was located next door to the Presidential Palace! So the Iraqi dictator forced the Russians to move their embassy across town.
But how could Saddam switch sides in the midst of the Cold War and join the West? It would prove a difficult trick given the Arab hatred of Israel. Egypt had done it, but Egypt had first thrown out the Soviet advisors. But Saddam wasn't willing to do that. He wasn't willing to part with the war machine the Russians were helping him build. On what basis could he form a new tie with the West? Perhaps that is why he eagerly grasped at the chance to attack Iran in the midst of the U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis in September 1980. At America's moment of need Saddam Hussein was there. Perhaps, in his sick way, he was demonstrating his good intentions. But this drastic move did not free him from Moscow. It only made him more dependent than ever. Step by step, no matter how he twisted or turned, once his economy was ruined by the war with Iran, he was drawn to invade Kuwait and to defend this looted province against America's determined intervention.
Here is the tragedy of the thug. From all we know of his treatment of his own people, military and civilian, he is the perfect picture of the tyrant. His policy is not steady, but based on urgently felt desires of the moment. He has attacked on all sides. He has opportunistically killed communists. He has attacked Western interests. He has persecuted Kurds and Shiites, he has invaded Iran and Kuwait. It is all according to his momentary hopes and fears. There is no solid thing, no guiding principle other than tyrannical selfishness underlying his state. It is all false and rotten. And now he is surrounded and isolated. He is being used by Russia and China and yet, he is not really supported by them. As for his military prowess, he cannot hope to win any future war. In Zhuge Liang and Liu Ji's commentaries on Sun Tzu, eight kinds of decadence are listed for generals. "First is to be insatiably greedy." Look at Saddam's personal wealth, his many palaces, to see how closely he fits this description. "Second is to be jealous and envious of the wise and able." In Saddam's many purges the wise and able fell, leaving incompetent lackeys to run the army. "Third is to believe slanderers and make friends with the treacherous." His friendship treaty with Moscow and his belief in a Western conspiracy against the Arab world has landed him in a fatal fix. "Fourth is to assess others without assessing oneself." For Saddam, this is a psychological imperative. "Fifth is to be hesitant and indecisive." And what of his decisive recklessness? "Sixth is to be heavily addicted to wine and sex." Consider the behavior of Saddam's eldest son, Uday, who is known for rape as well as drunkenness. "Seventh is to be a malicious liar with a cowardly heart." Here we do not say that Saddam has a cowardly heart, but he lies all the same. "Eighth is to talk wildly, without courtesy." This was Saddam's trademark from the first.
This is the enemy that America is mobilizing to fight. War is always difficult, but if the ancient Chinese masters are any guide, Saddam's position is weak. Even if he possesses weapons of mass destruction, he cannot hope to survive once a war begins. He has starved the people he pretends to serve. He has enriched himself at their expense. He has killed Iraq's sons in pointless wars for his own aggrandizement. He has used torture and murder to maintain his position. Quite clearly, Saddam Hussein is an error of history that President Bush might soon erase. If there is any justice in the world, if there is any hope for the future of Iraq, then Saddam Hussein's regime will come to an end. The only question is whether he will inflict a serious injury on his attackers before he goes down.
