Saddam : His Rise and Fall (50 page)

The INA plot to overthrow Saddam was undoubtedly the most extensive ever attempted, and penetrated to the very heart of the regime. With so many supporters in key positions, the INA may have stood some chance of success had the Iraqis not captured the key communications system. All the credit for exposing the coup went to Qusay, the head of the Organization of Special Security. Saddam rewarded Qusay for his diligence by appointing him head of a new committee consisting of the heads of the Mukhabarat, special security, and military intelligence. While Uday languished in disgrace, his younger brother's star was very much in the ascendant.

In August Saddam inflicted another humiliating blow against the CIA when his forces reoccupied the Kurdish enclave that had been used the previous year by the INC for its assault on Kirkuk and Mosul. Tensions between the rival Kurdish factions of Talibani's PUK and Massoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) had been intensifying since Talibani supported the INC offensive. In the summer of 1996 fresh fighting erupted between the two groups. At first Talibani's forces got the upper hand, and Barzani appealed to Saddam for help. Saddam responded by dispatching the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard units, which mounted a surprise attack on the PUK positions and routed Talibani's forces. It was a triumphant return to Kurdistan for Saddam, and a complete disaster for the CIA and the Iraqi opposition, which had been closely allied with the PUK. The Iraqi troops captured scores of INC followers who were operating under direct CIA control and thousands of documents that revealed the combined plans of both sides. Saddam ordered the execution of all the Iraqi CIA operatives, and the rest of the INC survivors were jailed. The INC infrastructure in Kurdistan was completely destroyed, and the United States had to make hurried arrangements to evacuate more than six thousand Iraqis and Kurds who were involved with the INC operation. Despite the PUK's call for military assistance to fight Saddam's forces, President Clinton would only authorize another series of cruise missile attacks against Baghdad, which made no impact on the operational capability of Saddam's forces in Kurdistan. William Perry, the U.S. defense secretary, summed up the government's position when he said: “My judgment is that we should not be involved in the civil war in the north.”
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Saddam's success in exposing the INA's coup attempt and destroying the INC in Kurdistan effectively signaled the end of efforts by the Clinton administration and its allies to overthrow Saddam for the remainder of the 1990s. His rout of the INC in Kurdistan had been particularly embarrassing, and in the run-up to the 1996 presidential election contest the main priority of the Clinton camp was to ensure that the campaign did not attract any adverse publicity from its failed policy to overthrow Saddam. The sixty-five hundred Iraqi and Kurdish INC survivors and their families were evacuated to the remote island of Guam in the northern Pacific, where they were sequestered until the presidential election was safely out of the way. They were then given U.S. citizenship. The disasters of 1996 had taught Clinton a painful lesson in the limitations of Washington's ability to confront Saddam,
and for the remainder of his presidency little interest was displayed in hatching plots to overthrow him. Although lines of communication were maintained with Iraqi opposition groups, they were kept to a bare minimum. “After 1996 it reached the point where we exchanged Christmas cards, but little else,” commented one INA official.
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As 1996 drew to a close, Saddam had good reason to celebrate. Having eliminated his treacherous sons-in-law, he had successfully tested the limits of U.S. strength and resolve, and had found them both lacking. His regime had found a way of circumventing the effects of the UN sanctions and the only cloud on his horizon was the continued antics of his eldest son, Uday. One evening in December 1996, as he returned from feeding his pet dogs, Uday was badly injured in an assassination attempt in central Baghdad. The gunmen fired eight bullets into him at point-blank range before making good their escape, leaving him for dead. Saddam rushed to the hospital to see his injured son, as did Uday's mother, Sajida. It was the first time Uday's parents had been in the same room since the death of Adnan Khairallah in 1989. Although Uday was badly injured, the Cuban doctors who treated him informed Saddam that his son would live. There was no shortage of suspects, and in the next few days some 2,000 people were questioned, including Uday's uncle Watban, who was still recovering from the injuries he sustained when Uday shot him. The assassination was later attributed to a group calling itself al-Nahdah, or “the awakening,” a group of middle-class Iraqi professionals that had been set up in 1991 to overthrow Saddam. A few days after the shooting Saddam summoned his family for an emergency summit around Uday's bed. Qusay, Saddam's two half brothers, Watban and Sabawi, and Ali Hassan al-Majid were all present as he delivered a scathing denunciation of their general conduct. All those present were given a dressing-down for either being incompetent or corrupt. Saddam saved his severest admonishment for Uday. “Your behavior, Uday, is bad,” he lectured his stricken son. “There could be no worse behavior than yours. We want to know what kind of a person you are. Are you a politician, a trader, a people's leader, or a playboy? You must know that you have done nothing for this homeland or this people.”
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The spring of 1997 saw Saddam concentrating his energies on the two issues that remained from the Gulf War, the UN sanctions and the UNSCOM weapons inspections. When the sanctions were originally imposed in 1991, the Iraqis were led to believe that they would be lifted once they had satisfied all the requirements of the UN weapons inspectors.
But by early 1997, with the second Clinton administration established in office, it became clear that Washington no longer regarded the sanctions as being related to the weapons inspections. In March 1997 Madeleine Albright, the new secretary of state, told an audience at Washington's Georgetown University, “We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted.” Saddam duly noted this significant shift in policy. It was clear to him that he had nothing to gain from further cooperation with the UN inspectors. He was well aware that there was a limit to how far Washington was prepared to go militarily to enforce compliance with UNSCOM. In 1997 the threat of military force from Washington was declining. If the worst that the United States could throw at Saddam was a handful of cruise missiles, then he calculated that his interests would be better served by protecting his coveted nonconventional weapons arsenal from the prying eyes of the UNSCOM inspectors.

UNSCOM's main concern at this juncture was to track the remaining elements of the Iraqi biological and VX nerve gas programs, and any missile systems used to deliver them that Saddam might still be concealing. Another task delegated to UNSCOM was to investigate claims that Iraq had conducted biological weapons experiments between 1994 and 1995 on prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, and that there were human burial sites outside the Salman Pak facility.
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Equipped with the new information supplied by Hussein Kamel and his fellow defectors, the UNSCOM inspectors became more confrontational as they went about their work, especially after the studious Rolf Ekeus was replaced as head of UNSCOM in 1997 by the more abrasive Austrialian diplomat Richard Butler. The increased pressure from UNSCOM, however, was matched by a more defiant attitude from Saddam. On one occasion during an UNSCOM inspection an Iraqi official grabbed the controls of an UNSCOM helicopter, almost causing it to crash, in an attempt to prevent the inspectors from photographing a sensitive sight. The Iraqis blacked out the cameras that were supposed to monitor sensitive sites, and moved restricted equipment without notifying UNSCOM. Saddam declared some of the more sensitive sites to be presidential or sovereign areas that were immune from the inspection process. In June, addressing a rare meeting of the RCC, Saddam issued a statement that summed up Iraq's new approach to the activities of the weapons inspectors. “Iraq has complied with and implemented all relevant resolutions….
There is absolutely nothing else. We demand with unequivocal clarity that the Security Council fulfills its commitments toward Iraq…. The practical expression of this is to respect Iraq's sovereignty and to fully and totally lift the blockdade imposed on Iraq.”
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Saddam's obstruction of the inspectors' activities intensified, with the Iraqis arguing, with some justification, that UNSCOM had been infiltrated by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies.
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In October Tariq Aziz announced that no more Americans would be allowed into Iraq to work on the inspection teams, and a few days later the remaining Americans were expelled. The Clinton administration responded by threatening to bomb Iraq, and on this occasion Saddam decided to back down, although not before his brinkmanship had demonstrated that, with the notable exception of Britain, the United States had little international support for a resumption of military action against Baghdad. Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, even claimed that joint military action by the United States and Britain against Iraq would start World War III. Saddam, meanwhile, invited the foreign press to Baghdad to report on the devastating effects on Iraq caused by seven years of UN sanctions. The ensuing reports of hospitals without medicines, schools without books, and mothers without food duly appeared in the Western media and had a profound impact on public opinion. There was correspondingly less coverage either about how the regime was earning billions of dollars from its sanctions-busting activities, or about how UN food and medical aid was being sold on the black market by Uday's illegal smuggling network.

A final effort was made to defuse the mounting UNSCOM crisis through diplomacy when Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, visited Baghdad for talks with Saddam in February 1998. The key issues at stake were Butler's demand that the inspectors be allowed to visit so-called “presidential sites,” where it was known that much of the proscribed equipment was concealed. Saddam had resisted this demand, which he claimed insulted the honor of the presidency. The Iraqis, on the other hand, wanted to know at what point the UN intended to lift sanctions. Annan arrived in Baghdad on February 20 and had a face-to-face meeting with Saddam a few days later. Like all visitors, Annan had no idea where he was going as he climbed into the government car to be taken to the meeting. He was driven to a new palace that Saddam had built in Baghdad since the Gulf War, where he found Saddam looking relaxed and confident and wearing a double-breasted blue suit, matching tie, and highly polished black leather boots. Annan began by flattering him.
“You're a builder, you built modern Iraq. It was destroyed, you've rebuilt it. Do you want to destroy it again?” Saddam listened attentively to what Annan had to say, and at one point produced a yellow notepad to take notes on Annan's points. After three hours of discussions the two men began working on a formula to resolve the crisis. Saddam objected to the word “inspections” in relation to the presidential sites, and wanted it replaced with “visits.” Annan said Saddam's preference was too vague. Saddam replied, “Ok, they can enter,” and on that basis Annan drafted the phrase “initial and subsequent entries for the performance of the tasks mandated.” Saddam agreed to the amended text, in return for which he understood that Annan had made a commitment to lift sanctions if Iraq complied with a new round of inspections. As he said good-bye to Annan, Saddam said, “I want to thank you for coming to Baghdad personally. You must feel free to come here. You can even come for a holiday, if it won't embarrass you.”
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Although the Annan mission was successful in defusing the immediate crisis, in the long term it signaled the end for UNSCOM. Annan's intervention confirmed that UNSCOM was no longer the sole interlocutor with Iraq on weapons issues, as Saddam knew he could now appeal above Richard Butler's head. Butler's authority had been usurped by Annan and the bickering members of the Security Council, a fact that Saddam was quick to exploit.

Following Annan's mission, the United States tried to back away from its confrontation with Saddam because the Clinton administration realized that, apart from bombing Baghdad, there was little it could do to enforce the UN resolutions. And rather than have the impotency of the West's position with regard to Iraq exposed, Washington put pressure on the UN to be less confrontational in its approach to the inspections. Butler in turn ordered Scott Ritter, the chief inspector of the UN team in Baghdad, to call a halt to the inspections, eventually causing Ritter to resign in protest, complaining of interference in his work from officials in London and Washington. Before departing, Ritter revealed that Saddam would have as many as three nuclear weapons ready for use as soon as he had laid his hands on the necessary fissile material (uranium 235 or plutonium). Ritter also severely damaged UNSCOM's credibility by revealing that he had worked closely with Israeli intelligence for much of his seven-year tenure with the supposedly independent UN inspection teams.

In August Saddam provoked yet another clash with Washington by demanding a speedy conclusion to the UNSCOM mission and threatening
grave retaliation if sanctions were not lifted. In October the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress, which was becoming increasingly restless about President Clinton's disinclination to confront Saddam, voted the Iraqi Liberation Act into law on October 1, in which it pledged $97 million to Iraqi opposition groups working to overthrow Saddam. Saddam followed this in November by suspending all cooperation with UNSCOM's monitoring program. The inspectors were withdrawn, the United States and Britain prepared to bomb Iraq, and at the last moment Saddam allowed the inspectors back. Butler continued with the inspections, but the Iraqis were sufficiently obstructive for him to report back that Saddam was not fulfilling his UN commitments. By now Annan had concluded that both the Clinton administration and Saddam were intent on fomenting the long-awaited bombing attack. The timing especially suited Clinton, who was desperately seeking a diversion to draw attention away from the impeachment proceedings against him that had commenced in Washington.