 Experts say Saddam most dangerous when cornered By Sonni Efron and Sebastian Rotella Los Angeles Times (10-27-02)
The Iraqi president spends ever more time in the many bunkers beneath his ornate palaces. He rarely sleeps more than one night in the same place. He receives visitors only after they have been thoroughly searched and had their hands disinfected in as many as three liquids. He uses food tasters, and special teams test everything he might touch: bed linens, toiletries, clothes, ink. Each day, meals are prepared for him at palaces around Iraq, so no one can know where he will dine. He gives televised speeches from more than a dozen identical conference rooms, so no one can know where he is. He even employs surgically enhanced presidential doubles, so no one can know who he is. "He's afraid all the time," said Ahmed Samarrai, a former lieutenant colonel in Saddam's security force. "He likes to escape. He likes to hide. He likes to be underground, in bunkers. He only sleeps two or three hours, and he is always armed." This portrait, painted by Iraqi defectors, weapons inspectors, scholars, current and former U.S. intelligence officials and other experts in the United States, Europe and Israel, makes Saddam sound like a madman. Yet the experts place him in the ranks of sane but ruthless dictators who have ruled by terror, political cunning and personality cults. As the United States prepares to go to war with Saddam for the second time in 12 years, military and political analysts are mining these glimpses of his personality for clues to his likely diplomatic and military moves: Can Saddam be made to give up his weapons of mass destruction in exchange for his survival? Would he unleash a chemical or biological attack on invading American troops? If he knew he was about to be deposed, would he attempt to annihilate Israel or unleash a terrorist attack on the United States? Experts disagree on the answers. Despite years of study -- and during his 23 years of rule Saddam, 65, has been studied as much as any leader since Josef Stalin -- he remains an enigma to the West. Some defectors and political observers say Saddam is the consummate survivor who would do anything to stay in power, including give up weapons of mass destruction. These people insist that he is not suicidal and will back off, at least temporarily, if he can do so without humiliation or displays of weakness that would leave him prey to internal enemies. Others take the view that Saddam has a messianic complex fueled by his survival of coups, assassination attempts and the wrath of American presidents, and might choose to go out in a blaze. He is convinced his divine mission is to restore the oppressed Arab world to its former glory, some observers say, and might sacrifice his life to secure his legacy. Most analysts regard Saddam as essentially a thug who sees the world in the stark terms of the professional gunman he once was. They predict that he will resort to massive violence to defeat the Bush administration's efforts to bring about "regime change" in Iraq. Saddam is most dangerous when he is cornered, they say. If regime change means a bullet to the brain, Saddam is not likely to go quietly. "He would like to try to survive, but I believe he knows that if we come back this time, we're not going to let him off the way we did" in previous confrontations, said former CIA director R. James Woolsey, a hard-liner on Iraq. "I think he would like to be remembered as someone who has wreaked maximum destruction on what (Osama) bin Laden calls the Crusaders and the Jews. He will definitely try to wreak maximum destruction." Yet Saddam is dangerously isolated and apt to make catastrophic mistakes in foreign affairs. His invasion of Kuwait in 1990 resulted from a fundamental misreading of signals from the United States and the West. In the subsequent battle with an overwhelming U.S.-led international force, he let domestic political considerations trump the seemingly rational course of withdrawing from Kuwait because he judged he could not afford the loss of face at home. Sheltered and violent Saddam studied law at the University of Cairo in Egypt and in Baghdad, but he rarely has traveled outside the Middle East. Although he watches al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite news station, and even CNN, analysts say he often gets limited and distorted information. "No one in his inner circle really understands the workings of the outside world," said Remy Leveau, a former French envoy in the Middle East and professor at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris. "The few who might understand the world are afraid to tell him the truth. He is the classic primitive dictator." Like Stalin, Saddam has used violence to maintain his grip on power. He has executed underlings who dared to disagree with him, sometimes shooting the offender on the spot, according to U.S. officials and defectors. He also reportedly has given pistols to aides and ordered them to shoot, thus making them his accomplices. By most accounts, Saddam keeps his own counsel and has not consulted aides about some of his most vital foreign policy moves. The solitary decisions were his worst, made "when the leader felt omnipotent and invincible, while at the same time his pride was hurt, and he believed that he and Iraq were being wronged," wrote Amatzia Baram of the University of Haifa, one of Israel's leading Saddam-watchers. The Iraqi leader's isolation has increased since the Persian Gulf War in 1991, as he has suffered betrayals from his most trusted circles: his family, his clan and his army. In 1995, after a shootout with Saddam's older son, Uday, two of Saddam's sons-in-law defected to Jordan and spilled secrets about Iraqi weapons programs. They were persuaded to return -- and immediately were killed. Altogether, Saddam has had 53 of his relatives killed, according to Mustafa Alani, an Iraq expert at the Royal United Services Institutes think tank in London. Aware of weakness Saddam's army reportedly has been demoralized by the country's failure to win the Iran-Iraq war and by the crushing defeat in the Gulf War. There have been at least four coup attempts since 1990, according to Baram. Some of those executed belonged to the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard, the units that are supposed to be the best trained and most loyal. This time, the Iraqi regime has threatened its own military commanders with chemical attacks if they attempt an uprising, according to Iyad Allawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord, whose organization has frequent secret contact with Iraqi officials. Saddam moves every night with a security force of about 3,600 guards, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft personnel and a field hospital, according to Iraqi defectors. He even has three identical trucks equipped with bedrooms, former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter said. Saddam's recent public statements indicate an awareness that his power could be weakening, according to Abbas al Jabani, who was once an architect of the regime's propaganda programs. He said Saddam has taken to the airwaves proclaiming the Iraqi people to be partners in his struggle to keep the Zionists and the Americans from destroying Iraq. The Iraqi leader is convinced of the moral weakness of the West, its inability to accept mass casualties and its fundamental inferiority to Arab civilization, experts said. Saddam seized Western hostages as "human shields" in 1990 because he thought the Americans would be too squeamish to blow up targets to which their countrymen were strapped. Now some people think he is betting on the West's fear of mass casualties from biological or chemical strikes. High-ranking defectors insist Saddam believes his deadly arsenal kept him from losing the Iran-Iraq war and enabled him to survive the Persian Gulf War. "He's not grateful to us for backing off in '91," said Woolsey, the former CIA director. "He believes it was his resolution and his possession of chemical and bacteriological weapons that did it. And he sees these as his only real trump cards." That outlook makes Saddam inherently hostile to disarmament, the stated aim of the international community in this confrontation. "He cannot comply fully with the kind of demilitarization that the U.S. is looking for because his weapons of mass destruction are the be-all and end-all of this regime -- what he is all about," said Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi defector affiliated with Harvard University and author of "Republic of Fear." Moreover, if it is true that part of Iraq's chemical and biological arsenal is stashed inside Saddam's palaces, his obsession with his personal safety is likely to interfere with inspections. Senior Iraqi officials have told foreign diplomats that Saddam will never allow unfettered access to his palaces because he believes the weapons inspectors will send his coordinates to U.S. missile launchers or even plant special devices to kill him slowly with radioactive rays. But not everyone who knows Iraq well thinks Saddam will fight to the death; they predict he would relinquish his weapons if he were faced with annihilation. Saddam's manipulation of the U.N. inspection programs shows a talent for diplomatic bait-and-switch. He is patient, shameless about reversing course if expedient, and uninhibited about lying, experts said. During the Gulf War, Saddam was shocked that nearby Arab countries sided with the West and provided the bases from which to attack him. He has since moved to improve his regional position. Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia remain hostile, but tensions with Iran and Turkey are reduced. Saddam cleverly has co-opted Syria since the death of his old Baathist rival, Hafez Assad. Assad's son and successor, Bashar, now benefits from a deal by which Syria buys 150,000 barrels of Iraqi oil a day at half the world market price. The deal skirts U.N. sanctions by allowing the Syrians to export more of their own oil, while Iraq gets revenues it can spend without the fetters of the U.N. "oil for food" program. U.S. and Israeli officials worry the money has gone straight to Saddam's weapons program. In another gambit aimed at Muslims at home and abroad, Saddam has burnished his Islamic credentials. Although his Baathist ideology is socialist and secular, Saddam has built gargantuan mosques and has put up billboards around Baghdad showing himself kneeling on a prayer mat. The West has interpreted Saddam's moves to mean that if the United Nations does not lift its economic embargo against Iraq, Saddam might push the secular nation into the Muslim extremist camp. Threat of retaliation If words give way to war and Saddam sees that he cannot win, many people predict that he will repeat a long-standing pattern of lashing out at other targets. Eleven years ago, as his armies were forced to retreat from Kuwait and bombs rained down on Baghdad, Saddam ordered the Kuwaiti oil fields set ablaze and sent oil pouring into the Persian Gulf. Some analysts worry that this time, a cornered or defeated Saddam could torch his own oil fields, the world's second largest, to keep them out of the hands of American occupiers. Saddam ordered the failed assassination attempt on former President George H.W. Bush in 1993 and arranged the killings of his own sons-in-law in 1996 to punish them for their defection. If thwarted this time, the most likely targets of his wrath are believed to be some of those who have suffered before: his own people and Israel. After the Persian Gulf War, U.S. forces found documents showing that missiles tipped with chemical or biological warheads had been deployed to Iraqi field commanders with authorization to fire if Baghdad was out of contact or destroyed. Debate continues about why the missiles were never fired. It is generally thought that Saddam was deterred by a U.S. warning to Iraq's foreign minister that any use of nonconventional weapons would seal Iraq's destruction. But a former weapons inspector who asked not to be named said it would be a mistake to assume that deterrence worked in 1991. The United States does not know whether an order was issued and never got through, whether the missiles failed to fire, or whether field commanders, who had been told they would be treated as war criminals if they used chemical weapons, might have balked. When he fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel during the 1991 war, Saddam's goal was to draw the Israelis into the conflict and break Arab backing of the international coalition against Iraq. Israel refrained from responding at the urging of the United States. This time, however, Saddam knows that the Bush administration's policy is regime change. This greatly increases the risk that he would unleash biological and chemical weapons on his own people, U.S. troops, Israel or even a Western city, some experts say. They fear the doomsday scenario: an all-out attack on the Iraqi leader provoking exactly the nightmare it was intended to avert. "Why expect Saddam to go gently when he has nothing left to lose?" says Richard Betts, director of the Institute of War and Peace at Columbia University. "We have given Saddam all the warning time he needs to concoct retaliation, since the Bush administration has made a coming war the most telegraphed punch in military history." The CIA recently disclosed its assessment that Saddam is unlikely to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States unless he is attacked first. In that case, "Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a (weapons of mass destruction) attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him," the agency concluded. Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark said military planners could not neutralize the threat of a nonconventional attack on American troops, but there are ways to minimize the effects. "There are no guarantees on biological weapons. One of my worst fears is that Saddam will use biological weapons against his own (Shiite) population in the south in order to create a humanitarian disaster that would impede our efforts," Clark said. Former CIA director Woolsey's worst fear: a biological attack on the United States or Israel that could be difficult to thwart or even detect quickly. In addition to anthrax and VX, Iraq has weaponized aflatoxin, whose main effect is to cause liver cancer in children. This article contains material from other wire services. |
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