Saddam : His Rise and Fall (53 page)

All this activity was being carefully monitored in Baghdad by Saddam, who, at least in public, refused to be intimidated by the new coalition that was taking shape against him. In a defiant televised speech to the Iraqi people, he warned that anyone who attacked Iraq would die in “disgraceful failure,” and said that the security council was unfairly biased against Iraq. While saying that Iraq was willing to comply with UN resolutions on weapons inspections, he claimed—with some justice—that the new resolutions regarding Iraq were being manipulated by the United States. But for all the public bravado, Saddam sensed that this time the Bush administration meant business, and he began to make preparations to counter this new threat. With Washington and London intensifying the pressure on Baghdad to make a full disclosure on its WMD arsenal, Saddam decided that, with the prospect of teams of UN inspectors returning to Iraq, he could not afford to take any chances. Qusay, who had been in overall charge of Iraq's WMD programs since the mid-1990s, was ordered either to hide or dispose
of any remaining stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, and to remove any signs that Iraq was still engaged in illicit weapons production. In addition Qusay was also given responsibility for defending the regime. With hardly any air force to speak of, and the rest of the armed forces severely hampered by lack of equipment following eleven years of UN sanctions, Qusay decided to concentrate all his forces in and around Baghdad. If the Americans and the British, with their vastly superior firepower, decided to attack Iraq, then Qusay would make Baghdad the new Stalingrad.
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At this point, however, Saddam remained cautiously optimistic that he could avoid a rerun of the disastrous Gulf War. In particular he calculated that he might be able to exploit the obvious divisions that were emerging in the UN Security Council over how to handle the perennial question of forcing Iraq to abide by its disarmament obligations. It was no surprise to him and most other Iraqis that the United States and Britain should be at the forefront of the new campaign to call Saddam's regime to account. After all these countries had been Iraq's main protagonists at the UN throughout the 1990s, consistently arguing in favor of maintaining the sanctions embargo and the no-fly zones in the north and south of the country. Saddam, however, was aware that this view was by no means unanimous. Prior to September 11 many countries, including prominent members of the Security Council, had come to the view that Iraq was being unfairly penalized and pressed for the sanctions to be lifted. Of the five permanent members, France and Russia, which had long-established and profitable trading ties with Baghdad, adopted pro-Iraqi policies, while the Chinese, who were also keen to break into Iraq's lucrative arms market, adopted an agnostic posture.

These divisions had been suspended in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, with both Paris and Moscow offering what appeared to be unconditional offers of support to the traumatized Americans. By the autumn of 2002 French and the Russians were articulating, in public and in private, their reservations about the way in which Washington was prosecuting the “war on terror.” So far as Moscow and Paris were concerned, there was no evidence that linked Saddam's regime directly to the 9/11 attacks and, while Iraq continued to irritate the UN with its refusal to comply with a raft of resolutions relating to its weapons programs, neither Paris nor Moscow concurred with the view that Saddam posed a viable threat either to the Middle East or to the wider world. The Russians and French received wel
come support from Germany—another country that had enjoyed lucrative trading ties with Baghdad. The mounting opposition of the continental European powers to American policy was also informed by the suspicion that the Republican administration—and the deeply committed neoconservative ideologues who held key policy positions in Washington—were intent on extending American hegemony over the Middle East, and seizing control of Iraq's lucrative oil fields. From Saddam's perspective, these were divisions that he believed could be usefully exploited to avert military conflict, irrespective of the Bush administration's stated objective of effecting regime change in Baghdad.

Indeed, the Americans and Europeans needed little encouragement from Saddam to fall out among themselves. During the autumn, various attempts were made to draw up a new Security Council resolution that was acceptable to all the relevant parties, and one that took cognizance of Washington's determination to force Saddam finally, and unconditionally, to disarm. The UN process was formally launched on September 12 when President Bush addressed the General Assembly. After detailing Saddam's numerous breaches of UN resolutions, Bush concluded by laying down a challenge to both the UN and Iraq. So far as the UN was concerned, Bush demanded to know whether the organization had the strength to tackle Saddam. “The world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment,” he said. “Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?” The comments directed at Saddam's regime were equally uncompromising. “If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account…. We will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced—the just demands of peace and security will be met—or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.”

Bush's statement of intent was unequivocal. Saddam must come clean on his WMD arsenal completely or face military action. Saddam's only hope was that the UN, as it had on so many occasions in the past, would come to his aid, and in this respect he was not to be disappointed. While Bush seemed determined on war, French president Jacques Chirac seemed equally deter
mined to prevent it. On September 9, prior to Bush's speech, Chirac insisted that two resolutions were required to deal with Saddam: one to send back the UN inspectors with a tough new mandate; the second to endorse military action if the UN was dissatisfied with the Iraqi response. From the outset the French were adamant that there should be no “automaticity”—i.e., no automatic trigger that would allow the United States to go to war with Iraq without first coming back to the Security Council for approval. Moreover, the French knew that they could count on the support of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who believed that a peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis could be achieved through the UN (a significant concern was to ensure that Saddam repaid the $8 billion he owed the cash-strapped Russians for arms supplies). German chancellor Gerhard Schröder made no secret of his opposition to military conflict, and it formed a central part of his campaign for reelection, which he won narrowly in September.

Faced with such indomitable opposition, American and British diplomats had their work cut out if they were to win UN approval for military action against Saddam. In Britain Tony Blair faced the added complication of having to win over a deeply skeptical British public, not to mention his own Labour Party. To boost support for the campaign against Saddam, in late September the British government published an intelligence dossier, which had been compiled with the help of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, which sought to set out in stark terms the threat posed by Saddam's WMD programs. Although the dossier contained little new information and drew heavily on the reports published by UN weapons inspectors after they were pulled out of Iraq in 1998, the Blair government encouraged some sections of the British press to play up the threat posed by Saddam. The morning after the dossier was published, the front page of the mass-market, pro-Labour
Sun
newspaper proclaimed: “Brits 45 Minutes from Doom.” The front-page story stated unequivocally that “British servicemen and tourists in Cyprus could be annihilated by germ warfare missiles launched by Iraq…within 45 minutes.”
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In fact the intelligence provided in the dossier made no such claim. What it said, in two separate and distinct items, was, first, that “some of the WMD” could be ready “within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” But crucially, this intelligence related to battlefield weapons, such as mortar shells, which Saddam had used during the war with Iran in the 1980s. The section relating to ballistic missiles said only that Saddam was
attempting
to construct a mis
sile that, if developed, might have the range to hit British military bases in Cyprus. The cautious intelligence assessments contained in the dossier were a far cry from the lurid publicity it generated, but Blair made no serious attempt to counter the rabid anti-Saddam propaganda, which he no doubt believed would help him to rally British public opinion. The Bush administration, on the other hand, did not feel the same need to justify its actions. One year after the September 11 attacks, the opinion polls showed that most Americans were prepared to give their commander in chief a free hand to fight the “war on terror,” and so long as Saddam was thought to pose a threat to American interests, no matter how ill-defined that threat might be, the American public appeared willing to back military action against Baghdad. In early October 2002 the U.S. intelligence agencies did, however, produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that reflected much of the information contained in the British intelligence dossier. The American report stated: “Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons.” It also gave the grim warning that if Saddam could acquire fissile material he would be able to develop an atom bomb within a year.

Despite the genuine concerns of a number of Western intelligence agencies—including the French and Germans—about Saddam's WMD programs, American and British diplomats were struggling to find a consensus at the UN on how best to deal with Saddam. The biggest obstacle to the negotiations was the French government's refusal to countenance a resolution that would sanction immediate military action. As a consequence a drafting process that was supposed to last only two weeks dragged on for eight, and it was not until November 8 that a resolution was finally passed—unanimously—that set out the Security Council's new policy for dealing with Saddam. Resolution 1441 called for “an enhanced inspection regime” that would be driven by a tight timetable and required Iraq's complete and unconditional cooperation. The inspectors were to have “unimpeded, unrestricted, and private access to all officials,” and Saddam was obliged to submit “a currently accurate, full, and complete declaration of all aspects of its programs to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons” within thirty days. From Saddam's point of view, the biggest danger was contained in the resolution's conclusion, which stated that: “The Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations.” Although the language fell well short of Washington's earlier
demand for a resolution that would automatically trigger military action if Saddam were found to be in material breach of the UN's demands, the French also failed in their attempts to have an explicit requirement that a second resolution needed to be drafted to authorize war. For the Bush administration, of course, “serious consequences” meant war, while for the antiwar lobby it simply meant bringing the Iraq issue back to the UN for a fresh round of negotiations on a new resolution.

Even so, 1441 constituted a serious setback for Saddam. Throughout the autumn he had engaged in his usual tactic of trying to create divisions and sowing discord among the UN's leading member states. At one point during the delicate negotiations in New York, Saddam tried to throw the whole process into confusion by declaring that he was quite happy to readmit the weapons inspectors back to Baghdad before a new resolution could be agreed on. At the same time Saddam was working hard to increase his popularity among ordinary Iraqis. In late October he held a referendum in which, according to Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the Iraqi vice president who announced the result, Saddam had managed to win a 100 percent “yes” vote. Saddam's publicity campaign during the referendum had been carefully orchestrated by Baath Party officials. At one polling station little girls in shiny pink dresses and scarlet lace headbands scampered around the courtyard yelling, “Pray for the Prophet! Saddam Hussein is the new Prophet!” The day after Saddam's victory was officially proclaimed, he further sought to improve his standing with the Iraqi public by organizing a mass release of prisoners held in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Hundreds of common criminals were released to cheering crowds that had been bussed to the prison complex by Baath officials for the occasion. The relatives of Iraqi political prisoners who had made their own way to the prison, however, were not so lucky. Prior to the prisoner release Saddam had ordered the execution of any remaining political prisoners.

Saddam also made a television appearance in which he urged Iraqis to put up a strong defense if the Americans attacked. Any invasion, he declared, would lead to the spilling of American blood. In his address Saddam seemed to be under no misapprehension about the threat he faced, and warned Iraqis that they could soon find themselves faced with a major war—the third in his twenty-three-year rule. “I say to you that the evil of the evil-doers will never end until they are defeated amongst all mankind comprehensively, and their defeat is in the near future.” At one point Saddam displayed a glimpse of
emotion when he appeared to hold back tears as, with his right hand on a Koran, he started reading an oath to preserve and protect Iraq, its constitution, and sovereignty. “The road of blood takes you to more blood and he who tries to shed the blood of others must expect his blood to be spilled.”
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