Saddam : His Rise and Fall (30 page)

The indoctrination worked. Western diplomats who were stationed in Iraq during this period reported back that, even though most Iraqis were well aware of the security forces' uncompromising tactics, Saddam was a genuinely popular leader. “At grassroots level he had a great deal of popular support,” recalled a former ambassador to Baghdad. “He would make impromptu visits to the new towns that were being built all over Iraq. The quality of life had improved immeasurably for many people. There were schools, clinics, roads, water, and electricity, and this was very popular with ordinary Iraqi peasants. Superficially everything looked very good, and they were very appreciative of what Saddam had done for them.”
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Iraqis who wanted to show appreciation for their leader during these surprise visits needed to be on their guard, for soon after he became president Saddam's security guards began using sticks and electric rods on people who got too close to the man the Iraqi media dubbed Iraq's “knight,” “leader,” “struggler,” and “son of the people.”
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The sustained development of Saddam's personality cult, and the limited amount of time a man with so many responsibilities could reasonably devote to visiting his people, resulted in one of the more bizarre features of his presidency—the hiring of look-alikes. An Iraqi exile who called himself Mikhael Ramadan claimed that he acted as Saddam's double for more than ten years before defecting to the West. He provided an intriguing account of being brought to Baghdad from his village in southern Iraq shortly after Saddam became president after security officials noticed his strong facial similarities to the Iraqi leader. Ramadan said he was taken to meet Saddam at his house in Baghdad and that, when Saddam first met him, he was so struck by the similarities in their appearance that he jokingly asked whether his own father had enjoyed an illicit liaison with Ramadan's mother. Saddam then asked Ramadan whether he would be willing to stand in for him at some of president's more mundane official engagements. “I know the people of Iraq idolise their President, but my responsibilities are such that I do not have the time I would like to spend with my people…. Would you do me and, of course, the great people of Iraq an enormous service and perhaps stand in for me on occasion?”
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Ramadan agreed and was sent for months of training, where he
studied videos of Saddam's public appearances before himself undertaking low-scale engagements on his leader's behalf.

The quality of life had improved immeasurably for Saddam and his family. The Husseins occupied the Presidential Palace and were becoming accustomed to the trappings of high office. Saddam still worked sixteen to seventeen hours a day in a small office he had set aside for himself in the palace grounds. Saddam dressed well in tailor-made suits bought from his favorite tailors in Baghdad and Geneva, and there was something of the dandy about his appearance. One of his former Baath colleagues claimed that he owned more than four hundred belts. Despite his liking for the high life, Saddam remained something of a puritan when it came to his working practices. Dr. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician who negotiated with Saddam over several years, recalled how he visited the new Iraqi leader shortly after he had moved into the Presidential Palace. The meeting had been arranged for 7
A.M
. and when he arrived he found Saddam still in his pajamas. Saddam had spent the night working in his small office, and Othman was surprised to see a small military cot in a corner of the room where the Iraqi president had slept. Next to the bed there were twelve pairs of expensive shoes, and the rest of the cramped office contained a small library of books about Stalin. Seeing the books Othman remarked, “You seem fond of Stalin,” to which Saddam replied amiably, “Yes, I like the way he governed his country.” Othman, perhaps pushing his luck a little, then asked Saddam if he was a communist, to which Saddam replied in a questioning voice, “Stalin, a communist?” from which Othman deduced that Saddam regarded Stalin more as a nationalist than a communist.

In 1980 Saddam's two sons, Uday and Qusay, were sixteen and fourteen respectively and were attending Kharkh High School, Saddam's alma mater, which had been run by Saddam's wife Sajida before he became president. Former classmates recall that Uday was loud and vulgar while Qusay was quiet and calculating. Both boys received special treatment at the school and were not obliged, like the other pupils, to obey the rules. Uday, in particular, seems to have been totally out of control. Both boys, of course, were accompanied by security guards at all times, and Uday often took advantage of their presence to behave outrageously. Former pupils claim that it was not uncommon for him to turn up for school wearing a bandolier filled with live ammunition. He was obsessed with cars and would order his guards to seize a car from the family of fellow pupils if he took a shine to it. On one occasion he
broke his leg, and his class was required to move to a classroom on a lower floor. He started to imitiate his father's habit of smoking cigars. His legendary interest in the opposite sex is also said to have derived from his schooldays, and it has been suggested that the girls he dated had little choice in the matter.

Sajida Hussein, who had kept herself very much in the background during her husband's ten-year ascent to the presidency, had acquired a taste for the high life. By 1981 the shy, former schoolteacher was making personal use of the presidential jet to undertake shopping trips abroad. She made a secret trip to London with an entourage of twenty friends, where she spent most of her time at Hermès on Bond Street (Iraqi exiles claimed that she ran up a bill into the millions of pounds). A few months later Sajida flew to New York in a private Boeing 747 owned by the Iraqi government in the company of her cousin and future son-in-law, Hussein Kamel al-Majid, and an entourage of thirty. On this occasion she fell in love with Bloomingdale's department store, where she spent a small fortune replenishing her wardrobe. Every day that she was in New York Saddam, the devoted husband, phoned her to check on her progress and welfare.

Just as dawn was breaking on September 22, 1980, several squadrons of Iraqi fighter aircraft attacked ten Iranian air bases, including the military enclave at Teheran International Airport. Their objective was to destroy the Iranian air force on the ground and prepare the way for a land invasion by the Iraqi army. The tactic had worked brilliantly for the Israelis during the 1967 Six Day War, and Saddam Hussein, Iraq's newly promoted, and self-appointed field marshal, was confident that it would result in a glorious triumph for his own armed forces. Throughout the day the Iraqi pilots flew sortie after sortie, using their newly acquired French Mirage jets to devastating effect against the Iranian airfields and early warning radar stations. Initially taken by surprise by the attack, the Iranians soon managed to launch a counteroffensive, and ordered their American-built F-4 fighters to carry out retaliatory raids against the Iraqis, bombing two Iraqi airfields and destroying four missile boats stationed in the Gulf. The Iranians also attacked an Iraqi gas-processing plant and a number of oil installations near the Iran-Iraq border. Undeterred by the Iranians' spirited fight back, the next day Saddam ordered his tank commanders to lead the ground invasion of Iran. Six mechanized divisions of the Iraqi army crossed into Iran, thereby provoking one of the bloodiest, longest, and most costly conflicts since the Second World War. By the time the Iran-Iraq War finished eight years later, more than one million people would have perished and the economies of two of the world's wealthiest oil nations would lie in ruins.

Ultimate responsibility for the decision to invade Iran, which was to destroy all the progress the Baathists had made in modernizing Iraq, lay entirely with Saddam. Relations between the two Gulf states had been on a collision course, particularly after Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power. From April 1980 onward a number of skirmishes had been reported along their shared one-thousand-mile border after Khomeini publicly called on Iraq's Shiite Muslims to rise in revolt and overthrow the Baathist regime. The official reason for the escalating tensions was the continuing dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Even though the Algiers Agreement negotiated between Saddam and the shah in 1975 had attempted to resolve the issue, Saddam had always felt that Iraq, which was at the time in no position to challenge its more powerful neighbor, had come out second best in the deal. With the change of regime in Teheran, Saddam saw an opportunity to revise the agreement in Iraq's favor, a move that was firmly resisted by Iran. Relations between the two countries continued to deteriorate to the point where, on September 17, 1980, Saddam addressed an emergency session of the newly reinstated National Assembly at which he unilaterally declared the Algiers Agreement null and void, blaming the “frequent and blatant Iranian violations of Iraqi sovereignty.” Speaking slowly, and occasionally waving his finger for added emphasis, Saddam left his audience in little doubt about his intentions. “This river,” he proclaimed, “must have its Iraqi-Arab identity restored as it was throughout history.”
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Five days later Iraq was at war with Iran.

Despite the many successes he had achieved in his ruthless rise to power through the ranks of the Baath Party, Saddam was singularly unsuited to be a war leader. For all the uniforms, titles, and honorific ranks he had awarded himself—including that of field marshal—Saddam had never had any military experience, had probably never read a military textbook, or ever considered the finer points of strategy and tactics. Nor had he ever participated in an armed conflict. Moreover the student who had been unable to muster the required grades to enter Baghdad Military College harbored a deep distrust, fueled by jealousy, of successful military officers that would taint his dealings with the Iraqi commanders for the duration of the war. To compensate for his obvious shortcomings as a war leader, Saddam's propaganda machine now went into overdrive to portray him to the Iraqi people as their dashing commander in chief.

Saddam's strategy in essence was to strike deep into Iran and capture sufficient territory to use as a bargaining chip with Teheran to negotiate a better deal over the Shatt al-Arab. Saddam, who was being advised by a collection of
the shah's generals exiled in Baghdad, had been told that the new Iranian regime was in such a state of chaos that he could expect a quick victory—probably within two to three weeks. The invasion plan was based on a staff exercise that had been conducted by British military instructors at the Baghdad War College as far back as 1941.
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In addition to securing the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab, Saddam had his eye on capturing the Arab-inhabited region of Khuzistan from Iran, in the hope that this might trigger a revolt among other non-Persian ethnic groups. If he could achieve these goals he stood a good chance of precipitating the collapse of the Khomeini regime.

In the first few weeks of the campaign the Iraqis looked like they were achieving their war aims. The chaos engendered by the Iranian revolution had, as Saddam correctly calculated, left the country's military institutions unprepared for war, and certainly in no position to repulse a full-scale invasion. The Iraqis made rapid advances, capturing several key Iranian towns along the central border and subjecting to severe bombardment the city of Dezful, located in Iran's northern oil fields and the key transportation link between Teheran and the south. In the south the Iraqi forces crossed the Karun River, advanced on Abadan, and after a bitter battle involving house-to-house combat and enormous casualties on both sides, took Khorramshahr by late October. The Iranian defenders, armed only with light weapons and Molotov cocktails, fought with great fervor and tenacity, and each side suffered about 7,000 dead and seriously wounded, while the Iraqis lost more than 100 tanks and armored vehicles. By the time Khorramshahr was in Iraqi hands on October 24, it had come to be referred to by both sets of combat-tants as “Khunistan,” meaning “city of blood.” Iraq now occupied a strip of Iranian territory 600 kilometers (373 miles) long and varying in width from 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in the north to 40 kilometers (25 miles) in the south. Saddam's lack of military experience did not prevent him from taking direct control of the war effort himself. As had Hitler, he gave his generals their objectives and told them when to strike. From the outset of hostilities he went to the front and conducted military operations from forward headquarters. Whenever he ventured near the front line, his every move was filmed and shown on Iraqi television later that same evening.

Even though Saddam could claim that the initial phase of the war was a success, there were already worrying signs that the offensive would not achieve the desired goals. The raids carried out by the Iraqi air force had
achieved little, and most of the Iranian air force remained operational and retaliated with strikes against Iraq. The Iraqis quickly discovered that their air defense systems were ineffective. Although the Iranian army was in no position to fight, the Iraqi invaders were taken aback by the ferocity of the resistance put up by the local population. The heavy casualties suffered in the assault on Khorramshahr meant that the Iraqis were not able to take Abadan, ten miles to the south. This was a serious setback, as failure to take Abadan meant that the Iraqis had failed in one of their main objectives, namely occupying the eastern shore of the Shatt al-Arab and thereby securing control of the all-important strategic waterway.

At this point Saddam called a halt to the Iraqi offensive and ordered the army to assume a defensive posture. This was the first of many miscalculations that would severely rebound against Saddam. By digging in around their new positions, the Iraqis were sending a signal to the Iranians that they were not interested in pursuing hostilities any further. Saddam assumed that he had made sufficient territorial gains to force the Iranians to the negotiating table. Buoyed by the gains achieved, Saddam may even have believed that the collapse of the Khomeini regime was imminent. But Saddam had completely misread the situation. The Iraqis' failure to capture either Dezful or Abadan meant that the Iranians' lines of communication remained intact, enabling them to regroup. Despite suffering massive casualties, morale in the Iranian regular army and in the irregular forces of the Revolutionary Guards remained high. And rather than weakening the Khomeini regime, the Iraqi offensive simply provided the opportunity for the more militant elements in Teheran to gain control of the political system.

Saddam soon had to face up to the shortcomings of his strategy. Surprisingly for someone who rarely showed much respect for human life, the heavy number of Iraqi casualties suffered in the first offensive—forty-five thousand Iraqis are thought to have been killed during the first two months of the war—persuaded Saddam against sustaining further casualties by attacking Abadan. The morale of the Iraqi army was an unknown factor and, as many of the troops were Shiites, there was no guarantee of their loyalty when ordered to attack their fellow Shiites in Iran. There were many Iraqis who opposed the war and believed that Saddam's objectives could be obtained by other means. And as the war dragged on, Saddam slowly began to realize just how badly he had underestimated the size of the challenge he faced from a country that was three times larger than Iraq. Iraq's capacity to
sustain the long lines of communication that in-depth penetration of Iran would have demanded and to absorb the inevitable losses was questionable. Western military analysts have suggested that Saddam's insistence on exercising centralized control from Baghdad may have paralyzed the local commanders' ability to operate, and contributed to their failure to advance and hold ground. Iraq's strategic limitations were particularly a factor in the air war. Except for installations in Khuzistan, Iraq's air force had to penetrate hundreds of miles into Iran to hit major targets. The Iranian air force had to travel less than a hundred miles across the border to reach all major targets in Iraq. Six months into the war, Saddam finally came to terms with its strategic implications when he declared, “Geography is our enemy.”

A more realistic assessment of Saddam's failure to achieve his war aims is that the offensive was halfhearted and lacked clear objectives. Only half of the Iraqi army—six out of twelve divisions—was involved in the actual invasion, and from the outset Saddam sought to confine the war by restricting his army's goals, means, and targets. He was particularly anxious to avoid Iranian civilian casualties, mainly because he hoped that the Iraqi invasion would somehow persuade the Iranian populace to rise up and overthrow the Khomeini regime. Indeed, Saddam's real motivation appears to have been to overthrow the Khomeini regime before the Khomeini regime overthrew him. Saddam had gone to war with Iran while at the same time attempting to send a signal to the Iranian people that he did not want an all-out war with Iran. The Iraqi position was succinctly summed up by Tariq Aziz, who was now Saddam's deputy prime minister. “Our military strategy reflects our political objectives. We want neither to destroy Iran nor to occupy it permanently because that country is a neighbour with which we will remain linked by geographical and historical bonds and common interests. Therefore we are determined to avoid any irrevocable steps.”
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Small wonder the Iranian people were utterly confused by the Iraqi objectives, and remained loyal to their own government.

Another factor that may have contributed to the failure of the Iraqi blitzkrieg is the claim that the Iranians had been in possession of the Iraqi war plan for fully two months before the offensive was launched. According to Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former Iranian president, who was appointed chairman of the Supreme Defense Council soon after the Iraqi invasion, the Iraqi plan was contained in a document that had been purchased by the Iranian foreign minister in Latin America for $200,000. The details of the battle plan
had been given to Latin American intermediaries by the Soviets, who believed that Iraq had been given a green light by the United States to invade Iran. “Everything happened as set out in this document. There had been a meeting in Paris. At this meeting were Americans, Israelis, Iranian royalists: it was there that the attack plan was prepared.”
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The economic consequences of the war were considerable for both sides, but more so for Iraq than Iran. The Iranian refinery at Abadan had been largely destroyed along with many facilities at Bandar Abbas. Iraq's pumping stations at Kirkuk and Mosul had been severely damaged, as had the massive petrochemical complex that Saddam had built at Basra. Consequently oil exports from both countries were suspended and when they did resume it was at a far lower level than prewar. When it came to wartime oil exports, however, Iran had a massive strategic advantage over Iraq in the form of the thousands of miles of coastline it enjoys both in the Persian Gulf and in the Indian Ocean. Iraq, on the other hand, was effectively landlocked as its failure to capture Abadan meant it had lost its only access to the sea.

Worse was to follow for Saddam the following year when the Iranians finally launched their counteroffensive in May 1981 on the central and northern fronts, forcing the Iraqi forces to pull back to Khorramshahr. By October the Iranians had pushed the Iraqis back across the Karun River and in November the Iranians launched a new offensive in which they employed a devastating new strategy that had a terrifying effect on the Iraqi soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of ill trained and lightly armed Revolutionary Guard volunteers, filled with intense religious fervor, joined the fighting. Led into battle by their clerics, the volunteers showed little fear of dying, for the regime had taught them that heaven was the reward for martyrs—the same tactics were later used by Islamic militants in the Palestinian territories during the second
Intifada
to persuade Arab teenagers to become suicide bombers. The Iraqi soldiers were an unequal match for this army of suicidal volunteers. One Iraqi officer later related to a British military observer how “they came at us like a crowd coming out of a mosque on Friday. Soon we were firing into dead men, some draped over the barbed wire fences, and others in piles on the ground, having stepped on the mines.”
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Another Iraqi commander recounted the demoralizing effect the Iranian tactics had on his own soldiers. “My men are eighteen, nineteen, just a few years older than these kids. I've seen them crying, and at times the officers have had to kick them back to their guns. Once we had Iranian kids on bikes cycling toward us, and
my men all started laughing, and then these kids started lobbing their hand grenades and we stopped laughing and started shooting.”
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The tactics worked and for the duration of the Iranian offensive the Iraqis were gradually pushed back. In December the Iranians captured a key crossroads, the only road linking the entire southern sector. A monthlong Iraqi effort in February to recapture the junction failed, even though Saddam went to the front himself to lead the counterattack. At the end of March 1982 the Iranians achieved another dramatic victory, pushing the Iraqi army back thirty miles and taking 15,000 Iraqis prisoner. But Iran's greatest military success came in May 1982 when, in a monthlong campaign, they drove the Iraqis from their remaining positions and recaptured the city of Khorramshahr, together with 22,000 Iraqi troops.