Saddam, a symbol of cruelty (Part 2)
However, the Soviet Union and France continued to sell weapons to Baghdad, while Britain doubled Iraq's export credit guarantees. The Senate in Washington voted to impose sanctions on Baghdad, but the measure ran out of time in the House of Representatives when President Reagan said he would veto it.
By now Saddam was convinced that all international protests about human rights were designed solely to extract commercial concessions, and that no atrocity of his risked serious punishment. He believed that Western powers would not oppose his acquiring of nuclear weapons, since they had allowed him to buy chemical weapons technology and had apparently turned a blind eye to his agents buying nuclear triggers and fissile material, often with money borrowed from themselves under such guises as credit for agricultural products.
But his ambitions were secretly causing concern to some Western strategic thinkers. They could not understand why Iraq, with a population of only 17 million and an estimated foreign debt of $70 billion, needed "the fourth largest army in the world". In December 1989 Saddam declared that his country had launched its first space rocket. Another of his projects included a "super-gun", secretly designed and built in Britain and other European countries by a Canadian projectile specialist, Gerald Bull, that could target Israel with chemical or nuclear warheads. Bull was later assassinated in Europe, apparently by Israel.
In March 1990 Saddam turned down pleas by many foreign statesmen and executed an Iranian-born journalist working for The Observer, Farzad Bazoft, who had investigated an explosion at a missile manufacturing plant near Hilla in central Iraq.
But Saddam's next outrage was on a quite different scale. His new victim was the oil-rich state of Kuwait. On July 18, 1990, Iraq accused Kuwait of "stealing $2.4 billions' worth of oil" from it by drilling in a border region, and demanded prompt compensation, even though Baghdad had received more than that sum in gifts from Kuwait and owed it some $15 billion more in interest-free loans received to help it against Iran. A visit by Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak, to Baghdad six days later did not result in a change of position, nor did a meeting the next day with the American ambassador April Glaspie, who, reportedly, told Saddam that "the United States had no view regarding inter-Arab disputes". On August 1, talks in Jeddah between Iraqi and Kuwaiti representatives broke down. Soon after midnight, Iraqi tanks invaded Kuwait and its rulers fled to Saudi Arabia. Iraq looted Kuwait's gold reserves and declared the country to be its 19th province.
Western governments immediately froze Kuwait's substantial assets in their territories to prevent them from falling into Saddam's hand, and the United States began to send fighter and ground attack aircraft to Saudi Arabia to defend it against Iraq. The world was gripped by a crisis of a degree unheard of since the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. Iraq had its supporters. Jordan, Yemen and the Palestine Liberation Organization said they understood its motives, while Arab nationalists everywhere celebrated the "first step towards the unification of the Arab homeland". The Soviet Union, China and India pressed for a negotiated settlement.
In the following months, the United States and Britain worked to build a coalition of 29 countries, including Egypt and Syria, that would go to war to prevent the oilfields of the Arabian peninsula becoming Saddam's property. Meanwhile several retired Western statesmen, including Edward Heath and the Willy Brandt, traveled to Baghdad to mediate, but appeared only to be paying homage at the court of the new Caliph of Islam. They failed to persuade Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait, but won the release of the Western hostages he had imprisoned at strategic sites in Iraq to thwart Western bombing.
Every twist of the drama, with Saddam and the United States President, George Bush - father of the President who was to attack Saddam 12 years later - as its protagonists, was watched on the world's television screens by spellbound audiences. While Iraqi spokesmen held out the prospect of a peaceful withdrawal, and mediation efforts reached a high pitch, the coalition countries, led by the United States, Britain, France and Saudi Arabia, built up a formidable force of more than half-a-million troops and over 500 combat aircraft in the region.
Still, Saddam Hussein did not withdraw by the United Nations deadline of midnight, January 15, 1991. The next evening, the coalition airforces began the bombing of strategic targets in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, relying on the new breed of cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs and stealth fighters. The Iraqi air force was eliminated on the first day of the battle, many of its aircraft escaping to Iran to seek refuge in the former enemy state. But Iraq's Soviet-supplied Scud missiles did manage sometimes to reach Israel and Saudi Arabia. Saddam displayed his few captured British pilots on television.
Such was the devastation inflicted on the Iraqi army in Kuwait and southern Iraq by allied bombing that some experts argued a land invasion might not be necessary. In the event, an armored invasion was needed to repossess Kuwait. It was launched on February 24 and halted 100 hours later, with allied forces within 150 miles of Baghdad. It was a totally humiliating defeat, though Saddam managed to dub it "The Mother of all Victories".
In the months to come, it became clear that the Western powers had ended the war prematurely and had even allowed substantial cadres of Saddam's most loyal troops to escape with their armor. Furthermore, the cease-fire treaty, signed by the coalition's commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, allowed Iraq to fly its helicopter gunships within its territory. "I was suckered", said the general later.
Thus the Shia and Kurdish revolts that broke out in the south and north in the spring of 1991 were brutally put down by Saddam and a major Kurdish refugee exodus into Turkey embarrassed the West, forcing the United States, Britain and France to declare flight exclusion zones in the south and north of the country and send troops into the north to enable the Kurds to return to their homes.
The cease-fire treaty permitted the sale of Iraqi oil abroad to the value of $1.5 billion each six months to allow the importation of food, medicines and other humanitarian materials for the population. Yet Saddam refused to co-operate, saying that it violated Iraq's national sovereignty and demanding that all sanctions against his government be removed. The stalemate continued for several years and resulted in much suffering, until Saddam concluded that the strategy did not work. At the same time, the ceiling for permitted oil exports was lifted to $5.25 billion each six months.
Nevertheless, in June 1999, when Forbes Magazine placed Saddam among the richest men in the world with an estimated personal fortune of $6 billion US dollars, the United Nations reported that over half of all food and medicines it had allowed to be purchased by Iraq were perishing in warehouses in the country. While malnutrition and disease ravaged Iraqis, members of the regime seemed able to import any luxury product they desired and Western reporters found some of the medicines bearing the United Nations label on sale in Jordan.
Other examples of Saddam's malfeasance after the Persian Gulf War of 1991 included a plot to kill the former President George Bush during a visit to Kuwait; a systematic attempt to frustrate the work of the United Nations arms inspectors in finding and destroying Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons as demanded by a UN resolution; a partial invasion in August 1996 of the Kurdish enclave in the north; and the refusal to recognize the validity of the two flight exclusion zones in the north and the south. Reports also spoke of continued research on banned weapons involving tests on Iranian and Kurdish prisoners of war in underground laboratories.
In answer to some of these violations of the cease-fire treaty of 1991, American and British airforces based in the Persian Gulf mounted heavy punitive operations against military targets in Iraq. The heaviest example was Desert Fox in December 1998, after Saddam had finally expelled the UN arms inspectors. For the first time since the Persian Gulf War, some of the main instruments of his grip over Iraq, such as the Republican Guards, were heavily struck, after which Saddam seemed to offer less resistance to the allies.
To many countries in the international community it therefore seemed strange that from the autumn of 2001 there was a sudden and powerful demand from the West, led by America and President George W Bush and seconded by Britain personified by its Prime Minister Tony Blair, that Saddam destroy his "weapons of mass destruction" - or face attack again. This time there was to be no dependence on a military coalition. American anger at the destruction of the New York World Trade Center by al-Qaeda terrorists with no proven connection with Iraq would brook no new UN resolutions - which France, anyway, swore to veto - as a sanction for invasion.
In the European Union, France and Germany were opposed to attacking Iraq, Italy lay low and only the British and Spanish prime ministers pledged support. From early 2003, another mighty armament was assembled, this time in Kuwait, since Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries were resolutely set against the adventure. As before, it was preponderantly American, with the difference that Britain alone provided a substantial supporting component.
Saddam, though deriving encouragement from worldwide anti-war protests, so far bowed to this show of force as to allow the return of UN weapons inspectors. At the same time he, not surprisingly, made their work of verification and destruction as difficult as possible. But American patience was running out. Such large and highly technical land and air forces could not be kept indefinitely in the sweltering heat of the desert. Their merely having been assembled gave the impetus to war its own relentless momentum. When the blow fell it did so with irresistible force.
The prolonged air assault on Iraqi military assets which had been a feature of the coalition's 1991 campaign was dispensed with in the attack which was launched in March 2003. After a few "surgical" strikes on Baghdad and other targets, U.S. forces forged across the border towards Baghdad, while the British invested Basra. In little more than a fortnight the military campaign was all but over. After a remarkable advance of more than 250 miles U.S. Army and Marine units penetrated Baghdad and carried the war into the Iraqi capital's streets. Saddam was targeted in precision air strikes which supported the troops on the ground and, at the same time, attempted to eliminate members of the Iraqi leadership wherever they could be found.
On May 1, 2003 President Bush pronounced that the war was over and the month of July saw an American-backed Iraqi Governing Council meet for the first time. By October a new currency was adopted to replace the one on which Saddam had been displayed. But until November he was still visible on numerous broadcasts which sought to encourage Iraqis to increase their resistance. After the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers, as well as international officials including the UN Special Representative to Iraq, it was a coup for the American military when Saddam was captured near Tikrit in December. His sons Uday and Qusay had already been killed in an American strike on a safe house where they were hiding.
He was at first held in custody by U.S. forces at Camp Cropper in Baghdad. But it was the American intention that Iraqis themselves should try their former leader for his crimes against his people. In July 2004, the first legal hearing in his case was heard before an Iraqi Special Tribunal. In July the following year he was charged with the mass murder of the inhabitants of the village of Dujail in 1982.
But the trial, conducted against a background of rising violence in Iraq as the country disintegrated into its Shia, Sunni and Kurdish components, swiftly degenerated into chaos. In November a defense lawyer on the team representing one of Sadam's co-accused was murdered. He was to be the first of several. On December 5, Saddam and his lawyers contested the authority of the court, Saddam himself telling the judge to "go to hell". The chief judge Rizgar Amin, a Kurd, resigned complaining of government interference and an interim appointment was made in his stead.
When, March 15, 2006, Saddam took the stand, he refused to answer questions, instead delivering a tirade of political pronouncements, declaring himself to be still President of Iraq and calling on his people to stop fighting each other and turn on the Americans. In June Khamis al-Obeidi, the chief defense lawyer was kidnapped and killed. In protest, Saddam began - and ended - a hunger strike, and later embarked on a second. The trial became increasingly chaotic with judges replacing each other with a rapidity that completely undermined any remaining plausibility that might have accrued to the proceedings.
Yet in the end, on November 15, Saddam was found guilty of crimes against humanity in ordering the deaths of 148 Shia inhabitants of the town of Dujail, and was sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam's response was to shout in open court: "God is great! Long live Iraq! Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!" His lawyers appealed against the sentence, but Iraq's highest appeal court confirmed it on December 26, with the rider that sentence should be carried out within 30 days.
Saddam Hussein married, in 1963, Sajida Khairalla Talfah, and they had two sons and three daughters. But he also had a long-standing mistress, Samira Shahbandar, whom he married in 1986 after forcing her husband, the head of the Iraqi Airways, to divorce her. They had a son. There was a third marriage, to Nidal al-Hamdani.
Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq since 1979, was born on April 28, 1937. He died on December 30, 2006, aged 69.
(Source: Times Online)
Concluded