Saddam : His Rise and Fall (2 page)

The Outlaw

Shortly before a carefully orchestrated series of terrorist attacks devastated the eastern seaboard of the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001, several Western intelligence agencies received an intriguing report to the effect that Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, had placed his troops on “Alert G,” the highest state of military readiness Iraqi troops had seen since the 1991 Gulf War. Intelligence agents based in Iraq claimed that Saddam himself had retreated to one of his heavily fortified bunkers in the family fiefdom of Tikrit, in northern Iraq. Meanwhile his two wives, Sajida and Samira, women who in normal circumstances shunned each other's company, had been moved to another of Saddam's secret bunkers. The clear implication was that Saddam had retreated to Tikrit in early September 2001 because he had prior warning of the September 11 attacks, in which groups of suicidal al-Qaeda terrorists flew fully laden civilian airliners into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing thousands of innocent civilian office workers and military personnel. A fourth team of Islamic terrorists had planned to fly their hijacked aircraft into the White House, but were prevented from doing so by the heroism of some of the passengers who tackled the hijackers, thereby causing the aircraft to crash in a field south of Pittsburgh, killing everyone on board.

In the chaotic days that followed the world's worst terrorist atrocity, Saddam Hussein's Iraq soon emerged as one of the most likely targets for retaliation. The intense secrecy and security that surrounded Saddam's every move meant that it was impossible to say for sure if the intelligence reports
about the Iraqi leader's actions prior to the September 11 attacks were accurate. But even though American and British intelligence were unable to find clear proof that Saddam was directly involved in the September 11 attacks, Washington's deep-seated institutional antipathy toward the Iraqi dictator was such that President George W. Bush, in the days immediately following the atrocity, found himself having to urge restraint on his more hawkish colleagues. Bush wanted to keep the immediate focus of his response on al-Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist group led and funded by the fanatical Saudi dissident, Osama bin Laden. All the available evidence linked the hijackers directly to bin Laden. In the speech Bush made to Congress on September 20, the American president made no mention of Iraq. He spoke in general terms of fighting a “war on terror,” and his main demand was that the Taliban regime hand over bin Laden and his al-Qaeda accomplices, or face the consequences.

Although the main emphasis of Bush's speech was concentrated on al-Qaeda, scraps of intelligence, such as that concerning Saddam's whereabouts on the morning of September 11, began to percolate in the Western intelligence community. One of the more intriguing reports was that issued by the Interior Ministry of the Czech Republic, which said that Mohammed Atta, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 bombings, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer five months before the attacks were carried out. Atta, it was alleged, had tried to enter Prague in the summer of 2000 but had been turned away because he did not have a valid visa. The Czechs were now reporting that, having acquired the proper travel documentation, Atta had returned to Prague in April 2001, where he was said to have met with Ahmed al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence official whom the Czech authorities were about to expel. Ani, who worked as a second consul at the Iraqi embassy in Prague, was suspected of “engaging in activities beyond his diplomatic duties,” the euphemism used to denote espionage. Although there was nothing to link the Iraqi agent with the September 11 bombings, the very fact that the formidable intelligence apparatus controlled by the world's most notorious dictator might have established contact with the world's most ruthless terrorist organization meant that Saddam might quickly find himself in the crosshairs of the Pentagon's military planners. This report, like so many others, could not be taken as conclusive proof that Saddam was working with al-Qaeda. The Prague report was discounted by both the CIA and FBI, which, having conducted an exhaustive inquiry into
Atta's movements before 9/11, concluded that he never left the United States during the period he was supposed to have met Ani in Prague.

That Saddam's name should be implicated in the first place in the September 11 atrocities came as no surprise to those counterterrorist specialists who had been investigating the Iraqi dictator's links with international terrorism since the early 1970s. In the past Saddam had been directly involved with such infamous terrorists as Abu Nidal, the leader of the radical Palestinian group that was held responsible for, among other atrocities, the attacks on Rome and Vienna airports in 1985, and also with the legendary Venezuelan Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or Carlos the Jackal as he was more commonly known.

The whiskey-drinking Saddam was not by disposition a devout Muslim or well disposed toward the forces of radical Islam; between 1980 and 1988 he had fought a murderous war against the hard-line Islamic regime that had been established in Teheran by Ayatollah Khomeini. Throughout the 1990s, however, when radical Islamic groups, such as Hizbollah in Lebanon and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, had been successful in attacking Western targets in the Middle East and elsewhere, there were reports that suggested Saddam's security forces were helping to train, fund, and equip Islamic terrorists. Two high-ranking defectors, who were debriefed by Western intelligence in late 2001, claimed that Saddam had established a terrorist training camp at the Salman Pak facility south of Baghdad, which had hosted groups of Islamic fighters from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt. The camp was said to contain a disused Boeing 707 that had been used to teach the recruits how to hijack a plane using only their bare hands or knives, techniques similar to those used by the September 11 hijackers.
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Although the defectors could not say for certain that the recruits trained at Salman Pak belonged to al-Qaeda, the fact that the majority came from Saudi Arabia and were from bin Laden's uncompromising Wahhabi sect was sufficient to arouse suspicions in Washington and London.

A more direct connection that was made between Saddam and bin Laden related to terrorist activities in the mid-1990s based in Sudan, a country that then ran several Islamic terror training camps. Saddam channeled funds through Sudan to support Islamic insurgencies in Algeria and other parts of the Middle East. In the late 1990s details emerged of a plan devised by Saddam in which a specially selected detachment of his security network, Unit 999, would collaborate with al-Qaeda to undertake a number
of attacks against designated targets in Europe and the Middle East. By secretly funding bin Laden's operatives, Saddam hoped to conceal Iraqi involvement in Islamic terrorism. As a consequence of this collaboration, several prominent Iraqi dissidents were murdered in Jordan, and plans were laid to destroy the Radio Free Europe headquarters based in Prague.
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In April 1998, bin Laden even sent a delegation of his al-Qaeda fighters to attend the birthday celebrations of Saddam's eldest son, Uday, who responded to this gracious gesture by agreeing to train a number of al-Qaeda recruits in Iraq.

Information linking Saddam personally to bin Laden and al-Qaeda, however, remained sketchy. In the three decades that he had effectively run Iraq, Saddam had constructed one of the most powerful and all-pervasive security structures in modern history, making the task of extracting genuine information about Saddam's own activities a significant challenge for Western intelligence agencies. Consequently, many of the claims made about Saddam's activities turned out not to be true. In October 2001, for example, there were allegations that Saddam was behind the anthrax outbreaks that had occurred in Florida and New York soon after the September 11 atrocities. These and other reports concerning Saddam's activities caused President Bush to come under intense pressure from a number of high-ranking hawks in the administration to take action against Saddam. Prominent among them were Vice President Dick Cheney, who a generation before had been defense secretary to President Bush's father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, when he led the international military coalition that defeated Saddam's forces following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Others in favor of undertaking military action against Saddam were Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a veteran of the former Reagan and Bush administrations, and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary. Although the main priority of these veterans of previous Republican administrations was to ensure that the United States and its allies were fully protected against Islamic terrorist groups, they had not forgotten that Saddam had attempted to assassinate George Bush senior during a visit he'd made to Kuwait in 1993. The only senior member of the administration involved in foreign policy who urged caution was Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been President George H. W. Bush's chief of staff during the war to liberate Kuwait in 1991.

President George W. Bush's ambivalence about targeting Saddam in
response to the September 11 attacks began to change only toward the end of October when American intelligence received warnings that Islamic militants were planning an even more spectacular attack on the United States than the September atrocities, one that, in the words of Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, would “make September 11 look like child's play by using some terrible weapon.”
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The intelligence suggested that bin Laden's associates were planning to use a “dirty bomb,” which uses conventional explosives to spew radioactive material. One device could devastate an area the size of Manhattan, making it uninhabitable for years. Emergency security arrangements were implemented to ensure that Bush and Cheney were never together, and private notices were sent to Washington police and congressional intelligence committees warning of the new threat.

The attack did not materialize, but the scare made a deep impression on the American president. It was clear to him that al-Qaeda was aggressively searching for weapons of mass destruction, and Washington concluded that the one country that might be tempted to make such weapons of mass destruction available to terrorist groups was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Since the 1970s, when Saddam first emerged as the “strongman of Baghdad,” Iraq had concentrated enormous resources into acquiring chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Furthermore, whereas in the West such weapons were developed as a deterrent, Saddam had demonstrated he was willing to use them in an offensive capacity against his enemies, most notably when he used chemical weapons against innocent civilians in Kurdistan in 1988. Saddam's willingness to use his nonconventional weapons arsenal, coupled with al-Qaeda's desperation to acquire such weapons, convinced Bush that effective action had to be taken to remove the threat posed by Saddam. Condoleezza Rice later explained the evolution in Bush's thinking thus: “It is not because you have some chain of evidence saying Iraq may have given a weapon to al-Qaeda…. It is because Iraq is one of those places that is hostile to us and, frankly, irresponsible and cruel enough to make this available.”
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The threat to the West posed by the forces of fanatical Islamic terrorism forced the United States to undertake a fundamental reassessment of its national security doctrine. During the cold war the United States and its NATO allies had relied on the threat of massive retaliation to deter attacks from hostile countries. But when it came to dealing with an enemy for whom the normal rules of warfare did not apply, and for whom the notion
of martyrdom was inextricably linked to the success of any mission, it was clear that the war against militant Islam would need to be fought by a very different set of rules. The Bush administration became convinced that in the “war on terror,” as Bush dubbed it, the United States would need to strike first against its enemies. As Bush would later tell a group of graduating cadets at the prestigious West Point Military Academy in the spring of 2002, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Veterans of the cold war such as Cheney and Rumsfeld regarded the conflict with Saddam as leftover business from the superpower era. Saddam's attitude to the West had, in a sense, been conditioned by the support, both military and diplomatic, that he had received from the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union no longer in existence, Saddam's Iraq had become a dangerous anachronism.

For the first nine months of George W. Bush's presidency, Iraq did not feature prominently as an issue. Western policy toward Baghdad had entered a state of limbo since the collapse of the United Nations–sponsored program to dismantle Saddam's weapons of mass destruction arsenal at the end of 1998, which had resulted in President Bill Clinton launching a series of largely ineffectual air strikes against Iraq. The guiding principle of what remained of the allies' policy toward Iraq was “containment,” which was essentially defined by the wide-ranging UN sanctions that had been imposed in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Halfhearted efforts were also made to coerce rival Iraqi opposition groups to settle their differences and present a unified front against Saddam, but these invariably ended in failure. American and British warplanes continued to patrol the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq that had been established in the early 1990s to protect Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite minorities, and there were occasional clashes when Iraqi antiaircraft missile systems locked on to allied aircraft. In the summer of 2001 Iraq was reported to have upgraded its air defense systems, and demonstrated its new capability by firing on a U.S. U-2 spy plane, nearly bringing it down. But despite these occasional acts of provocation, President Bush had seemed in no hurry to formulate his policy toward Iraq. At the time of the September 11 attacks, Bush's review of U.S. policy toward Iraq was languishing in the doldrums because of the American president's apparent lack of interest in the issue.