Getting away with murder
Norman Stone
SADDAM HUSSEIN: THE POLITICS OF REVENGE by Said K. Aburish Bloomsbury, £20, pp. 406 The most disastrous decision of the sec- ond half of the 20th century seems, on the evidence of this book, to have been George Bush's, when he stopped, in 1991, before Baghdad. The Gulf war itself had been, as was callously said, 'a turkey-shoot'. How on earth could the West have failed to get rid of the man who started it? When the war ended, two anti-Saddam groups immedi- ately rebelled — Kurds in the north, Shia Arabs elsewhere. Saddam had been allowed, in the armistice, to fly helicopters. No one on the American side seems to have appreciated that these helicopters — in effect, gun-ships — would be lethal in Saddam's successful efforts to put down the rebellions. The result was a massacre of the Shia Arabs and, initially, a flight of two million Kurds towards Turkey, until the West imposed a safe zone for them in northern Iraq. For almost ten years, British and American aircraft have been flying sor- ties to protect them, but there is still, apparently, no end in sight. Meanwhile, the economy of northern Iraq depends on international hand-outs, and the only employment there consists of recycling these. Not surprisingly, the place is a smug- glers' paradise (at Urfa, the old Edessa, in south-eastern Turkey there is a bazaar where, at ridiculous prices, you can buy the best European brand names, falling off lor- ries courtesy of some 'non-governmental organisation' or other in northern Iraq). And the inhabitants, Kurdish tribesmen with a fine military bent, have ended up fighting each other.
In Iraq itself, Saddam goes on producing his deadly weaponry, whether nuclear or biological. At the end of this very informa- tive book, Aburish describes the efforts of United Nations inspection teams to detect the place where these things are made, and the efforts made by Saddam to frustrate them. He is very clever and resourceful, holds down his countrymen with vicious strength of will, and seems to be indestruc- tible. His survival is a terrible monument to the Bush presidency (and also to the Major government that went along with Bush's decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power). Perhaps the greatest problem that he leaves is that there is no one to replace him: even Aburish, who knows Iraq at first hand (he is of Palestinian origin, for years acted as consultant to the Iraqis when theirs was a going concern, and has inter- viewed a great number of people with sto- ries to tell) cannot really say what on earth will happen in Iraq when Saddam finally goes. Vaguely, he expects something of the Shia Arabs, who make up nearly two thirds of the country's population. But religion, especially one as divided as Shia Islam — some are crypto-Christian, others crypto- ayatollah — is hardly going to be a pre- scription for any kind of modern rule. You put this book down, well written and informed as it is, with a deep sense of depression, and a feeling that the world is going to end somewhere along the line.
For quite a long time, Saddam Hussein was the most successful of the Arab dicta- tors. The Iraqis — good fighters and good learners — counted as the Prussians of the Middle East. Saddam himself had come up the hard way (Aburish is excellent on the family background) as a street-urchin, reg- ularly beaten by a cruel step-father, in a district, Takrit, that had been settled by Sunni Beduin (Takritis were known in Iraq, generally speaking, as bad hats). He learned fast, and got into politics on the socialist, Arab-nationalist Ba'ath party side. Betraying and flattering where necessary, killing on occasion, he rose because, like his model, Stalin, he was an excellent organiser (even now, he organises his own survival brilliantly, and to see him even for five minutes means a whole day of check- ing, including X-rays designed to detect if the interviewer has swallowed explosives).
There has been a long-standing rivalry between Arab Baghdad and Persian Tehran. Once the Iranian revolution occurred, the Iran of the Ayatollah became the USA's great enemy in the Middle East, and Saddam Hussein was built up accord- ingly. The West shut its eyes to his local tyranny (it was foul: the horror stories in this book go on and on) and supplied Sad- dam with what he needed in the way of weaponry or raw materials. The author himself was involved in some of these deals, and has many stories to tell of West- ern businessmen who profited vastly from what they must have known was deadly business (to its credit, ICI refused, and, to the author's credit, he refused to carry on when he realised the nature of the trade). Biological weapons could be cheaply made, and the raw materials could be passed off as ingredients for chemical fertiliser. Sad- dam's confidence grew, and in 1980 he attacked Iran — assisted, all along, by the Americans, although there were constant signs that the American government was badly divided as to the right course of action. At any rate, once the war was over — Iran having fought back with extraordi- nary tenacity, Saddam's aims having been frustrated — Iraq's finances were in a mess, and Saddam decided to extract some billions from the Arab states who, he said, owed their existence to him. The result was his great miscalculation, the invasion of Kuwait, and retribution at the hands of the West.
But not personal retribution. On and on he goes, the regime becoming ever more surreally brutal, the dictator's suspicions and cruelties landing, now, even on his own immediate family circle and the various Takritis who, for the past decade, have been his only friends. Seemingly, the West has allowed him to continue because it can- not see any alternative. Aburish is dismis- sive of this, but on the other hand he himself does not seem to have an alterna- tive, either. He is quite dismissive of the northern Iraqi Kurds, whose leaders he makes out to be stupid and short-sighted, interested only in fighting each other. His heart is with the Shia Arabs, and he might have written at greater length about their failure to assert themselves. In the end, he does believe in an Iraqi patriotism that transcends the Sunni-Shia divide, and might also include the Kurds of the north; but he seems rather despairing, and there are even hints of sympathy with Saddam himself, in the sense that the West encour- aged his own worst sides. Until the end of Saddam Hussein's regime, we cannot of course have a proper historical work, but Mr Aburish's is an extremely good one to be going on with.
Previous page
