Saddam's Secrets Read online

  During the five months preceding the commencement of hostilities, the United Nations Security Council put forth twelve separate resolutions condemning Saddam’s actions and calling for immediate withdrawal from Kuwait. His refusal to cooperate with those demands led to the formation of one of the most formidable coalitions in military history, representing thirty-one nations from five continents. Joining the Americans, the British, and the Australians were ten nations with predominantly Arab or Muslim populations. This fact was not lost on Saddam.

  While America and Britain provided the lion’s share of men, money, and materiel, they were joined by Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. It was to be America’s largest military engagement since Vietnam, involving a half million troops, more than two thousand aircraft, and one hundred warships.

  The devastation unleashed upon my country at that time was entirely due to the arrogance and avarice of one man. Saddam could not restrain either his ego or his greed, and his total lack of moral boundaries cost the nation dearly. In addition to the tens of thousands of soldiers and airmen killed in the war, as many as 3,500 innocent civilians were killed in collateral damage. These were tragic losses, yet for Saddam the deaths of civilians was a good thing because it served his purposes: exploiting the deaths of civilians as propaganda has always been a favorite weapon of tyrants.

  To his own tally of war casualties, Saddam could add the 8,000 who were killed in the brutal massacre of the Kurds in 1983; the attack on Halabja in 1988, carried out by his cousin, Ali Hussein al-Majid (better known as “Chemical Ali”), which killed 5,000; and at least 182,000 Kurds murdered at Anfal the same year. The total is still not complete, but more than 275 mass graves have now been discovered, each containing from fifty to several thousand bodies. This is the true legacy of Saddam. Murder, torture, rape, and wholesale genocide were his trademarks, and it may be years before the world discovers the full extent of his evil deeds.

  Certainly there were other casualties, both before and after the war. Some estimates by international agencies place the total number of Saddam’s victims at more than a million dead. It may have been more, but even that wasn’t enough for him. Saddam wanted desperately to drag Israel into the war. If he had succeeded, it probably would have fragmented the coalition and led to thousands more casualties, which would have pleased Saddam immensely.

  Ultimately, the war would cost Iraq more than $200 billion. But this was only a fraction of the price we paid. During Operation Desert Storm, coalition fighters and bombers flew more than 60,000 sorties and made more than 41,000 strikes. Two-thirds of these actions were directed against our ground forces. Approximately 227,000 bombs and missiles were deployed by the coalition, and the damage this caused was staggering.

  The toll in human terms was even higher. Of the approximately 360,000 Iraqi soldiers on the field of battle, 28 percent of them (or nearly 100,000 men and boys) were killed in action, and as many as 200,000 sustained serious injuries. In addition, coalition forces captured 60,000 prisoners, and by some estimates there may have been as many as 150,000 deserters. As for casualties on the other side, 390 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen died in combat, while 458 were wounded in action. Among coalition forces, there was a total of 510 casualties. The financial cost to America was approximately $80 billion, of which coalition nations contributed $54 billion. In the end, it’s clear that Saddam had underestimated the resolve of the American forces, and he completely misjudged the unity and determination of the coalition.

  An Uncertain Victory

  When the war ended, Gen. Sultan Hashim, who had commanded the Iraqi infantry, met with coalition commanders in a tent at Safwan, on the Iraqi side of the border with Kuwait. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of coalition forces, and Gen. Khalid bin Sultan, commander of the Arab coalition forces, were there to negotiate the ceasefire. The document before them testified to the fact that the multinational forces led by the Americans had gotten everything they wanted. But even the statement of surrender didn’t solve the problem.

  For one thing, Schwarzkopf had agreed to let Iraq keep its remaining helicopters, which allowed Saddam to use them to attack and punish those who had carried out the uprising in the fourteen provinces. And, worst of all, nothing was done to change the regime or restrain what Saddam and his deputies could do to us in the future. When news of what happened that day reached the people of Iraq, many felt that America had deserted and abandoned us.

  Just weeks later—as soon as they could load their tanks and artillery and personnel—the Americans left, and there was no one to save us from the wrath of Saddam. Within days he had turned defeat into a victory. He admitted that the Americans had managed to take back Kuwait, but he boasted that three of the world’s most powerful nations had attacked us in the “Mother of all Battles,” and we had won. Iraq was still there, Saddam was still in power, and we would rebuild our forces.

  The Americans thought that sanctions would cause Saddam’s regime to collapse, but it didn’t happen. Anyone who knew Saddam could have told them what was going to happen. Sanctions made the nation weak but they only made Saddam stronger. He hijacked the nation. He even took the bread rations and sold them. Whenever U.N. inspectors would come to see if the people were getting bread, he would open the warehouses and show them bread. But the minute they left, he would shut the doors. And if he ever suspected that someone had been against the regime during the war, he would cut off their bread rations, cut off their electricity, and in this way gradually starve them to death.

  Saddam always had ways of maintaining the appearance of victory even in defeat. When the armistice was signed, Gen. Sultan had agreed to all the points of surrender. But what Gen. Schwarzkopf and his aides didn’t realize was that on the way to the tent, Gen. Sultan received a call from Saddam on his cell phone. Saddam said, “Look, Sultan. I don’t want you to take off your pistol when you go in there to sign the agreement. I want the world to see you with your weapon on your belt. If they tell you to take it off, I want you to refuse.”

  Once again, Saddam was proving that his authority was still supreme, and thereby he was undermining the coalition’s victory. I’m sorry to say that Gen. Schwarzkopf didn’t notice what was happening and didn’t say anything about it. Consequently, Gen. Sultan managed to sit through the entire proceedings wearing his pistol on his belt. In his book, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, Rick Atkinson also reports that coalition commanders had agreed before the signing that Gen. Schwarzkopf was not to shake hands with Gen. Sultan, as a sign of disrespect. But at the last minute, when the Iraqi officer extended his hand, Schwarzkopf shook it anyway, which reportedly outraged Gen. Colin Powell and the top brass at the Pentagon.

  For years afterward, Saddam often pointed to the pictures of that day, and he would say, “Look, let everybody know that we signed the document in Safwan, but Gen. Sultan Hashim was still wearing his pistol.” It was a tiny victory, little more than a way of saving face. But to the people of Iraq this was one more sign that, despite the overwhelming strength and might of the enemy, Saddam had won again. For anyone not familiar with Middle Eastern culture, it must be difficult to understand how a man who was such a tyrant could still be seen as a hero. But Saddam understood, and he mastered the art.

  The reality was that the entire Iraqi Army was destroyed. Most of Saddam’s tanks had been destroyed. The images of Iraqi tanks and equipment lying smoldering and burning beside the road for more than a hundred miles between Kuwait City and Nasiriyah were broadcast by satellite to the entire world. Yet Saddam was still in control. He had told his general to wear a pistol to the surrender proceedings, and every Iraqi knew that as long as Saddam was still alive, he would always win. And we knew that one day Saddam would rise again.
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br />   The Source of Weakness

  The Baath Party came back as well, and before long everything was very much as it had been before the war. Furthermore, when the Americans left, they turned everything over to the United Nations, and the U.N. officials were corrupt, taking money to look the other way. They were selling the food and supplies they were supposed to be giving to the people as part of the recovery effort. Today the media and investigators are discovering the tip of the iceberg in the Oil-for-Food scandal, but this sort of thing was happening from the beginning.

  Over the next twelve years, things got better and better for Saddam while they just got worse and worse for the people. But what made Iraq weak in the first place, in all fields, was the system that put weak people in charge of all major departments and functions. This was the true nature of all the systems put in place by the Baath Party. If you look at the principles of the party that empowered Saddam and allowed him to rule for all those years, you can’t miss the irony.

  The motto of the Baath Party was “Socialism, Unity, Freedom.” The phrase was meant to be poetic, in the same way that the rallying cry of the French Revolution in 1789—liberté, fraternité, egalité—had galvanized the republic. In the aftermath of the revolution in France, there was not much liberty, no fraternity, and there was equality only in the suffering endured by the people. The motto was all symbolism with little meaning. By the same token, there was no freedom or unity in Iraq under Saddam either, and his idea of socialism was a joke.

  The slogans of the Baathis were loaded with symbolism, but it was a symbolism that mattered only to members of the party. If the party had really cared about the people, they would have given us a free-enterprise economy, or at least allowed the people to use their native skills as businessmen and entrepreneurs to improve conditions in Iraq. But this never happened, and it was a great loss to the Iraqi economy.

  For example, when I was retired from the military, I was given ten thousand acres of arable land. In years past this land would have been managed by the government. We had a nationalized agriculture program at one time, but it was terribly unprofitable. It was like the Soviet system in that way, only worse. But one day Saddam thought, Why do we have all this land in agriculture and we can’t make any money with it? We pour so much money and equipment into it, and still we get nothing back. We should get out of the farming business. So he said, “Give the land to the people and let them farm it. Maybe they can make a profit.”

  That’s what happened, and it was one of the few economic measures Saddam ever took that actually helped the people. The minute the people began farming the land for themselves, it became profitable. The lucky thing for me was that my property was well prepared. The land had been cleared and leveled during the days of the collective farms. Concrete irrigation canals were installed and there were barns, outbuildings, harvesting and storage facilities, and I was able to buy modern equipment on the open market. These benefits from the socialist era were helpful, but the ingenuity and hard work were all mine, and that was what made the real difference.

  With a combination of government funds and some of my own money, I was able to buy the things I needed. It wasn’t the biggest farm in Iraq by any means, but it was one of the most productive farms in the Middle East. For four years I lived the life of a prosperous farmer. But my question is, why couldn’t the Baath Party have followed that model, empowering people to take command of their own welfare? Instead, they were merely defenders and enablers of the ceaseless quest for power and domination that consumed our corrupt leader’s every waking thought.

  Decline and Dissent

  Part of the problem in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was a creature of the Baathist political apparatus. It was the Baathist agenda that brought Saddam and Al-Bakr to power in 1968, and that agenda was never benign. The Baathis were fiercely political and unaccountable to anyone. They were brutal to rivals and they couldn’t even maintain peace in their own ranks. The only two countries actually ruled by the Baath Party were Syria and Iraq, and they were two of the biggest enemies in the Arab world. Despite the motto of the party calling for unity and freedom, there was no unity among them.

  The man who fought hardest against unity and freedom was Saddam. He wasn’t the least interested in Arab unity, and he wasn’t interested in giving the people freedom unless it was the freedom to bestow honors and riches on him. The slogans of the Baath Party were only that: slogans. Saddam wasn’t interested in the well-being of the people, whether it was a socialist system or any other. And the Baathists gave him no reason to behave otherwise.

  Now the whole world is able to see the evil that was done under that evil regime. Today investigators are uncovering the mass graves and examining records of atrocities revealing, at last, the corruption in everything that Saddam touched. The truth is, Saddam Hussein killed more Arabs than anyone in history, and he wouldn’t hesitate to abuse, torture, and kill his own people if he felt threatened. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to maintain his grip on the country, and there were no principles he wouldn’t sacrifice for the sake of his own greed.

  The Baath Party claimed to be dedicated to a socialist welfare system. But if I tell you how Saddam and his sons dealt with the wealth of the nation, and especially how he dealt with the nation’s oil and gas resources, you will see that it had nothing to do with the welfare of the people, and everything to do with their own venality and corruption.

  And freedom? Let me give you a graphic example of freedom under Saddam. It was the unspoken rule in Iraq that if Saddam gave a speech on TV—and he gave hundreds of them, ad nauseam —everyone in the entire country was supposed to watch it. There was no freedom of the press in Iraq; all the news was about Saddam. There was no freedom of speech in Iraq; any word of dissent would be met with swift and often fatal punishment. Every day, in all the news media, the subject was what Saddam had done that day. Not to watch a broadcast when Saddam was giving a speech could be very dangerous to your health.

  If anyone disagreed with Saddam over even the slightest thing, he would have his head cut off. If anyone spoke against him, he would have his tongue cut out. If they didn’t like the army, he would have their ears or their nose cut off. In some cases he would have brands seared into the flesh of their foreheads to show that they were cowards.

  On one occasion that I know about, a man was watching a speech by Saddam on TV. He was sitting there with his family and at one point became fed up with hearing the same old lies, day after day. So he simply reached over and turned off the television. He said, “I don’t want to hear that anymore. I’ve heard it all too many times.” And that was all. But the next day at school, his son, who was about seven or eight years old, told his teacher, “My daddy turned off the TV because he didn’t want to hear President Saddam last night.” An innocent comment? Less than a week later, undercover agents of the Mukhabbarat showed up at his door. They took that father away and he was never seen again.

  No one had to ask. We all knew what happened to that man, and this was a well-known and constant threat under Saddam. But what kind of “freedom” is it when a child can turn in his own father and the result is that the man will be killed for turning off the television? And this wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg in my country. Iraq was a nation gripped by fear, night and day, and, believe me, there were many things more horrible than this taking place in every village and town.

  When Saddam wanted to punish the people of a certain province, he wouldn’t say, “I’m going to punish you for rebelling against me.” Instead, he would say it was because of the sanctions. We can’t build a school in your city because of the sanctions. You can’t have a hospital because of the sanctions. You can’t have medicine or food or good roads because of the sanctions. But if he wanted a new palace, he would build it wherever he liked and there were no sanctions.

  In some cases he would punish the people of a certain region to the degree he believed they had been against him; and by the same token, he reward
ed those who had been for him, meaning primarily the four provinces in the Sunni Triangle who were strong Saddam loyalists, with jobs and money and political appointments. Today, it’s the other way around. The provinces he rewarded are the ones where the insurgency has remained strongest, and that’s where most of our problems have come from since the end of the war.

  But this is what Saddam and the Baathis gave us. Their motto was a lie. There was no unity, no freedom, and their idea of socialism was a fraud that corrupted the people. Life in Iraq was precisely the opposite of what we were told to expect, but the fear was so great that nobody dared say a word. The system Saddam created did not make us better, stronger, or more prosperous. It diminished us and weakened us in many ways. Saddam’s government shriveled the souls of the people and weakened our standing in the eyes of the world. The only thing that grew bigger and stronger day by day was Saddam Hussein and his insatiable ego.

  The Human Toll

  After the first Gulf War ended in 1991, and to a much greater extent since April 2003, international agencies have been able to examine areas in Iraq that had previously been off limits. So they went in to determine if rumors of mass graves in Iraq were true. The fact is, mass graves were being used in Iraq for many years before 1991. The Baathis had used mass murder as a tool for decades, and the tragedy of what happened to the Kurds in the north at the hands of Chemical Ali was well known long before the Gulf War began. Kurds were taken from their homes and villages and massacred in the tens of thousands.