Saddam's Secrets Read online

  It was not until the investigations of 2003, however, that those Kurdish graves were finally uncovered, and what they discovered was horrifying. Thousands of men, women, and children from the northern regions, referred to as Kurdistan, had been seized and taken from their homes in the north, massacred, and buried in the south. The people who opened the graves knew immediately where the victims were from by the bits of clothing that remained on the bodies. Some remnants of their distinctive Kurdish garments were still intact.

  We also know that thousands more were taken from Halabja and murdered somewhere near Babylon in the south. So long as Kurdistan was being protected by the American forces based in Turkey, the Kurds had a measure of protection. But when they left in 1991, Saddam ordered his soldiers to take these people as prisoners and execute them. They massacred them in the tens of thousands and buried them in military camps where U.N. peacekeepers and international forces could not go. There were vast areas within the three biggest military bases in the south where mass graves were dug, and Saddam believed no one would ever know the difference.

  The graves were well hidden, and access to those sites was strictly prohibited by the military and the government. But even before liberation in 2003, people would sneak into those areas at night and dig, hoping to find evidence of their loved ones and even entire families that had been taken away and killed. Imagine their horror when dogs began digging in the graves and pulling out parts of human bodies. Finally, after 2003, the camps were opened and hundreds of searchers showed up, digging for evidence of the atrocities that had taken place under Saddam.

  Human rights organizations, peace activists, private religious groups, and many others were part of this. And in some cases they had access to satellite imagery that showed them the most likely places where mass graves could exist. There’s still so much that we don’t know. But many official records from the Saddam era are now being brought to light, and the agencies are finding long lists with the names of those killed, how and when they were killed, and even who did the killing. But it will be years, I suspect, before the whole dark secret of Saddam’s savagery is known.

  There are also mass graves of the Shia people and their clerics. The strict laws followed by the Shia go back more than 1,400 years, and each member of Shia society is obedient to a particular imam or religious leader. Each of these leaders is obedient, in turn, to another cleric at a higher level. And this continues to the level of the ayatollah who is obedient to the highest Shia leader of all, a grand ayatollah. In Iraq, the Shia make up about 55 percent of the country. Their first loyalty was not to the government but to Islam, and this made Saddam very angry.

  Consequently, Saddam thought nothing of capturing, torturing, and killing these people. Especially in the south, where the majority of Iraqi Shia live, he kept the people of the region in constant fear. Some families lost four, five, or six members in a single day. And because it was impractical to put so many people in prisons—many times the intelligence officers would round up thousands of them—they usually ended up in mass graves.

  The persecution of the Marsh Arabs, who live in the wetlands to the east of Nasiriyah and south almost to Basra, was very much the same. Saddam was afraid of these people, who live and make their living in a very different way from most Iraqis. Because of their unique customs and fiercely independent nature, the Marsh Arabs were among the first to challenge Saddam’s edicts, and he feared that one day they would rise up against him. Because they lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where tanks and heavy vehicles couldn’t go, he decided that the best way to control them would be to drain the marshes, fill them in, and then drive the people off the land.

  This was an ambitious project because the marshlands cover an enormous area—more than 7,500 square miles, an area equal to the state of Massachusetts. But over a period of years, the military engineers sent in by Saddam were able to divert the rivers and reduce the size of the marshlands to less than 500 square miles. Less than a third of the land was spared, and the way of life of these people, who depended on the rice crops, fishing, water birds of all kinds, and an active river commerce, was shattered. Water was the basis of their entire civilization. But this wasn’t even the worst of it, because once the tanks and armored vehicles began penetrating that territory, they rounded up men, women, and children, and marched them off to places where they, too, were killed and buried in mass graves.

  Saddam took revenge on anyone he believed had worked against him in the past or who might be a threat to him in the future, and he did it in the most brutal ways imaginable. This is where the mass graves and torture chambers came from, and those things are a dark stain on the history of our country. I haven’t seen any official reports documenting the total number of Iraqis who were killed by Saddam in this way, but I’m inclined to believe that the unofficial estimates of 200,000 to 300,000 deaths wouldn’t be unrealistic, and it could be substantially higher.

  A Sinister Caricature

  For Iraqis to move beyond all the disasters that have happened in Iraq over the past forty years, we will need to learn about human compassion and the importance of working together, regardless of our religious and political differences. We will need to appreciate the importance of the miracles that are happening now in Iraq, and we will need to have faith in the capacity of the human spirit to survive in the midst of suffering, humiliation, and defeat. But we also need to remember what we’ve learned about evil, and that it was our own complacency that allowed this man (who will one day rank in history beside Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot) to rise and seize power in our midst.

  Some people have asked me in recent years, “Georges, do you really support what the Americans and coalition forces did when they came to Iraq and turned our world upside down?” And I say to them, “Yes, of course I do. And I support it for one simple reason: I have known that man since the early days, when he was first coming up as an ambitious young hoodlum and a tool of the Baathis. He was very clever, that’s true. But too late we discovered that all his cleverness was directed toward doing evil.”

  God only knows what evil he would eventually have done if he had remained in power. His intentions were very bad and he would pay any amount of money to gain greater power and control. He dreamed of resurrecting ancient Babylon as his capital, and he claimed that one day he would be the emperor of all the Arab nations. He would have spent any amount of money or committed any atrocity, no matter how barbaric, to make that arrogant boast come true.

  For a man like Saddam to possess nuclear weapons was a threat of such immense proportions that it was inconceivable that he would be allowed to continue to pursue them. The collapse of the former Soviet Union may have ended, or at least postponed, the threat of a nuclear holocaust from that part of the world, but that didn’t mean that the world was a safer place. Saddam was willing to pay any price to gain control of a nuclear arsenal, and he wouldn’t hesitate to use those nuclear warheads if he had them.

  Saddam knew he could get those weapons if he put enough money into the hands of certain people, and he was actively courting displaced nuclear scientists from the former Soviet regime. He paid large sums to bring back many Iraqi nuclear scientists who were working in the West, and he used every trick imaginable to expand his superweapons program. By the late 1980s, he had a functioning light-water reactor as well as dozens of nuclear weapons facilities in operation, from one end of Iraq to the other.

  I’m convinced that Saddam came close to having nuclear warheads by the beginning of the second Gulf War, but it was difficult to maintain secrecy about these operations. To the best of my knowledge, he never managed to acquire all the pieces to make that happen. However, I know that he made payments to a group of Asian scientists to manufacture nuclear components abroad, and had even made the first multimillion-dollar down payment. What he was thinking about doing was so dangerous that the only solution was for coalition forces to remove Saddam from power. And that’s why I applaud the liberati
on of my country, despite the losses we suffered in two successive wars. Someone had to stop Saddam from fulfilling his plans, and the Americans were the only ones with the military and moral resolve to do it.

  You can’t begin to imagine what Saddam would have done if he had been given just a little more time. His personality was so full of ambiguity, and the way he saw the world had nothing to do with the world as it really is. Saddam fooled some people for a time—he made himself out to be a peacemaker, a good Muslim, a teacher, a lawyer, and a statesman. But he was none of those. He was never anything but a common thug.

  I knew this man. I saw him as closely as anyone, and what I saw was a sinister caricature of a human being. He was nothing but a gangster in a uniform he was unworthy to wear—the living embodiment of evil and a danger to the world. There are millions of Iraqis today who, like me, can only look forward with anticipation to a time when the world will finally be rid of him once and for all.

  CHAPTER 8

  BEATING THE SYSTEM

  For more than a decade, from the end of the Gulf War in 1991 to the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, I suspect most Americans were wishing that the Iraq problem would just go away. With a presidential election less than a year away, Americans were ready to return to business as usual. And the United States Department of State, committed to a doctrine of stability at any cost, even if it meant winking at a dictator like Saddam Hussein, was doing its best to look the other way.

  They wanted containment in Iraq, and with the cooperation of the United Nations they were hoping that military and economic sanctions would provoke the people to rebel against the dictator. But this wasn’t just unrealistic diplomacy; it was bad policy, for many reasons. Nothing but force and the threat of death or imprisonment would ever cause a tyrant like Saddam to give up his base of power. As I’ve said repeatedly in these pages, he continued to confiscate the wealth of the nation and to use it for his own pleasure and amusement. The subtleties of international diplomacy would have absolutely no effect on such a man.

  Sanctions never touched Saddam, but they did hurt the people of Iraq very much. And when people in the provinces did rise up to rebel against Saddam, the diplomats were nowhere to be seen. The rebels were left to fend for themselves, and they were decimated by the Republican Guard. Any who survived the conflict were destined to become victims of Saddam’s revenge. They were slaughtered like sheep. The situation couldn’t have been worse.

  The first President Bush was disinterested and ineffective by the end of the Gulf War. Later President Clinton favored a doctrine of appeasement. He refused to strike back at terrorists when American forces were hit, which was seen by most people in the Middle East as a sign of cowardice. Many in Iraq were laughing at America during those years, and terrorists like Osama bin Laden were emboldened, broadcasting the message that Americans are cowards. America was brave once, he said, but no longer. And it was hard to argue with those messages when the American leadership had seemingly gone soft on so many things.

  When President Clinton did authorize an air strike in Sudan, in August of 2000, he was apparently responding to faulty intelligence, and as a result the U.S. military sent cruise missiles to destroy an aspirin factory. I wasn’t following the invasion and bombings in Kosovo or Bosnia very closely at the time, but I was fairly certain that those operations would have little impact on the situation in Iraq. And the efforts of the international community to encourage democracy in our part of the world were meaningless. Before long even the State Department had to acknowledge that their policy of containment wasn’t working.

  Organized Corruption

  In 2001 it became apparent that the world had changed since the end of the Gulf War. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, were a wake-up call for the West. In his State of the Union address, given on January 29, 2002, President George W. Bush identified Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” The media in Europe and the Middle East made fun of this idea. But for many of us, it was a clear signal that America was finally getting the message.

  I thought at the time that it was likely that the Americans were already planning to come back to Iraq and finish the job by removing Saddam once and for all. I’m absolutely certain that Saddam believed they were coming after him. He was very perceptive in that way, and he was also paranoid.

  Members of the Iraqi opposition abroad, many of whom had been talking to President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, were urging the U.S. military to take action. The expatriate community had detailed information about what was happening in Baghdad, and I believe the mere existence of Saddam, with more and more news reaching the West about the evil he had done, was becoming an embarrassment for the Bush White House.

  They had no option but to listen to what the dissidents and expatriates were telling them.3 They had once hoped, naively, that Saddam would just fade away or starve to death. But Saddam had only grown stronger and richer over the previous decade. He had more palaces, more soldiers, more oil, more power, and more weapons, and he unleashed more death and destruction against his enemies in Iraq than ever before. News of what he was doing to his own people was beginning to make headlines in the West, so surely some sort of response had to come.

  The survival of Saddam and his regime had to be a concern for President Bush and Prime Minister Blair in England. After ten years of sanctions, they looked around and he was still there, and very much in charge. He had palaces more beautiful than the White House. He had more money than ever— literally billions of dollars that he had stolen from the people—and millions of barrels of oil were still going out of the country illegally. Furthermore, it now appeared that members of the United Nations were involved as well, taking kickbacks and raking in billions of dollars for themselves.

  Washington had underestimated the capacity of a man like Saddam for doing evil. And they had overlooked his capacity for drawing others into his conspiracy, including individuals at the highest levels of the United Nations. I could tell you many stories about the people we call the United Nations. Whenever people hear the name United Nations, they may think of some big, powerful organization. But if they would go to the borders of Iraq and see for themselves who these people really are, they might not be so easily impressed.

  More often than not the people we call the United Nations are ordinary men from Third World countries who have no great visions of world peace. Chances are you’ll see three or four guys from Third World countries, and they’re supposed to be monitoring trucks coming and going across the border. They’re supposed to make sure there’s no smuggling of contraband; but they’re all taking bribes—ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars at a time—to look the other way. And hundreds of trucks are going back and forth, in both directions, and no one is saying a word.

  A Master of Deceit

  Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. I believe that one day the Oil-for-Food program will prove to be the biggest bribery scheme in modern times, and Saddam Hussein will be seen as the man who used it to perfection. He was truly a master of deceit. And thanks to the corruption of U.N. officials, Saddam was able to get whatever he wanted.

  After a dozen years of sanctions, the Iraqi people became experts at how to work the system. Millions of tons of oil went through the Persian Gulf under the noses of the U.N. and multinational forces. There were days when dozens of barges loaded with contraband would sail out of our ports. And each one was carrying anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 tons of oil. Because of the restriction on oil, Saddam had to sell it very cheaply. But because of the volume of contraband going out, the profits were enormous.

  With the high price of oil today—recently in America it reached nearly seventy dollars a barrel—it would shock you to know that smugglers were selling Iraqi oil at one time for as little as four dollars a barrel. When dealers could buy it for four dollars and sell it for thirty dollars, believe me, people were clamoring to get it, and this included people from
many countries that were supposedly America’s allies.

  Saddam used to tell the smugglers, “Bring your ships to our ports, fill them up with oil, and take them away. After that, I don’t know you anymore.” After that the ships would sail out into the Gulf, and often they were stopped by American patrol boats that were there to prevent smuggling. Specialists would test the oil to see if it was from Iraq—they knew the properties of all the different types of oil in the region—and they would say, “Nope, this is Iranian oil. Okay, you can go.” And the smugglers would pass through with no further problems.

  What the specialists and other officials didn’t realize was that Iraqi smugglers had made a deal with Iranian smugglers. He would send Iraqi oil to Iran, and they would send back Iranian oil in return. So when our ships left Basra for Europe or the United Arab Emirates, or wherever they found buyers, there was no one to stop them because the oil wasn’t Iraqi.

  And that wasn’t all. Saddam’s agents were selling oil to Iran at very low prices, and Iran was shipping the same oil in the same ships from their ports, but under the Iranian flag. No one was checking them because those ships weren’t under the embargo. So the Iranians would sell Iraqi oil on the open market for whatever they could get—and I can assure you it was much higher than the four dollars a barrel they had paid Saddam.

  I can say without reservation that the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations were a 100 percent failure. They had a disastrous effect on the people of Iraq and absolutely no effect on Saddam. Even under the eyes of the U.N. inspectors, Saddam was constantly beating the system. He had a million ways to cheat. And even though the inspectors found and destroyed many prohibited weapons, they never found all of them. Believe me, Saddam was laughing the whole time, and his regime was only getting stronger.

  Despite U.N. regulations, Saddam also found hundreds of ways to sell oil illegally. There are many people who will cheat or cut corners to make money when the temptation is so great, and this happened constantly during those years. As just one example, some of our neighbors were given permission to receive from seventy thousand to one hundred thousand barrels of oil per day from Iraq. This was permitted under Item 50 of the U.N. agreement because those countries had been helpful to the coalition during the war, and they depended heavily on Iraqi oil.