The man who is already dead

By PATRICK COCKBURN*

The next few weeks may witness the end of Saddam Hussein's rule, and perhaps his life. Every morning, in his office in Baghdad, he reads summaries of the foreign press telling of US and British forces mustering against him. But he has always been an optimist.

President Saddam once told King Hussein of Jordan he considered every extra day of life a gift from God since he narrowly escaped with his life in 1959, after trying to assassinate the Iraqi President, Abd al-Karim Qassim. "I consider myself to have died that day," he said.

For months he has tried to delay the American onslaught. Soon after the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, long before President George W. Bush made his "axis of evil" speech, Iraqi officials were speaking of the likelihood of a US assault.

The Iraqi president has always had a strong sense of the uncertainty of political life. "What is politics?" he asked a high-level meeting soon after he had assumed absolute control of the country in 1979. He supplied his own answer: "Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said nor what you intended."

What does President Saddam intend to do now? He regards allegations that Iraq has a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction capable of threatening other countries simply as an excuse for overthrowing him. He may have few to destroy.

General Hussein Kamel, his son-in-law in charge of military industries who defected to Jordan in 1995, confirmed to American, British and United Nations interrogators that all such Iraqi weapons were destroyed after the Gulf War, though designs and technical information were stored secretly for possible use later.

In Saddam's rare television appearances he looks gaunt and strained, but he still gives the impression of a man in control of the situation, often underlining a point by waving a large cigar, a habit to which he was introduced by the late Algerian President Houari Boumedienne. At one time, he drank Portuguese Mateus Rose wine, a surprising choice in Iraq where the rich, if they drink at all, normally prefer whisky.

Despite his smoking and drinking, President Saddam has always made a fetish of physical health. In the past few days, he has ordered overweight army officers and officials to forfeit half their salaries if they fail an annual fitness test. He also ordered officials of the ruling Ba'ath Party caught gambling to be jailed for three years.

Saddam has long had a strong sense of his own mission. He sees himself as the latest in a long line of Iraqi and Arab rulers from Nebuchadnezzar to Saladin. At the height of the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s, when resources were short, he even started to rebuild the ruins of ancient Babylon using unpleasant, mustard-coloured bricks, each with his name imprinted on it.

One of the most extraordinary architectural excesses of the Iraqi leader is the monument in Baghdad celebrating "victory" over Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. It is the Iraqi Arc de Triomphe. Two metal forearms, modelled on those of the Iraqi leader, each 12m long, reach out of the ground, clutching steel sabres, whose tips cross, forming an arch under which the Iraqi Army often marches.

These symbols of President Saddam's personality cult have led to doubts about his ability to reach rational decisions. He has committed two catastrophic political errors by overplaying his hand. The first was in 1980 when he attacked Iran, believing it would be an easy victim. By the time it ended eight years later, 670,000 Iraqis were dead, wounded or prisoners.

It was a costly war, but Iraq, thanks to help from the US, Soviet Union and most of the world, came out marginally ahead. Two years later he invaded Kuwait, leading to a confrontation with the US and its allies which he could not possibly win.

In starting both wars, Saddam showed he was less astute in international politics than in judging developments at home. He made concessions too late, on the eve of war, when they were ineffectual.

But the dictator has also been at his most effective when staring defeat in the face, in 1982 against Iran, and in 1991 against the US. Queried in an interview about a purge of the Iraqi military during the Iran-Iraq war, he gave the less than reassuring reply: "Only two divisional commanders and the head of a mechanised unit have been executed. That's quite normal in war."

In recent months he has taken precautions to guard against another rebellion among Iraq's Shia Muslims, such as that which almost unseated him in 1991. Iraqi security forces have maps of every city district and village where loyalties are dubious. Houses thought to harbour families hostile to the regime are marked in red, those whose allegiance is doubtful in black.

It is unlikely that he would consider voluntary exile even with guarantees for his security. Some reports are wishful thinking, others are propaganda. In 1991, for instance, the British Foreign Office disseminated a report that his wife, Sajida, was seeking refuge in Mauritania, but was swiftly forced to admit the story was untrue.

Voluntary exile would also go against President Saddam's sense of tribal honour, a horror of anything which could be portrayed as cowardice and retreat in the face of the enemy.

He comes from a tribal society and has always prided himself on his generosity to those who helped him and pitiless retribution against those who crossed him. He has said he prided himself on his ability to sniff out treachery. Even his closest associates are careful about contradicting him.

"In that circle, the safest course is always to be 10 per cent more hawkish than the chief," a veteran Russian diplomat long stationed in Baghdad said. "You stay out of trouble that way."

Power in Iraq is almost entirely focused on Saddam. His chief lieutenants are either related to him or old associates. But he has always tried to balance loyalty with expertise, so it is common to find a Ba'athist thug as minister and a sophisticated deputy who does all the real work. Even so, some critical decisions - such as the invasion of Kuwait - seem to have been taken by Saddam alone.

In his life it is difficult to distinguish myth from reality. He has always wanted to portray himself as rising from obscurity solely by his own efforts after a deprived childhood. By the early 80s, Iraqi poets were winning prizes by drawing parallels between Saddam Hussein and the Prophet Mohammed, both orphaned at an early age.

His enemies have their own mythology. They portray him as coming from a dysfunctional family, though this is contradicted by his exceptional reliance on family members in key positions.

In reality, Saddam is from a Sunni Arab family (the Sunni have traditionally ruled Iraq) with just the right connections to propel him to the front of Iraqi politics. He was born in Ouija, a typical Iraqi village of mud-brick houses outside the city of Tikrit, in the plains of northern Iraq on 28 April, 1937. His father, Hussein al-Majid, was a peasant farmer who died just before his son was born or a few months afterwards. He was brought up by his mother Subha al-Tulfah, a strong woman, and two uncles.

The strength of Saddam's family and clan connections matter because he was born into a tribal society. He has maintained many of its characteristics. It is a world of intense loyalties within the clan, but cruel and hostile to outsiders. Tikrit, a decayed textile town once known for building rafts to carry melons down the Tigris to Baghdad, was becoming politically important during his youth. Its young men, all Sunni Arabs, increasingly took the road to the capital to become officials or join the army.

His has always been a minority regime, dominated by Sunni Arabs who were only a fifth of the population. Most Iraqis are Shia and Kurds who have always been marginalised. Saddam relied on his security services, his family, his tribal connections, the Ba'ath Party and the army. He successfully ensured nobody else could rise to power as he had and stage a military coup.

"It was really impossible to have an internal resistance after they started to arrest, torture and execute the families of anybody involved," said one army officer who fled into exile.

No army unit can move in Iraq without an order countersigned by at least five authorities. Regular armoured divisions around Baghdad have only half a dozen rounds of ammunition for each tank to make sure they cannot stage a coup.

And the Iraqi dictator also has a coldly realistic view of the motives of foreign powers. During the Iran-Iraq war, the CIA station in Baghdad was giving Iraqi military intelligence satellite photographs of Iranian positions. Saddam told General Wafiq al-Samarrai, his battle commander, not to tell the Americans anything they might pass on to Iran. As the Irangate scandal was to reveal, the US was doing just that.

Saddam survived the 90s because the US wanted him overthrown, but not his regime. It did not want revolutionary change in the Middle East, particularly one which might benefit Iran. UN sanctions kept Iraq weak, though they hit mainly ordinary Iraqis, not the establishment.

Now there is a growing belief in Iraq that a war is coming and Saddam will be overthrown. But there is also caution because Iraqis have vivid memories of how the US suddenly called a ceasefire in 1991. Many fear it might happen again.

"Nobody will do anything until the first American tank is on Iraqi soil," one Shia dissident said.

Saddam will also try to persuade Iraqis that they are about to become the victims of a neo- colonial adventure, the objective of which will be to subjugate them and steal their oil.

This may not work because Iraqis are tired, poor and want to see the president gone almost regardless of the motives of those who eject him.

In the past few weeks, the four million Kurds of northern Iraq, who have suffered more than anybody from Saddam Hussein, discovered that part of the US strategy was to allow the Turkish army to invade their homeland.

Suddenly, the only topic on the streets of Kurdistan is no longer Saddam or chemical weapons, but the Turkish threat. The Kurds threaten to fight the Turks even if they are part of a US-led army.

Saddam has been hoping for divisions like this. Probably they are too little, too late. It is unlikely that Washington will want the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator, planned as the great demonstration of US strength in the world, to become a demonstration of weakness, as it would do if he survived.

Yet President Saddam has succeeded in one respect. His rule has been a disaster for Iraqis, but he has the international fame for which he always yearned. He must also know not all Iraq's problems were caused by him. Even if Baghdad is captured and he is killed, the US will have to deal with one of the most complex and dangerous societies on earth.

- INDEPENDENT

* Patrick Cockburn is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and co-author, with Andrew Cockburn, of Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession.