Saddam : His Rise and Fall (35 page)

The lavish expenditure of Saddam's ruling elite contrasted sharply with the sacrifices demanded from ordinary Iraqis to fund the war effort. In 1983, for example, when Iraqi oil exports were at their lowest, Saddam called on Iraqi
civilians to donate their jewelry and savings to the nation, “to allow women or elderly people to take part in the battle for the homeland, each according to his or her ability.” Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Iraqi deputy prime minister, put it more succinctly. “This is a referendum in favour of the party…in favour of the revolution and the leadership of Saddam Hussein.” The response was immense, whether from peasant farmers donating their life savings or elegant Baghdad ladies carrying their Moroccan leather jewel cases to the collecting centers. The finance minister was so impressed by the amount collected that he claimed “the gold amassed will be an extra reserve to strengthen the Iraqi currency.” In theory, all the money and valuables handed over were merely on loan for the duration of the war, and would be handed back when the war ended. In most cases, however, the Iraqis received nothing in return for their generosity.

 

By far Saddam's biggest achievement during the mid-1980s was to turn Iraq's disastrous performance in the war against Iran to his, and the nation's, advantage. Iraq's “voluntary withdrawal” from Iran in the summer of 1982, as the regime referred to the defeats it had suffered at the hands of the Iranians, had fooled no one, least of all the Iraqi public. The “second Qadisiya” was now more commonly known as “Saddam's war,” and the wholesale failure of the Iraqi military to achieve any of the stated war aims was Saddam's personal responsibility. The setbacks, however, only made Saddam more determined than ever to reassert himself as the undisputed ruler of the Iraqi people and their destiny. The purges carried out on senior military officers during the disastrous summer of 1982, together with the reorganization of the RCC, had reaffirmed Saddam's position as the country's supreme leader. In late 1982 he convened a special meeting of the Baath Party's Regional Command at which he sought, and received, confirmation of his absolute control over the machinery of government. The final report of the Ninth Party Congress stated unequivocally that “Saddam Hussein is the symbol of freedom, independence, pride, integrity and hope for a better future for Iraq and the Arab nation.” But with absolute power came absolute responsibility, and the responsibility for the perilous plight Iraq faced from the ayatollahs rested squarely on Saddam's shoulders.

From the summer of 1982 onward the main thrust of the Iranian counteroffensive was directed at Basra, Iraq's second largest city and the capital of the country's Shiite community. The Iranians' objective was to cut the main Baghdad-Basra highway and to take control of the Shiite heartlands. The
Iraqis, however, proved better at defending their positions than they had been at going on the offensive, and were able to repulse the Iranian attacks and inflict heavy losses. From this point onward the conflict was locked in stalemate, with neither side able to make a significant breakthrough. The Iraqi engineers were fully occupied constructing an elaborate network of defensive positions that were not so very different from those constructed in northern France during the First World War. Well dug in, with a plentiful supply of ammunition and two other major defensive lines to protect the Iraqi heartland in the event of an Iranian breakthrough, Saddam's approach was to grind the Iranians into submission. The Iranians persisted with the same tactic that had succeeded in driving the Iraqis out of Khorramshahr. The
basij,
the young suicidal Iranian volunteers who were prepared to walk through minefields to claim their place in heaven, persisted with their human-wave attacks against the Iraqi positions. But the Iraqis had learned their lesson during the humiliating retreat from Khorramshahr, and were easily able to fight off these kamikaze tactics. On the rare occasions that the Iranians succeeded in making a breakthrough, the Iraqis were able to regain the initiative by calling in their helicopter gunships and fighter aircraft.

Saddam displayed considerable political skill during this period in turning the Iranian counteroffensive to his advantage. Somehow the Iranian attempts to capture Iraqi territory enabled the Iraqi government to achieve something it had failed to do in the early years of the war—unite the nation. With their backs to the wall, fighting to defend their territory and to prevent an invasion by the Iranians, the people of Iraq were transformed. Not only did the army fight with greater tenacity, there was also a noticeable drop in the volume of dissent. As one Western diplomat who was based in Baghdad during this period recalled, the bottom line was that the Iraqis were more afraid of the Iranians than they were of Saddam. “The Iraqi people were well aware that Saddam was a dictator and treated people badly if they crossed him, but they were far more alarmed at the prospect of the Iranian revolution being exported to Iraq. They wanted Saddam to be strong and they wanted him to win.”
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The Iranians' three-pronged attack on Basra in late summer 1982 set the pattern for the dozens of others that would follow. The Iranians gained ground—in this instance about four miles—but were eventually stopped and driven back, losing large numbers of men in the process. Well protected behind their fortifications, the Iraqis showed a new spirit, fighting with skill
and determination as they defended their homeland rather than having to hold some nebulous, unnatural line inside Iran. Saddam was highly successful in publicizing the military's success in halting these Iranian onslaughts as a great victory. Rallies and celebrations were held in Baghdad and in towns and villages throughout the country. The speeches made by Saddam and the Baath leadership made a point of blaming Iran for the outbreak of hostilities in 1980. The demands made at the start of the war, such as the realignment of the border along the Shatt al-Arab and the resolution of Iraq's claim to Arab territories in Iran, were quietly dropped. All Saddam was looking for now was the restoration of the status quo ante of 1980.

Iraq's success in repelling the Iranian human-wave attacks, however, made little impression on the ayatollahs in Teheran. The Iranians' main objective remained the capture of Basra and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Their strategy was to besiege the city and destroy its garrison or force it to surrender, or to bypass it completely and drive into the west, effectively cutting Iraq in two. The Iranians reasoned that by seizing a sizable slice of territory in southern Iraq, the Shiite heartland, it would be possible to announce a provisional government to which the opponents of Saddam Hussein could rally. The fear that the Iranians would attempt to implement a similar strategy in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 was one of the reasons the victorious allies refused to support the Shiite revolt against Saddam.

The Iranians remained determined to take Basra even though they were unable to achieve a significant breakthrough. Different attacks were launched in different sectors, each one gaining a little ground and nibbling away at the Iraqi border areas. No matter how great the sacrifice, the ayatollahs would not give up on their objective. As a consequence the casualties on both sides were horrendous. By 1984 Iraq had suffered at least 65,000 killed, with at least three to five times as many wounded and between 50,000 to 60,000 combatants taken prisoner. By comparison the Iranians had lost up to 180,000 killed, with as many as 500,000 injured.
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The casualty figures were far higher than anything Iraq had experienced since independence, and there was hardly a family in the country that had not suffered some loss. The manpower situation was so bad by the end of 1984 that the government had to revert to calling up seventeen-year-olds for service. Saddam tried to cushion the discontent caused by the appalling waste of life at the front by making generous payments and benefits available to bereaved families and widows. Even so, there was further public disquiet in Iraq about the level of casualties and from
1984 Saddam ordered a change in tactics that were designed to reduce the level of casualties at the front. The Iraqis relied even more on heavy artillery and air strikes to repel the frequent human-wave attacks being launched by the Iranians. And the Iraqis managed to harass the Iranians by launching raids deep inside Iranian territory, in the hope of demonstrating the incompetence of the authorities in Teheran in protecting their own people.

The only breakthrough of any significance made by the Iranians during the war of attrition, as this period in the conflict became known, came in early 1984 when the Iranians captured the Majnun Islands, two thin strips of territory, loaded with oil, that commanded the northern approach to Basra. The Iranian operation was brilliantly executed. Attacking at night, Iranian commandos in small fiberglass boats had made their way silently through the Howeiza marshes, taking the few Iraqis guarding the levees by surprise. By dawn the Iranians were fully in control of both islands, north and south, and well dug in. They constructed a pontoon bridge to bring up supplies and fresh troops. Within days they had increased the bridgehead to some 30,000 troops and had built a dirt causeway linking the Majnun Islands to the mainland in Iran. The Iraqis counterattacked time after time, trying to drive the Iranians into the swamps and back over the border. But the reed-filled marshes got the better of them. The heavy undergrowth fouled the propellers of Iraq's amphibious tanks, making them an easy target for the Iranian gunners. Saddam, furious that his troops were unable to dislodge the stubborn Iranians, decided that there was only one option available to him—to use the poison gas now being manufactured at his new chemical weapons plants that had come on-line at Salman Pak and Samarra.

Iraqi pilots dumped canisters from Soviet-, German-, and French-built helicopters. A small electric pump inside the drums triggered on impact, dispersing the mixture into a deadly cloud. In other attacks the helicopters sprayed the Iranians with a greasy yellow liquid that filled the area with the odor of garlic. The Iranians, who had no protective clothing, fell ill immediately. Within minutes they began vomiting a yellowish liquid, and their skin turned red. By the time the medics reached the battlefield, some of the troops were already dead, their faces horribly blackened by the gas. Others had amber-colored blisters all over their bodies and were having trouble breathing.
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The Iraqis, of course, strongly denied using chemical weapons, but in March 1984 a group of UN experts visited Iran to investigate the claims. The UN team concluded that Iraq had used mustard gas and the chemical nerve
agent Tabun, which had first been developed by the Nazis and was now being manufactured at the Salman Pak military complex at Suwaira, which had been constructed with the help of a number of German companies. Although Tabun had been developed by the Nazis, Hitler himself had refrained from using it on the battlefield. Saddam, clearly, had no such qualms.

The use of chemical weapons against the Iranians rebounded on Saddam in more ways than one. To start with, the use of poison gas was counterproductive. Although the first use of the gas caught the Iranians by surprise, and inflicted significant casualties, the weather conditions were rarely right for its use, and when the wind changed direction, it could blow back onto the Iraqi troops. “The Iraqis hated using poison gas,” according to a former Western military attaché who was based in Iraq at the time. “It was difficult to use and posed as much of a threat to their own forces as it did to the enemy.”
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The Iranians also proved adept at changing their tactics to deal with the new threat. When the Iraqis used poison gas the following year, the Iranian front-line troops had all been equipped with West German respirators and personal phials of Atropin, a fast-acting agent used to counter nerve gas. And confirmation by UN inspectors that Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians resulted in most Western countries reassessing their policy of supporting Iraq.

Prior to the scandal surrounding Iraq's use of nerve gas on the battlefield, Saddam had deployed the same skill abroad as he had at home in turning the war to his advantage. At the start of the war the general view of those not directly involved in the conflict had been best articulated by Dr. Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of state, who had lamented the fact that both sides could not lose. Thanks to Saddam's remarkable propaganda skills, however, by 1984 most of the Western powers, together with the majority of Arab states, had swung behind the Iraqi war effort. It would be fair to say that at the start of the Iran-Iraq War few people outside the closed arena of international diplomacy had heard of Saddam, despite his obsession with propaganda and self-promotion. On the other hand by the early 1980s most people were well aware of the Iranian revolution, and the fanaticism of Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards. The American embassy siege in Teheran, and the disastrous U.S. military mission to rescue the hostages in late 1980, had destroyed Jimmy Carter's presidency. The attempts by the Iranians to export their revolution to the Gulf states and Lebanon, where the establishment of the Hizbollah militia, which was funded, equipped, and trained by Iran's
Revolutionary Guards, posed a direct threat to Western interests in the eastern Mediterranean, had turned Iran into a pariah state. Although the blame for provoking hostilities lay with Saddam, by early 1983 the Iraqis were able to claim, with ample justification, that the Iranians were wholly responsible for their continuation.

No matter how unappealing Saddam's totalitarian regime might have appeared to the outside world, Baghdad found itself attracting an eclectic mix of backers who saw the Iraqi cause as a crucial bulwark against the advancing tide of Islamic fanaticism as personified by the ayatollahs in Teheran. Saddam's first breakthrough was with the Soviets, traditionally one of Baghdad's largest military suppliers, which had responded to Iraq's invasion of Iran by declaring its neutrality and imposing an arms embargo. Relations between Moscow and Baghdad had become strained before the war because of the Soviets' increasing displeasure at Saddam's persecution of the Iraqi Communist Party. But Saddam's anticommunism was manageable when compared with the rabid anticommunist and anti-Soviet rhetoric emanating from Teheran, which culminated in 1983 with the ayatollahs executing the leaders of the Tudah Party, the Iranian Communist Party. The Soviets had resumed moderate levels of arms shipments to Baghdad in 1981, but by 1983 Moscow was prepared to sell the Iraqis top-of-range equipment, such as its SS-12 ballistic missiles, which, with a range of 800 kilometers (500 miles), were capable of hitting targets deep inside Iranian territory. The Soviets also dispatched twelve hundred military advisers to help with the Iraqi war effort.