Saddam : His Rise and Fall (54 page)

Saddam's immediate reaction to Resolution 1441 showed that he was still prepared to indulge in a dangerous game of brinkmanship. To start with, Iraq's 250-member parliament, a body rarely required to discuss issues of national policy, was convened and, following a two-day debate, voted to reject the resolution. There was no doubt that the event had been carefully stage-managed, and the only speech of any significance was made by Uday, who was the only member to argue that the resolution should be accepted on the understanding that only Arab weapons inspectors would be allowed to participate in the new inspection process. Uday was preparing the ground for his father to overrule the parliament's decision, in the hope that this would give him a stronger bargaining position at the UN in the difficult weeks that lay ahead. As the parliament was effectively responding to instructions issued by the Revolutionary Command Council, it was clear that Saddam was merely using the body so that he could appear more statesmanlike when he bowed to the inevitable and accepted the resolution, which he did with marked bad grace a few days later.

In a letter sent by Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri explaining Saddam's decision to accept 1441, he harshly criticized the UN mandate for its “bad contents” and accused the resolution's cosponsors—the United States and Britain—of being part of a “gang of evil.” The letter also called the UN measure illegal and appeared to dare UN weapons inspectors to find any traces of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. Iraq's bluster made little impression on President Bush who responded to Saddam's decision by reiterating his warning that the Iraqi dictator must disarm or face the threat of an American-led war. “If he chooses not to disarm, we will disarm him,” Bush said in a meeting with his cabinet. Saddam, of course, was indulging in the same tactics of prevarication and diversion that had served him so well in the past. But if he genuinely believed that he would be able to undermine the will of the Bush administration, he was misguided. Certainly Saddam appeared to be in no mood for compromise, as his treatment of Uday later that month revealed. Reports had appeared in the British press suggesting that Saddam had entered negotiations with Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadhafi to provide him and key members of the Iraqi government with a bolt-hole in
Tripoli, in return for paying the Libyan leader hundreds of millions of dollars. Uday, who was still in charge of the
al-Babil
daily newspaper, thought it would be a good idea to run an abbreviated version of the article under the mocking headline “The Barking of the Dogs.” Saddam did not find it at all amusing, however, and the following day the Iraqi Information Ministry announced the newspaper had been banned from publishing for a month for violating press regulations.
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Tensions between Saddam and his errant elder son, which had caused the regime so much discomfort in the past, were still running high.

 

A new team of UN weapons inspectors returned to Iraq on November 27, 2003, nearly four years after the UNSCOM team had been unceremoniously thrown out. The chemical and biological inspections team was headed by Dr. Hans Blix, while the nuclear inspections were carried out under the auspices of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Saddam was well aware that anything less than the appearance of cooperating fully with the inspectors would trigger a conflict, and he instructed his officials to be as accommodating as possible with the inspectors, even allowing them access to presidential sites that had been the cause of so much trouble in 1998. Saddam was confident that the sophisticated concealment operation that had been undertaken by Qusay since September meant that nothing of any importance would be uncovered by the inspectors, and that the brutal effectiveness of his security forces would ensure that none of the scientists involved in the various illicit arms programs would commit any indiscretions. As one senior official involved in the inspections later admitted, “The Iraqis were much better at concealment than we thought they were going to be.”
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Much to the chagrin of the Bush administration, the inspectors reported that they were receiving “satisfactory” access to sensitive Iraqi weapons sites, although the effectiveness of the inspections was somewhat undermined when it was revealed that the UN officials were giving the Iraqis advance warning of the sites they intended to visit.
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UN officials also found Iraqi scientists reluctant to be questioned in private—a condition stipulated in Resolution 1441—and that, when they were, they denied having any knowledge of banned weapons programs. The process was not helped by the deteriorating relations between the White House and Dr. Blix, a pedantic, liberal Swedish politician who made no secret of his distaste for the warmongers in
Washington. Just one week into the renewed inspections, Dr. Blix publicly criticized the Bush administration for putting pressure on the inspectors to be more rigorous in their dealings with the Iraqis, declaring, “We are in no one's pocket.”

Despite the Iraqis' concerted efforts to comply with the inspectors' demands, it did not take long before Washington had the ammunition it needed to confront Saddam. Under 1441 the Iraqis were obliged to provide a full account of its WMD program, and on December 7 Iraqi officials delivered forty-three spiral-bound volumes of documents, written in English, containing 12,159 pages, six folders, and twelve CD-ROMs, claiming that they would “answer all the questions which have been addressed during the last months and years.” At the same time, and in a calculated attempt to further improve his standing with those countries that had deep reservations about supporting military action against Baghdad, Saddam issued a statement, which was read on state television, in which he apologized for the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. “We apologize to God about any act that has angered him in the past and that was held against us, and we apologize to you [the Kuwaitis] on the same basis.” He then invited the Kuwaitis to join his fight against the “armies of occupation,” i.e., the American and British troops enforcing the no-fly zones in the north and south of the country. The public apology to Kuwait was undoubtedly a canny move by Saddam, as it satisfied yet another of the conditions stipulated at the end of the Gulf War. Of course no mention was made of paying Kuwait compensation for the damage the Iraqis had inflicted on the sheikhdom during their six-month occupation. But by giving such a detailed response to the UN on the outstanding arms issues, and making the Kuwait apology, Saddam was making a direct appeal to the antiwar lobby.

It was a valiant effort, but it made little impression on officials in either Washington or London. One British Foreign Office official described the material contained in the documentation submission as “the mother of all gobbledygook,” and within days American and British experts had found a number of key omissions in the declaration, so that they believed they had a prima facie case for finding Saddam to be in material breach of 1441. A week after the Iraqis made their submission, U.S. intelligence experts revealed that they had reached the preliminary conclusion that the Iraqi declaration had failed to account for chemical and biological agents missing when the inspectors left Iraq four years previously, and that Iraq's declaration on its nuclear
program was incomplete. Questions were also raised about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa, as well as high-technology materials that could be used to enrich uranium.
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In London Blair was given a similar briefing by his officials, who informed him that most of the report was a recycling of information that was known either from public sources or from intelligence. Blair, who still entertained the hope that the UN process might avert renewed military conflict, remarked to his colleagues, “He hasn't done it, has he? That was Saddam's big moment, and he's blown it.” Blair's intuition was on target, for on December 19 President Bush declared that Iraq was in material breach of 1441. Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, informed the UN that the Iraqi weapons declaration totally failed to meet the UN's demand for an accurate and complete account of Iraq's weapons programs. Saddam's failure to comply would result in a month of intensified inspections. If those efforts failed, then war would be declared on Iraq. While the breach was undoubtedly a setback for Saddam, he could hardly have been surprised. The United States was in no mood to tolerate the tricks and obfuscations that Saddam had developed almost into an art form during the 1990s.

By the end of the year there was an inexorable momentum building up to war. In Baghdad the Iraqi authorities increased food distribution to enable civilians to stockpile supplies in anticipation of the expected conflict. The trade ministry advised civilians to buy enough supplies to last for three months at least. Saddam marked Christmas Day by delivering a speech on state television in which he called for extra efforts to boost national pride and faith “for people to see that it is worth it to sacrifice their soul and life in defense of the nation.”

The Iraqi media reported that the country's armed forces had carried out extensive war games, including urban warfare. Saddam instructed Qusay—who apart from being in charge of the weapons concealment program had been given responsibility for defending the regime—to concentrate his energies on defending Baghdad, in the regime's heartland. Regular army units were to be given the task of impeding the advance of the invading force while the elite units—the Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, and the Fedayeen, a paramilitary outfit run by Uday—were to be deployed in a series of military “rings” around the city. If the invaders were successful in breaking through the city's defenses, then the remaining units were to fall back to Baghdad and lure the invading forces into a bloody street war. Saddam remained convinced—as he had made clear to April Glaspie, the U.S. ambas
sador, during his meeting with her before the Kuwait war (see Chapter Ten)—that support for a war against Iraq would quickly collapse if U.S. forces suffered significant casualties. Saddam had been very impressed by the heavy casualties Palestinian militants had inflicted on Israeli troops the previous year in Jenin when they ambushed and killed several members of an Israeli patrol that had been lured into the city. He believed that if he could use similar tactics against American forces, he might be able to force Washington to accept a cease-fire.

Saddam was obsessed with improving the protection of Iraq's air defenses. During the late 1990s he had become deeply frustrated by Iraq's failure to protect its air defense systems from allied attack. Following one particularly devastating attack in late 2001, when allied aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones attacked and destroyed several Iraqi radar installations, Saddam demanded that immediate action be taken to prevent the country suffering further losses. “He went absolutely crazy,” said Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh, who commanded a key air defense unit in Iraq's western desert and was secretly providing reports on Iraq's war preparations to British intelligence. “Saddam said, ‘If we don't do something fast there will be no radar left in Iraq.'” Initially, the Iraqis recruited about one dozen Serbian air defense specialists who were each paid $100,000 a month to help devise a method to protect Iraq's air defenses from attack. But their contract was terminated when their attempts to devise a mobile radar system failed because they could not find a truck large enough to carry the equipment. Saddam then struck a deal with the Chinese government—a clear breach of the UN sanctions applied against Iraq at the end of the Gulf War—whereby a team of Chinese military advisers was dispatched to Baghdad to help resolve the problem. “They were personally greeted by Saddam and seemed very happy to be in Iraq,” recalled al-Dabbagh. “A couple of them even grew mustaches and wore keffiyehs [Arab scarves] around their heads so that they would look more like us.” According to al-Dabbagh, the Chinese scientists succeeded in devising a sophisticated decoy device that led missiles fired by allied aircraft to hit the wrong targets.
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An altogether more sinister development was Saddam's plan to deploy chemical and biological weapons that could be used on the battlefield against invading troops. This proposal was one of several measures Saddam made at a meeting of his military chiefs in early 2002 when he first became convinced that the Bush administration, flushed by its recent success in Afghanistan,
was preparing to overthrow him. Saddam ordered that mortar shells fitted with chemical or biological weapons be deployed at front-line units for use when the war reached what he described as “the critical stage.” Al-Dabbagh, who smuggled his reports to London through a network of agents working for the Iraqi National Accord, the London-based Iraqi exile group, said that the shells—similar to the ones used during the Iran-Iraq War—could be deployed within forty-five minutes of Saddam giving the order. Al-Dabbagh's report on Saddam's forty-five-minute capability was smuggled to London in time for it to be included in the British government's intelligence dossier on Iraq. The claim that Saddam could deploy his weapons of mass destruction within forty-five minutes generated most of the publicity that accompanied the dossier's publication. The shells, which were simply marked “secret,” were actually delivered to front-line units toward the end of 2002, when Saddam was supposed to be helping UN inspectors destroy Iraq's WMD capability. The munitions were under the control of the Special Republican Guard and the Fedayeen, who had special orders from Saddam on when and how they could be used. Any thoughts Saddam may have entertained of using these weapons seem to have evaporated after the White House issued an explicit warning to Baghdad in mid-December that it would use nuclear weapons if Iraq attempted to use chemical or biological weapons against American troops or allies. This was similar to the warning James Baker, the former secretary of state, had given Saddam before the Gulf War. It had the desired effect as soon afterward the Special Republican Guard units were ordered to remove the “secret” weapons from front-line units and store them at secret locations.