- Faced with Saddam Hussein, the former teenage hit man
from Tikrit, our government appears to feel the need to talk as tough as
any Tikriti. Ari Fleischer, speaking from the White House briefing room,
calls for "one bullet" to take care of the Iraqi leader; George
Bush talks blithely of "taking him out"; and Tom Lantos, ranking
Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, recently, according
to Ha'aretz, assured a visiting Israeli lawmaker: "We'll be rid of
the bastard soon enough, and in his place we'll install a pro-Western dictator,
who will be good for us and for you."
-
- Such violent sentiments are not necessarily a reaction
to Hussein's well-documented cruelty. We can, after all, be understanding
about such foibles among our friends. The gassing of the Kurds was greeted
with barely more than a bleat of protest from Washington, as was his earlier
use of chemical weapons in the war with Iran, but we were allies then.
It took Hussein's apparent bid for control of the world oil market by invading
Kuwait to turn him into "Hitler," capable, as was faithfully
reported in the propaganda buildup to the last Gulf War, of tossing Kuwaiti
babies out of hospital incubators. That myth, dreamed up by the PR firm
Hill and Knowlton, was exposed soon after it had served its purpose. Others,
such as the notion that Hussein is both ready and able to unleash some
super-weapon on the United States, have proved more enduring.
-
- Now more than ever, myth looms larger than reality when
it comes to Iraq, which may be why Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan
has suggested that the dispute be settled in an OK Corral shootout between
Bush and Hussein, flanked by their respective veeps and umpired by U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
-
- In the prologue to "Saddam: King of Terror,"
Con Coughlin strikes a no less mythic note, citing as part of the indictment
against the Iraqi leader his links to Osama bin Laden and an alleged meeting
in Prague between hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer,
a story now effectively discredited by the Czech intelligence service that
spread it in the first place. Once past the obligatory threat-mongering,
however, Coughlin, a British journalist well-versed in Middle Eastern affairs,
deploys more credible sources, especially the reminiscences of former Baathists
who once worked closely with Hussein, to present an engrossing account
of how this semi-educated peasant boy advanced to power through the bloodstained
shoals of Iraqi revolutionary politics.
-
- While accounts of his subject's brutality and ruthlessness
are familiar, though no less chilling for that, Coughlin reminds us that
Hussein did not achieve his eminence through terror alone. Not only was
he extremely skillful politically -- steadily accumulating power through
the 1970s while maintaining a low profile in the shadow of his cousin,
President Ahmad Hassan Bakr -- he also displayed considerable constructive
talents as an administrator.
-
- Iraqi leaders, for example, had long chafed at the control
of the country's oil resources by the cartel of foreign oil corporations
that made up the Iraq Petroleum Co. Efforts by various regimes to alter
this colonial relationship by taking over those oilfields that the IPC
refused to develop had proved fruitless: Among other disciplinary measures,
the international oil companies simply refused to supply oil to any country
that bought oil directly from the Iraqi government rather than from the
IPC.
-
- Beginning in 1971, Hussein (then deputy to Bakr but already
the key power in the country), advised by the gifted oil minister Murtada
Hadithi, took the initiative in outmaneuvering the cartel. After first
securing the Soviet Union as a great-power sponsor (despite a career built
on persecuting Communists), he induced the French to break ranks with the
consortium by promising them lucrative contracts and discounted oil prices.
The scheme worked, finally allowing Iraq unfettered access to its own fabulous
oil riches. It was, says Coughlin, "the single most revolutionary
event to take place in Iraq since its establishment" -- one which
has doubtless not been forgotten or forgiven by the oil companies -- generating
a tidal wave of cash, which the Baath used "to turn the country into
a modern state, and to raise the living standards of ordinary Iraqis."
-
- Carrying out this vast undertaking required skilled assistance.
Hussein has always drawn a distinction between "those who are loyal"
and "those who are expert," the former being those very few trusted
individuals -- first and foremost his immediate family -- through whom
he maintains his grip on power. When it comes to experts, however, Hussein
always displayed an eager eye for, as one former apparatchik recalls, "young
people with good qualifications who were intelligent and courageous."
Even today, anyone who encounters his officials -- such as oil minister
Amer Rashid; Amir Sadi, chief negotiator on the weapon inspection issue;
or Foreign Minister Naji Sabri -- can see that Hussein is served by an
impressively accomplished team. Of course, as the charming Sabri could
explain, competence does not guarantee a long life in Hussein's Baghdad.
His cousin was Hadithi, the former oil minister who later became ambassador
to Moscow. Hadithi was summoned home soon after Hussein took supreme power
in 1979 and executed (perhaps because the newly enthroned leader did not
want anyone around sharing credit for the oil coup). Sabri's brother was
killed as well, and rumor has it that Sabri himself was on the list until
an attentive Hussein struck it off with the words "not him, he can
be useful."
-
- Kenneth M. Pollack's purpose in "The Threatening
Storm" is less to tell a well-rounded story than to argue the case,
as declared in his subtitle, for invading Iraq, displacing Hussein and
building a new Iraq. Pollack, a former CIA analyst and National Security
Council staffer in the Clinton administration, argues that such action
is imperative because Hussein is not only a bloodthirsty tyrant but a really
stupid one to boot, prone to irrational gambles such as the attack on the
Kurds in 1974 as well as the attacks on Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990.
Such reckless adventurism, Pollack insists, is a threat to us because Hussein
is on the point of acquiring nuclear weapons. Therefore, he and every aspect
of his regime must be eliminated as quickly as possible. This martial intervention
will ultimately reverse anti-Americanism in the Arab world once the U.S.
has built a "strong, prosperous, and inclusive new Iraqi state."
-
- Because so much of the "debate" over war with
Iraq has barely risen above the level of sloganeering, Pollack's considered,
empirical style and intellectually rigorous tone is likely to strike a
chord with many undecided observers. Each stage in his argument comes buttressed
with well-footnoted facts and sources (albeit secondary and mostly non-Iraqi).
Still, this is probably the best presentation of their case that the war
party can hope for, especially because Pollack takes a hardheaded approach
to various postulated alternatives to a full-scale land invasion, such
as a bombing campaign ¦ la Kosovo or a sponsored assault by the
Iraqi opposition with U.S. air support, along the lines of the recent Afghan
campaign. He is surely right in deriding these latter notions, although
I think he has been a little naive about the opposition-based variant,
which was most likely crafted by the opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi with
the express design of drawing the United States into a full-scale land
war with Iraq.
-
- As with any work of advocacy, facts and viewpoints inconvenient
to the basic thesis sometimes get short shrift. His muddled account of
Hussein's dealings with the Kurds in the mid-'70s -- actually a masterful
display of cunning by "Mr. Deputy" that crushed the threat of
Kurdish separatism for a generation -- may be due to simple ignorance.
However, though he glosses over or fails to mention them, he must surely
be aware of the various covert U.S. interventions in Iraqi affairs, including
the CIA-supported 1963 coup that first put Hussein's Baath Party in power,
or the Carter administration's encouraging support for Hussein's attack
on Iran in 1980. He does concedes that the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad,
April Glaspie, might have led Hussein to believe he had a green light to
attack Kuwait, but he discounts the significance of the encounter.
-
- Similarly, Pollack refers delicately to Israel's "purported"
nuclear arsenal. This might be dismissed as a mere quibble, save that the
argument of his book -- the case for invading Iraq and occupying Iraq --
rests on the assumption that a dangerously reckless Hussein is about to
have the bomb, with no "purported" about it. It is this threat
alone -- biological and chemical weapons are not, he persuasively suggests,
instruments of mass destruction because they are ineffective or at least
unpredictable -- that justifies war.
-
- In late 1998, when the last United Nations weapon inspection
mission ended in debacle and a rain of American bombs, the inspectors concerned
with the Iraqi nuclear program were fully satisfied that the program was
dead and buried. One U.S. official supervising the work of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, the institution charged with Iraqi nuclear disarmament,
said to me at the time, "The United States pushes the IAEA to find
little discrepancies in Iraq's nuclear accounting so that the file can
be kept open, but short of lobotomizing or killing all the Iraqi nuclear
scientists, the Iraqi nuclear program is finished. We have closed down
all their nuclear facilities and activities." And in its October 1998
report to the U.N., the IAEA itself stated, "There are no indications
that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of
weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance."
-
- Such assessments do not find favor with Pollack, who
regards Hussein's acquisition of nuclear weapons as "probably inevitable."
His major source for this conclusion appears to be an exiled Iraqi nuclear
physicist, Khidhir Hamza, who is described without qualification as "the
former head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program." Hamza, who defected
in 1994, claims that Hussein will most likely be in possession of three
nuclear weapons by 2005 (though occasionally he amends that to "a
bomb" within "months"). This individual is furthermore a
key source for the suggestion that Hussein planned to fire a nuclear warhead,
should he have had one available in time, at Tel Aviv during the Gulf War,
thus inviting retaliatory immolation from Israel. If true, this certainly
bolsters the case for Hussein's being impermissibly reckless.
-
- However, not everyone takes Hamza at his own estimation
as "Saddam's bombmaker." In his forceful debunking of the Iraqi
threat, former senior weapon inspector Scott Ritter states flatly in "War
on Iraq," that Hamza "wasn't a designer and he certainly wasn't
head of the program.... [He] is not who he says he is." David Albright,
a Washington-based expert on nuclear proliferation who helped give Hamza
initial credibility, recently claimed that Hamza exaggerated his own importance
in the Iraqi program and recycled information he had picked up from the
press, including specious revelations about biological and chemical weapons,
as his own firsthand knowledge. Despite such reservations, Hamza still
finds a respectful hearing among journalists and Congress, despite the
lack of confirmation from other sources. It is telling that, while the
United States detected a North Korean uranium enrichment program in its
early stages, the administration has been unable, despite huge effort,
to uncover hard evidence -- which it would quite certainly broadcast --
of any similar Iraqi activity.
-
- Ritter, meanwhile, a hero among the hawks, is now vilified,
when he is not ignored, because of his assertions, backed up by detailed
information from his days as a star weapon inspector, that the former U.N.
inspection effort effectively destroyed all Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
as well as his means for constructing them. The very fact of Ritter's relative
obscurity nowadays, compared to people with more palatable messages, such
as Hamza, points to the lack of any real debate on the official justifications
for the proposed invasion.
-
- But then, who needs justifications? In December 1989,
the U.S. attacked Panama on the flimsiest of pretexts and overthrew its
government, killing more than 300 Panamanians in the process. The invasion
was officially code-named "Operation Just Cause." But, inside
the Pentagon, cynics dubbed it "Operation Just Because." As a
former defense official said to me recently, "we invaded Panama just
because it was there and we could."
-
- Perhaps the same will be said of Iraq.
-
- Andrew Cockburn is the co-author of "Out of the
Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein."
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- http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-cockburn3nov03.story
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