Saddam : His Rise and Fall (60 page)

Tired and despondent, Saddam was flown to Baghdad Airport, where the other captured members of the regime were being held in a specially constructed detention center. A U.S. Army cameraman filmed Saddam as medical staff checked him for lice, and took a DNA swab from his throat to confirm his identity. As with the bodies of Saddam's dead sons, the pictures of the defeated and humiliated dictator would be shown around the world. Several members of Iraq's Governing Council were driven to the airport to confirm his identity. Adnan Pachachi, the former Iraqi foreign minister who had returned from exile to head the council, asked him why he had killed so many people during his twenty-three-year term as president of Iraq. Saddam replied simply that they were “thieves and Iranian spies.” After spending half an hour with Saddam, Pachachi gave a press conference and confirmed that Saddam was now a captive. “He seemed rather tired and haggard, but he was unrepentant and defiant.”

If the circumstances of Saddam's capture were ignominious for a man who had dominated his country with an iron will for thirty-five years, there was a certain symmetry in the fact that the tyrant who had started his life in a mud hut on one bank of the River Tigris should end his career in a fetid hole less than a mile away on the other side of the river. Just as Colonel Hickey had predicted, Saddam had returned to his tribal homeland, whence he had fled with a few trusted companions within days of the fall of Baghdad the previous April. For the next eight months he had moved furtively among twenty or thirty primitive hiding places, while a close-knit network of family and clan sheltered him and brought him news about the occupation of his coun
try. To avoid detection, the sixty-six-year-old tyrant either traveled on foot, in a small fishing boat, or along the backstreets using a variety of cars, his favorite being a battered old yellow-and-white taxi.

Aware that the Americans had the ability to identify his whereabouts if he used conventional means of communication, Saddam instead used a network of word-of-mouth couriers to carry his instructions to a cluster of Baathist cells that were masterminding the bloody insurgency against the coalition. Among Saddam's possessions that were found in the farm hut—which included stashes of chocolate bars and halal chicken sausages that were the mainstay of his diet—was a suitcase containing details of the local cells responsible for carrying out the attacks. Saddam also had regular meetings with his two sons, Uday and Qusay, at safe houses to plot the strategy for the resistance, before separating so that they did not stand out. At this late stage in his career, and with the odds stacked against him, Saddam was not going to give up control of his country without a fight.

If Saddam's public humiliation, and his failure to die in a hail of American bullets, had severely dented his standing among his few remaining Iraqi supporters, Saddam had lost none of his bloody-mindedness. When Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, accompanied the group of Iraqis sent to confirm Saddam's identity, he found him full of contempt for both his new surroundings and his visitors. “Introduce me to these gentlemen,” Saddam said to his American captors with a sneer. Then, turning to the Iraqi delegation, he asked, “Are you going to be the new rulers of Iraq?!” A few days later Saddam was treating his American captors with similar contempt. When he was kept standing for too long, he said to the guards, “I'd like to sit down now. I'm the president of Iraq. You wouldn't treat your own president this way.” Even at this low ebb in his fortunes, Saddam was able to display the arrogance and cunning that had made him the most feared and powerful leader his country had ever known.

If coalition leaders had believed that Saddam's capture would help bring stability to Iraq, they were to be sorely disappointed. With Saddam safely in custody the most pressing priority that faced Allied commanders was to curtail the Iraqi insurgency and provide the country's civilian population with a sense of security and stability. Military officials were greatly encouraged when they learned that the briefcase that had been found during the raid on Saddam's hideout contained documents referring to the insurgency. These included many details about the Baathist cells running the insurgency, and within days of Saddam's arrest coalition forces had made a number of raids on those cells and detained scores of Saddam's sympathizers. Despite this success, there was no letup in the attacks, which suggested that, while Saddam had undoubtedly been involved in coordinating some of the elements involved in the resistance when he was on the run in Tikrit, by the time he was captured the insurgency had taken on a life of its own.

The reasons were manifold for the widespread discontent in Iraq that continued well after Saddam's overthrow and capture. The primary cause of the hostility directed toward the coalition and its allies in Iraq was the occupation itself. The majority of the Iraqi people were glad to see the back of Saddam and the Baathists, with the notable exception of the Sunni cliques that had thrived during the thirty-five years the country had been run by the Baath Party. A survey conducted in Iraq in March 2004 to mark the anniversary of the war showed that 56 percent of Iraqis believed that they were bet
ter off without Saddam. Even so, while Iraqis were generally relieved to have been liberated from Saddam's tyranny, most of them had no desire to see their country occupied by foreign powers, and consequently became increasingly frustrated at the slow rate of progress made by the coalition toward establishing a new Iraqi government. The atmosphere was not helped by chronic shortages in electricity, fuel, and other essential supplies that existed long after the war had ended. The Iraqi people blamed their discomfort on the Americans, especially for their not having done more to prevent the widespread looting that broke out after the liberation of Baghdad, and for their awarding lucrative contracts to repair the damage to a number of high-profile American companies.

The high level of unemployment, together with the absence of an indigenous security system, exacerbated the sense of lawlessness, particularly in Baghdad where the murder rate rose more than tenfold in the months following the war. The lawlessness was exacerbated by the coalition's unilateral decision to conduct a widespread debaathification program within Iraq's military and civil service, purging all the main government institutions of Baathists to eradicate completely any trace of the old regime. In so doing more than a half-million Iraqis became unemployed and, more to the point, had little prospect of any future employment, making them an obvious target for recruitment to the various underground groups responsible for maintaining the insurgency against the occupying powers. Many of the new Iraqi leaders believed the debaathification process had been taken too far. After all, not everyone who had joined the Baath Party under Saddam had done so because they were enthusiastic supporters of Baathist ideology.

Iraqi concerns about the way their country was taking shape post-Saddam were deepened because of the coalition's slow rate of progress toward handing over power to an elected Iraqi government. It had been widely predicted before the war that winning the peace in Iraq would prove to be more difficult than winning the military campaign, but even so the Bush administration appeared reluctant to take the issue seriously. A detailed appraisal of Iraq's likely postwar political landscape that was compiled by a team of experts at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York was ignored, as was a similar study that was submitted by the British Foreign Office. After the war, the group of neo-conservative ideologues that had aligned itself with Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon made no secret of their determination to introduce to Iraq a modern, Western-style democracy that would serve as a
role model for the rest of the Arab world. By attempting to impose their radical political agenda on the Iraqi people, the neoconservatives risked alienating Iraq's traditional ruling elite who made it abundantly clear that they had no desire to have their religious, ethnic, and tribal traditions Westernized.

The continuing political uncertainty in post-Saddam Iraq undoubtedly played into the hands of those both inside and outside Iraq who were determined that the coalition's attempts to rebuild the country, both politically and economically, ended in failure. There was no letup in the daily, morale-sapping guerrilla attacks on coalition troops, particularly American forces, which were carried out by a combination of disaffected Baathists and foreign recruits who had made their way to Iraq after the war for the chance to carry out attacks against Western targets. Coalition forces detained fighters who had come from as far afield as Somalia and Yemen, and there were significant numbers of fighters who made their way to Iraq from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran. So long as there was no recognized Iraqi government either to rally support among the people or to impose its will upon them, the foreign fighters were able to operate at will, carrying out a number of deadly attacks that were designed to make it impossible for the coalition to run the country by fostering civil strife. During a one-week period in February 2004 more than 100 Iraqis, most of whom were employed by the coalition, were killed by a series of car bombs, the purpose of these attacks being to deter Iraqis from cooperating with the occupation forces. In March, as the country prepared to celebrate the first anniversary of Saddam's overthrow, more than 200 Shiite worshipers were killed by a series of bombs detonated at mosques in Baghdad, Karbala, and Quetta as they celebrated the Shiite feast of Ashura.

Many of these indiscriminate attacks were blamed on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization. During the buildup to the war in Iraq, the Bush administration had argued persistently that military action against Saddam was justified because of Baghdad's links with al-Qaeda. In his victory speech on the USS
Abraham Lincoln
on May 1, 2003, President Bush had directly linked the war in Iraq to the September 11 attacks and stated that in defeating Saddam, the United States had defeated “an ally of bin Laden.” Undisputed evidence that Saddam had cooperated actively with al-Qaeda, however, remained elusive. Documents found in looted Iraqi ministries suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had been trying to arrange a meeting between
Saddam and bin Laden in the late 1990s, but there was no confirmation that the meeting had actually taken place.

If doubts existed about the extent of al-Qaeda's involvement in Iraq before the war, there could be none once Saddam had been overthrown. Coalition military commanders soon identified one of bin Laden's leading lieutenants, a one-legged Jordanian-Palestinian militant called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as the driving force behind many of the attacks being carried out in Iraq after Saddam's capture. Prior to the war the Bush administration had alluded to Zarqawi's presence in Iraq as evidence of Saddam's involvement with al-Qaeda. At that time Zarqawi was reported to be acting as an intermediary between Baghdad and a group of al-Qaeda fighters that had taken refuge in a northern enclave of Iraq near the Kurdish village of Halabja after fleeing from Afghanistan. There was some dispute as to whether Saddam's regime had any meaningful contact with the al-Qaeda fighters, but both Israeli and Jordanian intelligence claimed that Zarqawi was actively cooperating with Saddam. During the war U.S. forces made a point of destroying the al-Qaeda camp near Halabja, but Zarqawi remained at large, and by early 2004 he was identified as the prime culprit behind the deadly bombing campaign being waged against coalition targets, and U.S. forces offered a $10 million reward for his capture. In May 2004 Zarqawi gained international notoriety when he was held responsible for the murder of Nick Berg, an American contractor who was kidnapped in Iraq by a group of Islamic extremists. Zarqawi was filmed as he beheaded Berg with a long knife, and the gruesome images were later released on an Islamic website.

While coalition forces struggled to maintain control over Iraq, the American and British governments found themselves increasingly isolated over their failure to find tangible evidence that Saddam possessed a significant arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Both governments had used the threat posed by Iraq's WMD as one of the major justifications for going to war. Once the war was over, Washington set up the Iraq Survey Group to lead the hunt for Saddam's illicit weapons arsenal. The group was headed by Dr. David Kay, the former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector who was convinced that Saddam had continued to develop various WMD programs after UN inspectors were thrown out of Iraq in late 1998. But despite conducting a detailed search of Iraq's military establishments, and interviewing hundreds of Iraqi scientists and officials who were known to have been involved in
Saddam's previous WMD programs, Kay reluctantly came to the conclusion that the threat posed by Saddam's WMD had been greatly exaggerated, and blamed the West's intelligence agencies for relying too heavily on unreliable reports from Iraqi exile groups. While Kay and his officials found evidence that Saddam was secretly trying to develop a ballistic missile with a range far in excess of that permitted by the UN, they were unable to find any evidence of significant stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, or any evidence to prove that Saddam was trying to build an atom bomb.

In January 2004 Kay resigned from the Iraq Survey Group and went public with the fact that he had been unable to find stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Kay concluded that Saddam had in all probability disposed of most of his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and that the nuclear program had also been dismantled. Kay's comments did nothing to help the public standing of the Bush and Blair governments. The problem was particularly acute for Blair who had already been accused of exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam's WMD by British scientist David Kelly, who had worked as a weapons inspector in Iraq. Kelly committed suicide in July 2003 after he was identified as the source of a BBC report that claimed Blair's government had deliberately “sexed up” the intelligence dossier on Iraq that had been released by the British government in September 2002. Although a public inquiry into the causes surrounding Kelly's death concluded that the Blair government had not deliberately exaggerated the intelligence assessment, the failure to find a “smoking gun” in Iraq enabled Blair's political rivals to question his decision to participate in the war on Saddam.

The issue of Saddam's WMD was a less controversial issue for President Bush, as most Americans accepted the administration's argument that the invasion of Iraq was an integral part of the global war against terrorism. Even so, Bush was obliged to set up a bipartisan commission to find out why American intelligence had overestimated the threat posed by Saddam. The initial report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, published in July 2004, severely criticized the CIA for overestimating the danger posed by Saddam's WMD programs. It also concluded that there had been no significant ties between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network. The arguments used to justify the war soon became an issue in the presidential election campaign, with the Democratic candidate Senator John Kerry claim
ing that the Bush administration had deliberately “misled” Congress and the public. Even Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, entered the debate by suggesting that he might not have supported the conflict had he known Saddam Hussein lacked stockpiles of deadly weapons.

As the controversies continued throughout the world over whether or not the war was justified, the one certainty was that Saddam Hussein would never again be in a position to threaten either his own people or the wider world. Following his arrest he was held in a special compound at a U.S. military facility near Baghdad Airport where he was interrogated first by a specialist team of CIA interrogators and then by the FBI. The CIA team was particularly keen to acquire information about Saddam's prewar WMD program, his links with al-Qaeda, and any insights he might be able to provide about the organization of the insurgency. At the time Saddam was apprehended many Iraqi detainees were being subjected to a variety of torture methods while being held at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, which had become one of the Americans' main detention facilities after the war. (The Bush administration was severely criticized in May 2004 after hundreds of photographs were published that showed U.S. troops abusing Iraqi prisoners.) Saddam himself, however, was treated more humanely. His CIA interrogation team believed they would get more out of their prisoner if they treated him well. Even so, security remained a primary concern for the United States, and from early 2004 onward Saddam was moved to a different location every ten to twelve days to ensure that his supporters in Iraq did not attempt to rescue him.

From the outset of his captivity Saddam was disinclined to cooperate with his captors. When, in March 2004, Saddam received a surprise visit from Donald Rumsfeld, who had flown to Iraq to mark the first anniversary of the war, the U.S. defense secretary confided that he had found Saddam “uncooperative.” Indeed, the CIA was able to glean very little of use from Saddam about the WMD program, al-Qaeda, or the insurgency. Instead, on occasion Saddam provided them with startling comments and insights about his regime under his presidency. During one interrogation session, for example, he suggested that his real reason for invading Kuwait in 1990 was to keep his armed forces fully occupied, because he feared what his restive officers corps might do if they were not otherwise distracted. Saddam also confirmed U.S. suspicions that he had been surprised by the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. One of the interrogation team members said that
Saddam had hoped his deliberate ambiguity over whether his government possessed illegal weapons “would keep the neighbors at bay, while the U.S. would be hung up in interminable debate at the UN.”
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Although Saddam could speak English, he insisted that he only be interrogated in Arabic, and the CIA provided an Arabic speaker who conducted most of the interviews. No physically coercive methods were used on Saddam. Instead the Americans used a variety of psychological tricks, such as questioning him for several hours and then leaving him for a while, returning to ask just a brief question, only to leave him again for a while. But for all the sophistication of their interrogation techniques, the CIA gleaned little of any value. Saddam was quite happy to discuss his role in the Baath party in the 1970s, and the problems he had dealing with his errant son Uday. He was not at all forthcoming on the key issues, such as illegal weapons or links with al-Qaeda. “We got very little, I would say almost nothing,” a CIA official later admitted. A British intelligence official who participated in Saddam's interrogation added, “There are many ways of eliciting information without using torture. We pushed it right to the limit with Saddam, and he had a very hard time indeed. But at the end of the day he gave us very little that was of any use.”
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