virus: An Intimate and Extended Look at Saddam Hussein

From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 22:15:40 MDT


                        Tales of the Tyrant
                                  
  What does Saddam Hussein see in himself that no one else in the
   world seems to see? The answer is perhaps best revealed by the
         intimate details of the Iraqi leader's daily life
                                  
                          by Mark Bowden
                                  
                               .....

                       Shakhsuh (His Person)
                                  
   Today is a day in the Grand Battle, the immortal Mother of All
Battles. It is a glorious and a splendid day on the part of the self-
respecting people of Iraq and their history, and it is the beginning
of the great shame for those who ignited its fire on the other part.
It is the first day on which the vast military phase of that battle
started. Or rather, it is the first day of that battle, since Allah
   decreed that the Mother of All Battles continue till this day.
                                  
    ”Saddam Hussein, in a televised address to the Iraqi people,
                          January 17, 2002
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=T"}

 he tyrant must steal sleep. He must vary the locations and times.
 He never sleeps in his palaces. He moves from secret bed to secret
  bed. Sleep and a fixed routine are among the few luxuries denied
 him. It is too dangerous to be predictable, and whenever he shuts
his eyes, the nation drifts. His iron grip slackens. Plots congeal in
  the shadows. For those hours he must trust someone, and nothing
            is more dangerous to the tyrant than trust.
                                  
     Saddam Hussein, the Anointed One, Glorious Leader, Direct
   Descendant of the Prophet, President of Iraq, Chairman of its
    Revolutionary Command Council, field marshal of its armies,
doctor of its laws, and Great Uncle to all its peoples, rises at about
  three in the morning. He sleeps only four or five hours a night.
   When he rises, he swims. All his palaces and homes have pools.
   Water is a symbol of wealth and power in a desert country like
    Iraq, and Saddam splashes it everywhere”fountains and pools,
 indoor streams and waterfalls. It is a theme in all his buildings.
 His pools are tended scrupulously and tested hourly, more to keep
  the temperature and the chlorine and pH levels comfortable than
   to detect some poison that might attack him through his pores,
   eyes, mouth, nose, ears, penis, or anus”although that worry is
                         always there too.
                                  
   He has a bad back, a slipped disk, and swimming helps. It also
keeps him trim and fit. This satisfies his vanity, which is epic, but
fitness is critical for other reasons. He is now sixty-five, an old
 man, but because his power is grounded in fear, not affection, he
     cannot be seen to age. The tyrant cannot afford to become
 stooped, frail, and gray. Weakness invites challenge, coup d'état.
    One can imagine Saddam urging himself through a fixed number
   of laps each morning, pushing to exceed the number he swam the
previous year, as if time could be undone by effort and will. Death
  is an enemy he cannot defeat”only, perhaps, delay. So he works.
  He also dissembles. He dyes his gray hair black and avoids using
  his reading glasses in public. When he is to give a speech, his
aides print it out in huge letters, just a few lines per page. Because
 his back problem forces him to walk with a slight limp, he avoids
        being seen or filmed walking more than a few steps.
                                  
  He is long-limbed, with big, strong hands. In Iraq the size of a
  man still matters, and Saddam is impressive. At six feet two he
 towers over his shorter, plumper aides. He lacks natural grace but
  has acquired a certain elegance of manner, the way a country boy
   learns to match the right tie with the right suit. His weight
   fluctuates between about 210 and 220 pounds, but in his custom-
tailored suits the girth isn't always easy to see. His paunch shows
   when he takes off his suit coat. Those who watch him carefully
  know he has a tendency to lose weight in times of crisis and to
            gain it rapidly when things are going well.
                                  
  Fresh food is flown in for him twice a week”lobster, shrimp, and
fish, lots of lean meat, plenty of dairy products. The shipments are
 sent first to his nuclear scientists, who x-ray them and test them
   for radiation and poison. The food is then prepared for him by
    European-trained chefs, who work under the supervision of al
    Himaya, Saddam's personal bodyguards. Each of his more than
 twenty palaces is fully staffed, and three meals a day are cooked
 for him at every one; security demands that palaces from which he
  is absent perform an elaborate pantomime each day, as if he were
in residence. Saddam tries to regulate his diet, allotting servings
and portions the way he counts out the laps in his pools. For a big
man he usually eats little, picking at his meals, often leaving half
 the food on his plate. Sometimes he eats dinner at restaurants in
 Baghdad, and when he does, his security staff invades the kitchen,
  demanding that the pots and pans, dishware, and utensils be well
 scrubbed, but otherwise interfering little. Saddam appreciates the
culinary arts. He prefers fish to meat, and eats a lot of fresh fruits
 and vegetables. He likes wine with his meals, though he is hardly
  an oenophile; his wine of choice is Mateus rosé. But even though
  he indulges only in moderation, he is careful not to let anyone
    outside his most trusted circle of family and aides see him
 drinking. Alcohol is forbidden by Islam, and in public Saddam is a
                     dutiful son of the faith.
                                  
 He has a tattoo on his right hand, three dark-blue dots in a line
 near the wrist. These are given to village children when they are
only five or six years old, a sign of their rural, tribal roots. Girls
    are often marked on their chins, forehead, or cheeks (as was
  Saddam's mother). For those who, like Saddam, move to the cities
 and come up in life, the tattoos are a sign of humble origin, and
    some later have them removed, or fade them with bleach until
  they almost disappear. Saddam's have faded, but apparently just
       from age; although he claims descent from the prophet
        Muhammad, he has never disguised his humble birth.
                                  
     The President-for-life spends long hours every day in his
   office”whichever office he and his security minders select. He
meets with his ministers and generals, solicits their opinions, and
   keeps his own counsel. He steals short naps during the day. He
will abruptly leave a meeting, shut himself off in a side room, and
    return refreshed a half hour later. Those who meet with the
  President have no such luxury. They must stay awake and alert at
    all times. In 1986, during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam caught
  Lieutenant General Aladin al-Janabi dozing during a meeting. He
 stripped the general of his rank and threw him out of the army. It
  was years before al-Janabi was able to win back his position and
                              favor.
                                  
    Saddam's desk is always immaculate. Reports from his various
  department heads are stacked neatly, each a detailed accounting
   of recent accomplishments and spending topped by an executive
    summary. Usually he reads only the summaries, but he selects
  some reports for closer examination. No one knows which will be
chosen for scrutiny. If the details of the full report tell a story
   different from the summary, or if Saddam is confused, he will
      summon the department head. At these meetings Saddam is
   always polite and calm. He rarely raises his voice. He enjoys
   showing off a mastery of every aspect of his realm, from crop
 rotation to nuclear fission. But these meetings can be terrifying
      when he uses them to cajole, upbraid, or interrogate his
   subordinates. Often he arranges a surprise visit to some lower-
 level office or laboratory or factory”although, given the security
  preparations necessary, word of his visits outraces his arrival.
    Much of what he sees from his offices and on his "surprise"
   inspections is doctored and full of lies. Saddam has been fed
 unrealistic information for so long that his expectations are now
   also uniformly unrealistic. His bureaucrats scheme mightily to
   maintain the illusions. So Saddam usually sees only what those
    around him want him to see, which is, by definition, what he
  wants to see. A stupid man in this position would believe he had
 created a perfect world. But Saddam is not stupid. He knows he is
             being deceived, and he complains about it.
                                  
    He reads voraciously”on subjects from physics to romance”and
has broad interests. He has a particular passion for Arabic history
    and military history. He likes books about great men, and he
    admires Winston Churchill, whose famous political career is
   matched by his prodigious literary output. Saddam has literary
     aspirations himself. He employs ghostwriters to keep up a
   ceaseless flow of speeches, articles, and books of history and
philosophy; his oeuvre includes fiction as well. In recent years he
     appears to have written and published two romantic fables,
   Zabibah and the King and The Fortified Castle; a third, as-yet-
  untitled work of fiction is due out soon. Before publishing the
  books Saddam distributes them quietly to professional writers in
       Iraq for comments and suggestions. No one dares to be
  candid”the writing is said to be woefully amateurish, marred by
 a stern pedantic strain”but everyone tries to be helpful, sending
    him gentle suggestions for minor improvements. The first two
      novels were published under a rough Arabic equivalent of
    "Anonymous" that translates as "Written by He Who Wrote It,"
             but the new book may bear Saddam's name.
                                  
     Saddam likes to watch TV, monitoring the Iraqi stations he
   controls and also CNN, Sky, al Jazeera, and the BBC. He enjoys
 movies, particularly those involving intrigue, assassination, and
    conspiracy”The Day of the Jackal, The Conversation, Enemy of
  the State. Because he has not traveled extensively, such movies
    inform his ideas about the world and feed his inclination to
  believe broad conspiracy theories. To him the world is a puzzle
  that only fools accept at face value. He also appreciates movies
 with more literary themes. Two of his favorites are The Godfather
                series and The Old Man and the Sea.
                                  
  Saddam can be charming, and has a sense of humor about himself.
  "He told a hilarious story on television," says Khidhir Hamza, a
   scientist who worked on Iraq's nuclear-weapons project before
escaping to the West. "He is an excellent storyteller, the kind who
    acts out the story with gestures and facial expressions. He
   described how he had once found himself behind enemy lines in
  the war with Iran. He had been traveling along the front lines,
paying surprise visits, when the Iranian line launched an offensive
and effectively cut off his position. The Iranians, of course, had no
  idea that Saddam was there. The way he told the story, it wasn't
boastful or self-congratulatory. He didn't claim to have fought his
 way out. He said he was scared. Of the troops at his position, he
said, 'They just left me!' He repeated 'Just left me!' in a way that
    was humorous. Then he described how he hid with his pistol,
  watching the action until his own forces retook the position and
  he was again on safe ground. 'What can a pistol do in the middle
    of battle?' he asked. It was charming, extremely charming."
                                  
       General Wafic Samarai, who served as Saddam's chief of
  intelligence during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war (and who, after
  falling out of favor in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, walked
  for thirty hours through the rugged north of Iraq to escape the
  country), concurs: "It is pleasant to sit and talk to him. He is
  serious, and meetings with him can get tense, but you don't get
  intimidated unless he wants to intimidate you. When he asks for
   your opinion, he listens very carefully and doesn't interrupt.
Likewise, he gets irritated if you interrupt him. 'Let me finish!' he
                         will say sharply."
                                  
 Saddam has been advised by his doctors to walk at least two hours
   a day. He rarely manages that much time, but he breaks up his
 days with strolls. He used to take these walks in public, swooping
      down with his entourage on neighborhoods in Baghdad, his
  bodyguards clearing sidewalks and streets as the tyrant passed.
     Anyone who approached him unsolicited was beaten nearly to
    death. But now it is too dangerous to walk in public”and the
     limp must not be seen. So Saddam makes no more unscripted
   public appearances. He limps freely behind the high walls and
  patrolled fences of his vast estates. Often he walks with a gun,
hunting deer or rabbit in his private preserves. He is an excellent
                               shot.
                                  
 Saddam has been married for nearly forty years. His wife, Sajida,
    is his first cousin on his mother's side and the daughter of
   Khairallah Tulfah, Saddam's uncle and first political mentor.
   Sajida has borne him two sons and three daughters, and remains
 loyal to him, but he has long had relationships with other women.
Stories circulate about his nightly selecting young virgins for his
   bed, like the Sultan Shahryar in The Thousand and One Nights,
  about his having fathered a child with a longtime mistress, and
 even about his having killed one young woman after a kinky tryst.
 It is hard to sort the truth from the lies. So many people, in and
   out of Iraq, hate Saddam that any disgraceful or embarrassing
  rumor is likely to be embraced, believed, repeated, and written
    down in the Western press as truth. Those who know him best
                scoff at the wildest of these tales.
                                  
  "Saddam has personal relationships with women, but these stories
of rape and murder are lies," Samarai says. "He is not that kind of
 person. He is very careful about himself in everything he does. He
  is fastidious and very proper, and never wants to give the wrong
  impression. But he is occasionally attracted to other women, and
  he has formed relationships with them. They are not the kind of
               women who would ever talk about him."
                                  
   Saddam is a loner by nature, and power increases isolation. A
    young man without power or money is completely free. He has
nothing, but he also has everything. He can travel, he can drift. He
    can make new acquaintances every day, and try to soak up the
  infinite variety of life. He can seduce and be seduced, start an
 enterprise and abandon it, join an army or flee a nation, fight to
 preserve an existing system or plot a revolution. He can reinvent
   himself daily, according to the discoveries he makes about the
    world and himself. But if he prospers through the choices he
  makes, if he acquires a wife, children, wealth, land, and power,
 his options gradually and inevitably diminish. Responsibility and
     commitment limit his moves. One might think that the most
    powerful man has the most choices, but in reality he has the
      fewest. Too much depends on his every move. The tyrant's
  choices are the narrowest of all. His life”the nation!”hangs in
  the balance. He can no longer drift or explore, join or flee. He
     cannot reinvent himself, because so many others depend on
    him”and he, in turn, must depend on so many others. He stops
  learning, because he is walled in by fortresses and palaces, by
 generals and ministers who rarely dare to tell him what he doesn't
 wish to hear. Power gradually shuts the tyrant off from the world.
    Everything comes to him second or third hand. He is deceived
  daily. He becomes ignorant of his land, his people, even his own
 family. He exists, finally, only to preserve his wealth and power,
 to build his legacy. Survival becomes his one overriding passion.
So he regulates his diet, tests his food for poison, exercises behind
well-patrolled walls, trusts no one, and tries to control everything.
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=M"}

  ajor Sabah Khalifa Khodada, a career officer in the Iraqi army,
  was summoned from his duties as assistant to the commander of a
    terrorist training camp on January 1, 1996, for an important
    meeting. It was nighttime. He drove to his command center at
      Alswayra, southwest of Baghdad, where he and some other
   military officers were told to strip to their underwear. They
 removed their clothing, watches, and rings, and handed over their
 wallets. The clothing was then laundered, sterilized, and x-rayed.
  Each of the officers, in his underwear, was searched and passed
 through a metal detector. Each was instructed to wash his hands in
               a disinfecting permanganate solution.
                                  
  They then dressed, and were transported in buses with blackened
  windows, so that they could not see where they were going. They
 were driven for a half hour or more, and then were searched again
as they filed off. They had arrived at an official-looking building,
  Khodada did not know where. After a time they were taken into a
   meeting room and seated at a large round table. Then they were
told that they were to be given a great honor: the President himself
 would be meeting with them. They were instructed not to talk, just
   to listen. When Saddam entered, they were to rise and show him
  respect. They were not to approach or touch him. For all but his
closest aides, the protocol for meeting with the dictator is simple.
                            He dictates.
                                  
"Don't interrupt," they were told. "Don't ask questions or make any
                             requests."
                                  
 Each man was given a pad of paper and a pencil, and instructed to
  take notes. Tea in a small glass cup was placed before each man
          and at the empty seat at the head of the table.
                                  
   When Saddam appeared, they all rose. He stood before his chair
  and smiled at them. Wearing his military uniform, decorated with
   medals and gold epaulets, he looked fit, impressive, and self-
  assured. When he sat, everyone sat. Saddam did not reach for his
tea, so the others in the room didn't touch theirs. He told Khodada
 and the others that they were the best men in the nation, the most
   trusted and able. That was why they had been selected to meet
  with him, and to work at the terrorist camps where warriors were
   being trained to strike back at America. The United States, he
  said, because of its reckless treatment of Arab nations and the
  Arab people, was a necessary target for revenge and destruction.
  American aggression must be stopped in order for Iraq to rebuild
   and to resume leadership of the Arab world. Saddam talked for
   almost two hours. Khodada could sense the great hatred in him,
    the anger over what America had done to his ambitions and to
     Iraq. Saddam blamed the United States for all the poverty,
            backwardness, and suffering in his country.
                                  
     Khodada took notes. He glanced around the room. Few of the
   others, he concluded, were buying what Saddam told them. These
  were battle-hardened men of experience from all over the nation.
   Most had fought in the war with Iran and the Persian Gulf War.
  They had few illusions about Saddam, his regime, or the troubles
of their country. They coped daily with real problems in cities and
  military camps all over Iraq. They could have told Saddam a lot.
   But nothing would pass from them to the tyrant. Not one word,
                      not one microorganism.
                                  
    The meeting had been designed to allow communication in only
   one direction, and even in this it failed. Saddam's speech was
 meaningless to his listeners. Khodada despised him, and suspected
     that others in the room did too. The major knew he was no
   coward, but, like many of the other military men there, he was
  filled with fear. He was afraid to make a wrong move, afraid he
     might accidentally draw attention to himself, do something
unscripted. He was grateful that he felt no urge to sneeze, sniffle,
                             or cough.
                                  
    When the meeting was over, Saddam simply left the room. The
  teacups had not been touched. The men were then returned to the
   buses and driven back to Alswayra, from which they drove back
     to their camps or homes. The meeting with Saddam had meant
  nothing. The notes they had been ordered to take were worthless.
    It was as if they had briefly visited a fantasy zone with no
                   connection to their own world.
                                  
           They had stepped into the world of the tyrant.

                         Tumooh (Ambition)
                                  
 The Iraqis knew that they had the potential, but they did not know
   how to muster up that potential. Their rulers did not take the
 responsibility on the basis of that potential. The leader and the
  guide who was able to put that potential on its right course had
       not yet emerged from amongst them. Even when some had
 discovered that potential, they did not know how to deal with it.
Nor did they direct it where it should be directed so as to enable it
to evolve into an effective act that could make life pulsate and fill
                       hearts with happiness.
                                  
  ”Saddam Hussein, in a speech to the Iraqi people, July 17, 2000
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=I"}

 n Saddam's village, al-Awja, just east of Tikrit, in north-central
  Iraq, his clan lived in houses made of mud bricks and flat, mud-
   covered wooden roofs. The land is dry, and families eke out a
  living growing wheat and vegetables. Saddam's clan was called al-
     Khatab, and they were known to be violent and clever. Some
   viewed them as con men and thieves, recalls Salah Omar al-Ali,
    who grew up in Tikrit and came to know Saddam well in later
        life. Those who still support Saddam may see him as
   Saladinesque, as a great pan-Arab leader; his enemies may see
  him as Stalinesque, a cruel dictator; but to al-Ali, Saddam will
   always be just an al-Khatab, acting out a family pattern on a
                      much, much larger stage.
                                  
    Al-Ali fixed tea for me in his home in suburban London last
January. He is elegant, frail, gray, and pale, a man of quiet dignity
      and impeccable manners who gestures delicately with long-
  fingered hands as he speaks. He was the Information Minister of
Iraq when, in 1969, Saddam (the real power in the ruling party), in
  part to demonstrate his displeasure over Arab defeats in the Six-
  Day War, announced that a Zionist plot had been discovered, and
  publicly hanged fourteen alleged plotters, among them nine Iraqi
    Jews; their bodies were left hanging in Baghdad's Liberation
  Square for more than a day. Al-Ali defended this atrocity in his
 own country and to the rest of the world. Today he is just one of
  many exiled or expatriated former Iraqi government officials, an
  old socialist who served the revolutionary pan-Arab Baath Party
  and Saddam until running afoul of the Great Uncle. Al-Ali would
 have one believe that his conscience drove him into exile, but one
 suspects he has fretted little in his life about human rights. He
    showed me the faded dot tattoos on his hand which might have
      been put there by the same Tikriti who gave Saddam his.
                                  
 Although al-Ali was familiar with the al-Khatab family, he did not
   meet Saddam himself until the mid-sixties, when they were both
   socialist revolutionaries plotting to overthrow the tottering
    government of General Abd al-Rahman Arif. Saddam was a tall,
    thin young man with a thick mop of curly black hair. He had
    recently escaped from prison, after being caught in a failed
attempt to assassinate Arif's predecessor. The attempt, the arrest,
 the imprisonment, had all added to Saddam's revolutionary luster.
   He was an impressive combination: not just a tough capable of
    commanding respect from the thugs who did the Baath Party's
   dirty work, but also well-read, articulate, and seemingly open-
   minded; a man of action who also understood policy; a natural
  leader who could steer Iraq into a new era. Al-Ali met the young
  fugitive at a café near Baghdad University. Saddam arrived in a
  Volkswagen Beetle and stepped out in a well-cut gray suit. These
    were exciting times for both men. The intoxicating aroma of
  change was in the air, and prospects for their party were good.
  Saddam was pleased to meet a fellow Tikriti. "He listened to me
for a long time," al-Ali recalled. "We discussed the party's plans,
  how to organize nationally. The issues were complicated, but it
  was clear that he understood them very well. He was serious, and
    took a number of my suggestions. I was impressed with him."
                                  
      The party seized control in 1968, and Saddam immediately
   became the real power behind his cousin Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr,
    the president and chairman of the new Revolutionary Command
  Council. Al-Ali was a member of that council. He was responsible
 for the north-central part of Iraq, including his home village. It
 was in Tikrit that he started to see Saddam's larger plan unfold.
      Saddam's relatives in al-Awja were throwing their newly
  ascendant kinsman's name around, seizing farms, ordering people
  off their land. That was how things worked in the villages. If a
   family was lucky, it produced a strongman, a patriarch, who by
   guile, strength, or violence accumulated riches for his clan.
      Saddam was now a strongman, and his family was moving to
 claim the spoils. This was all ancient stuff. The Baath philosophy
   was far more egalitarian. It emphasized working with Arabs in
 other countries to rebuild the entire region, sharing property and
  wealth, seeking a better life for all. In this political climate
      Saddam's family was a throwback. The local party chiefs
    complained bitterly, and al-Ali took their complaints to his
    powerful young friend. "It's a small problem," Saddam said.
  "These are simple people. They don't understand our larger aims.
I'll take care of it." Two, three, four times al-Ali went to Saddam,
  because the problem didn't go away. Every time it was the same:
                      "I'll take care of it."
                                  
 It finally occurred to al-Ali that the al-Khatab family was doing
   exactly what Saddam wanted them to do. This seemingly modern,
  educated young villager was not primarily interested in helping
the party achieve its idealistic aims; rather, he was using the party
 to help him achieve his. Suddenly al-Ali saw that the polish, the
 fine suits, the urbane tastes, civilized manner, and the socialist
 rhetoric were a pose. The real story of Saddam was right there in
the tattoo on his right hand. He was a true son of Tikrit, a clever
   al-Khatab, and he was now much more than the patriarch of his
                               clan.
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=S"}

  addam's rise through the ranks may have been slow and deceitful,
  but when he moved to seize power, he did so very openly. He had
     been serving as vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command
   Council, and as Vice President of Iraq, and he planned to step
   formally into the top positions. Some of the party leadership,
  including men who had been close to Saddam for years, had other
     ideas. Rather than just hand him the reins, they had begun
 advocating a party election. So Saddam took action. He staged his
                     ascendancy like theater.
                                  
 On July 18, 1979, he invited all the members of the Revolutionary
      Command Council and hundreds of other party leaders to a
  conference hall in Baghdad. He had a video camera running in the
  back of the hall to record the event for posterity. Wearing his
    military uniform, he walked slowly to the lectern and stood
  behind two microphones, gesturing with a big cigar. His body and
   broad face seemed weighted down with sadness. There had been a
 betrayal, he said. A Syrian plot. There were traitors among them.
    Then Saddam took a seat, and Muhyi Abd al-Hussein Mashhadi,
    the secretary-general of the Command Council, appeared from
 behind a curtain to confess his own involvement in the putsch. He
    had been secretly arrested and tortured days before; now he
  spilled out dates, times, and places where the plotters had met.
    Then he started naming names. As he fingered members of the
     audience one by one, armed guards grabbed the accused and
   escorted them from the hall. When one man shouted that he was
  innocent, Saddam shouted back, "Itla! Itla!"”"Get out! Get out!"
  (Weeks later, after secret trials, Saddam had the mouths of the
  accused taped shut so that they could utter no troublesome last
words before their firing squads.) When all of the sixty "traitors"
      had been removed, Saddam again took the podium and wiped
   tears from his eyes as he repeated the names of those who had
    betrayed him. Some in the audience, too, were crying”perhaps
   out of fear. This chilling performance had the desired effect.
    Everyone in the hall now understood exactly how things would
  work in Iraq from that day forward. The audience rose and began
  clapping, first in small groups and finally as one. The session
   ended with cheers and laughter. The remaining "leaders"”about
 300 in all”left the hall shaken, grateful to have avoided the fate
  of their colleagues, and certain that one man now controlled the
    destiny of their entire nation. Videotapes of the purge were
                circulated throughout the country.
                                  
   It was what the world would come to see as classic Saddam. He
 tends to commit his crimes in public, cloaking them in patriotism
  and in effect turning his witnesses into accomplices. The purge
  that day reportedly resulted in the executions of a third of the
   Command Council. (Mashhadi's performance didn't spare him; he,
   too, was executed.) During the next few weeks scores of other
   "traitors" were shot, including government officials, military
 officers, and people turned in by ordinary citizens who responded
   to a hotline phone number broadcast on Iraqi TV. Some Council
    members say that Saddam ordered members of the party's inner
             circle to participate in this bloodbath.
                                  
  While he served as vice-chairman, from 1968 to 1979, the party's
  goals had seemed to be Saddam's own. That was a relatively good
   period for Iraq, thanks to Saddam's blunt effectiveness as an
   administrator. He orchestrated a draconian nationwide literacy
  project. Reading programs were set up in every city and village,
 and failure to attend was punishable by three years in jail. Men,
     women, and children attended these compulsory classes, and
    hundreds of thousands of illiterate Iraqis learned to read.
       UNESCO gave Saddam an award. There were also ambitious
drives to build schools, roads, public housing, and hospitals. Iraq
 created one of the best public-health systems in the Middle East.
      There was admiration in the West during those years, for
     Saddam's accomplishments if not for his methods. After the
 Islamic fundamentalist revolution in Iran, and the seizure of the
    U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, Saddam seemed to be the best
           hope for secular modernization in the region.
                                  
  Today all these programs are a distant memory. Within two years
 of his seizing full power, Saddam's ambitions turned to conquest,
and his defeats have ruined the nation. His old party allies in exile
     now see his support for the social-welfare programs as an
   elaborate deception. The broad ambitions for the Iraqi people
 were the party's, they say. As long as he needed the party, Saddam
     made its programs his own. But his single, overriding goal
             throughout was to establish his own rule.
                                  
 "In the beginning the Baath Party was made up of the intellectual
     elite of our generation," says Hamed al-Jubouri, a former
       Command Council member who now lives in London. "There
         were many professors, physicians, economists, and
   historians”really the nation's elite. Saddam was charming and
    impressive. He appeared to be totally different from what we
  learned he was afterward. He took all of us in. We supported him
   because he seemed uniquely capable of controlling a difficult
 country like Iraq, a difficult people like our people. We wondered
   about him. How could such a young man, born in the countryside
   north of Baghdad, become such a capable leader? He seemed both
  intellectual and practical. But he was hiding his real self. For
 years he did this, building his power quietly, charming everyone,
   hiding his true instincts. He has a great ability to hide his
 intentions; it may be his greatest skill. I remember his son Uday
said one time, 'My father's right shirt pocket doesn't know what is
                    in his left shirt pocket.'"
                                  
  What does Saddam want? By all accounts, he is not interested in
 money. This is not the case with other members of his family. His
   wife, Sajida, is known to have gone on million-dollar shopping
    sprees in New York and London, back in the days of Saddam's
    good relations with the West. Uday drives expensive cars and
   wears custom-tailored suits of his own design. Saddam himself
  isn't a hedonist; he lives a well-regulated, somewhat abstemious
   existence. He seems far more interested in fame than in money,
    desiring above all to be admired, remembered, and revered. A
 nineteen-volume official biography is mandatory reading for Iraqi
    government officials, and Saddam has also commissioned a six-
  hour film about his life, called The Long Days, which was edited
    by Terence Young, best known for directing three James Bond
films. Saddam told his official biographer that he isn't interested
 in what people think of him today, only in what they will think of
   him in five hundred years. The root of Saddam's bloody, single-
        minded pursuit of power appears to be simple vanity.
                                  
  But what extremes of vanity compel a man to jail or execute all
 who criticize or oppose him? To erect giant statues of himself to
   adorn the public spaces of his country? To commission romantic
 portraits, some of them twenty feet high, portraying the nation's
  Great Uncle as a desert horseman, a wheat-cutting peasant, or a
 construction worker carrying bags of cement? To have the nation's
television, radio, film, and print devoted to celebrating his every
  word and deed? Can ego alone explain such displays? Might it be
   the opposite? What colossal insecurity and self-loathing would
                     demand such compensation?
                                  
  The sheer scale of the tyrant's deeds mocks psychoanalysis. What
     begins with ego and ambition becomes a political movement.
    Saddam embodies first the party and then the nation. Others
 conspire in this process in order to further their own ambitions,
selfless as well as selfish. Then the tyrant turns on them. His cult
 of self becomes more than a political strategy. Repetition of his
   image in heroic or paternal poses, repetition of his name, his
  slogans, his virtues, and his accomplishments, seeks to make his
 power seem inevitable, unchallengeable. Finally he is praised not
   out of affection or admiration but out of obligation. One must
                            praise him.
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=S"}

     aad al-Bazzaz was summoned to meet with Saddam in 1989. He
  was then the editor of Baghdad's largest daily newspaper and the
   head of the ministry that oversees all of Iraq's TV and radio
   programming. Al-Bazzaz took the phone call in his office. "The
  President wants to ask you something," Saddam's secretary said.
                                  
  Al-Bazzaz thought nothing of it. He is a short, round, garrulous
  man with thinning hair and big glasses. He had known Saddam for
   years, and had always been in good odor. The first time Saddam
  had asked to meet him had been more than fifteen years earlier,
     when Saddam was vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command
  Council. The Baath Party was generating a lot of excitement, and
  Saddam was its rising star. At the time, al-Bazzaz was a twenty-
five-year-old writer who had just published his first collection of
      short stories and had also written articles for Baghdad
       newspapers. That first summons from Saddam had been a
    surprise. Why would the vice-chairman want to meet with him?
 Al-Bazzaz had a low opinion of political officials, but as soon as
 they met, this one struck him as different. Saddam told al-Bazzaz
  that he had read some of his articles and was impressed by them.
  He said he knew of his book of short stories, and had heard they
    were very good. The young writer was flattered. Saddam asked
him what writers he admired, and after listening to al-Bazzaz, told
    him, "When I was in prison, I read all of Ernest Hemingway's
  novels. I particularly like The Old Man and the Sea." Al-Bazzaz
   thought, This is something new for Iraq”a politician who reads
    real literature. Saddam peppered him with questions at that
  meeting, and listened with rapt attention. This, too, al-Bazzaz
                     thought was extraordinary.
                                  
      By 1989 much had changed. Saddam's regime had long since
   abandoned the party's early, idealistic aims, and al-Bazzaz no
   longer saw the dictator as an open-minded man of learning and
     refinement. But he had prospered personally under Saddam's
 reign. His growing government responsibilities left him no time to
     write, but he had become an important man in Iraq. He saw
      himself as someone who advanced the cause of artists and
journalists, as a force for liberalization in the country. Since the
end of the war with Iran, the previous year, there had been talk of
loosening controls on the media and the arts in Iraq, and al-Bazzaz
had lobbied quietly in favor of this. But he wasn't one to press too
 hard, so he had no worries as he drove the several miles from his
   office to the Tashreeya area of Baghdad, near the old Cabinet
     Building, where an emissary from the President met him and
  instructed him to leave his car. The emissary drove al-Bazzaz in
  silence to a large villa nearby. Inside, guards searched him and
  showed him to a sofa, where he waited for half an hour as people
  came and went from the President's office. When it was his turn,
    he was handed a pad and a pencil, reminded to speak only if
 Saddam asked a direct question, and then ushered in. It was noon.
    Saddam was wearing a military uniform. Staying seated behind
    his desk, Saddam did not approach al-Bazzaz or even offer to
                          shake his hand.
                                  
                "How are you?" the President asked.
                                  
      "Fine," al-Bazzaz replied. "I am here to listen to your
                           instructions."
                                  
      Saddam complained about an Egyptian comedy show that had
    been airing on one of the TV channels: "It is silly, and we
   shouldn't show it to our people." Al-Bazzaz made a note. Then
  Saddam brought up something else. It was the practice for poems
   and songs written in praise of him to be aired daily on TV. In
     recent weeks al-Bazzaz had urged his producers to be more
   selective. Most of the work was amateurish”ridiculous doggerel
 written by unskilled poets. His staff was happy to oblige. Paeans
 to the President were still aired every day, but not as many since
                 al-Bazzaz had changed the policy.
                                  
  "I understand," Saddam said, "that you are not allowing some of
           the songs that carry my name to be broadcast."
                                  
  Al-Bazzaz was stunned, and suddenly frightened. "Mr. President,"
 he said, "we still broadcast the songs, but I have stopped some of
    them because they are so poorly written. They are rubbish."
                                  
 "Look," Saddam said, abruptly stern, "you are not a judge, Saad."
                                  
                      "Yes. I am not a judge."
                                  
     "How can you prevent people from expressing their feelings
                            toward me?"
                                  
  Al-Bazzaz feared that he was going to be taken away and shot. He
 felt the blood drain from his face, and his heart pounded heavily.
   The editor said nothing. The pencil shook in his hand. Saddam
                  had not even raised his voice.
                                  
    "No, no, no. You are not the judge of these things," Saddam
                            reiterated.
                                  
  Al-Bazzaz kept repeating, "Yes, sir," and frantically wrote down
    every word the President said. Saddam then talked about the
 movement for more freedoms in the press and the arts. "There will
               be no loosening of controls," he said.
                                  
                            "Yes, sir."
                                  
             "Okay, fine. Now it is all clear to you?"
                                  
                            "Yes, sir."
                                  
    With that Saddam dismissed al-Bazzaz. The editor had sweated
    through his shirt and sport coat. He was driven back to the
    Cabinet Building, and then drove himself back to the office,
 where he immediately rescinded his earlier policy. That evening a
     full broadcast of the poems and songs dedicated to Saddam
                              resumed.

                         Hadafuh (His Goal)
                                  
 You are the fountain of willpower and the wellspring of life, the
 essence of earth, the sabers of demise, the pupil of the eye, and
  the twitch of the eyelid. A people like you cannot but be, with
 God's help. So be as you are, and as we are determined to be. Let
  all cowards, piggish people, traitors, and betrayers be debased.
                                  
    ”Saddam Hussein, addressing the Iraqi people, July 17, 2001
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=I"}

raq is a land of antiquity. It is called the Land of Two Rivers (the
       Tigris and the Euphrates); the land of Sumerian kings,
   Mesopotamia, and Babylon; one of the cradles of civilization.
   Walking the streets of Baghdad gives one a sense of continuity
  with things long past, of unity with the great sweep of history.
  Renovating and maintaining the old palaces is an ongoing project
    in the city. By decree, one of every ten bricks laid in the
   renovation of an ancient palace is now stamped either with the
   name Saddam Hussein or with an eight-pointed star (a point for
            each letter of his name spelled in Arabic).
                                  
  In 1987 Entifadh Qanbar was assigned to work on the restoration
  of the Baghdad Palace, which had once been called al-Zuhoor, or
    the Flowers Palace. Built in the 1930s for King Ghazi, it is
relatively small and very pretty; English in style, it once featured
 an elaborate evergreen maze. Qanbar is an engineer by training, a
   short, fit, dark-haired man with olive skin. After earning his
  degree he served a compulsory term in the army, which turned out
 to be a five-year stint, and survived the mandatory one-month tour
             on the front lines in the war with Iran.
                                  
    Work on the palace had stalled some years earlier, when the
   British consultant for the project refused to come to Baghdad
  because of the war. One of Qanbar's first jobs was to supervise
   construction of a high and ornate brick wall around the palace
 grounds. Qanbar is a perfectionist, and because the wall was to be
 decorative as well as functional, he took care with the placement
 of each brick. An elaborate gate had already been built facing the
main road, but Qanbar had not yet built the portions of the wall on
 either side of it, because the renovation of the palace itself was
  unfinished, and that way large construction equipment could roll
    on and off the property without danger of damaging the gate.
                                  
   One afternoon at about five, as he was preparing to close down
    work for the day, Qanbar saw a black Mercedes with curtained
  windows and custom-built running boards pull up to the site. He
      knew immediately who was in it. Ordinary Iraqis were not
  allowed to drive such fancy cars. Cars like this one were driven
          exclusively by al Himaya, Saddam's bodyguards.
                                  
    The doors opened and several guards stepped out. All of them
   wore dark-green uniforms, black berets, and zippered boots of
   reddish-brown leather. They had big moustaches like Saddam's,
  and carried Kalashnikovs. To the frightened Qanbar, they seemed
                  robotic, without human feelings.
                                  
    The bodyguards often visited the work site to watch and make
  trouble. Once, after new concrete had been poured and smoothed,
  some of them jumped into it, stomping through the patch in their
    red boots to make sure that no bomb or listening device was
       hidden there. Another time a workman opened a pack of
cigarettes and a bit of foil wrapping fluttered down into the newly
  poured concrete. One of the guards caught a glimpse of something
   metallic and reacted as if someone had thrown a hand grenade.
 Several of them leaped into the concrete and retrieved the scrap.
   Angered to discover what it was, and to have been made to look
   foolish, they dragged the offending worker aside and beat him
  with their weapons. "I have worked all my life!" he cried. They
  took him away, and he did not return. So the sudden arrival of a
              black Mercedes was a frightening thing.
                                  
  "Who is the engineer here?" the chief guard asked. He spoke with
    the gruff Tikriti accent of his boss. Qanbar stepped up and
 identified himself. One of the guards wrote down his name. It is a
    terrible thing to have al Himaya write down your name. In a
country ruled by fear, the best way to survive is to draw as little
attention to yourself as possible. To be invisible. Even success can
    be dangerous, because it makes you stand out. It makes other
   people jealous and suspicious. It makes you enemies who might,
if the opportunity presents itself, bring your name to the attention
of the police. For the state to have your name for any reason other
 than the most conventional ones”school, driver's license, military
 service”is always dangerous. The actions of the state are entirely
  unpredictable, and they can take away your career, your freedom,
       your life. Qanbar's heart sank and his mouth went dry.
                                  
  "Our Great Uncle just passed by," the chief guard began. "And he
 said, 'Why is this gate installed when the two walls around it are
                            not built?'"
                                  
      Qanbar nervously explained that the walls were special,
 ornamental, and that his crew was saving them for last because of
    the heavy equipment coming and going. "We want to keep it a
                   clean construction," he said.
                                  
   "Our Great Uncle is going to pass by again tonight," said the
            guard. "When he does, it must be finished."
                                  
      Qanbar was dumbfounded. "How can I do it?" he protested.
                                  
"I don't know," said the guard. "But if you don't do it, you will be
   in trouble." Then he said something that revealed exactly how
   serious the danger was: "And if you don't do it, we will be in
                     trouble. How can we help?"
                                  
  There was nothing to do but try. Qanbar dispatched Saddam's men
     to help round up every member of his crew as fast as they
    could”those who were not scheduled to work as well as those
    who had already gone home. Two hundred workers were quickly
  assembled. They set up floodlights. Some of the guards came back
   with trucks that had machine guns mounted on top. They parked
   alongside the work site and set up chairs, watching and urging
     more speed as the workers mixed mortar and threw down line
                       after line of bricks.
                                  
    The crew finished at nine-thirty. They had completed in four
  hours a job that would ordinarily have taken a week. Terror had
 driven them to work faster and harder than they believed possible.
  Qanbar and his men were exhausted. An hour later they were still
  cleaning up the site when the black Mercedes drove up again. The
 chief guard stepped out. "Our Uncle just passed by, and he thanks
                           you," he said.
                                  
  Walls define the tyrant's world. They keep his enemies out, but
  they also block him off from the people he rules. In time he can
  no longer see out. He loses touch with what is real and what is
   unreal, what is possible and what is not”or, as in the case of
  Qanbar and the wall, what is just barely possible. His ideas of
  what his power can accomplish, and of his own importance, bleed
                           into fantasy.
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=E"}

     ach time Saddam has escaped death”when he survived, with a
  minor wound to his leg, a failed attempt in 1959 to assassinate
      Iraqi President Abd al-Karim Qasim; when he avoided the
  ultimate punishment in 1964 for his part in a failed Baath Party
  uprising; when he survived being trapped behind Iranian lines in
  the Iran-Iraq war; when he survived attempted coups d'état; when
   he survived America's smart-bombing campaign against Baghdad,
   in 1991; when he survived the nationwide revolt after the Gulf
  War”it has strengthened his conviction that his path is divinely
 inspired and that greatness is his destiny. Because his world view
 is essentially tribal and patriarchal, destiny means blood. So he
   has ordered genealogists to construct a plausible family tree
    linking him to Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad.
(This ancestry is an honor he shares, perhaps, with everyone in the
  hated West. See "The Royal We," by Steve Olson, in this issue.)
  Saddam sees the prophet less as the bearer of divine revelation
 than as a political precursor”a great leader who unified the Arab
  peoples and inspired a flowering of Arab power and culture. The
    concocted link of bloodlines to Muhammad is symbolized by a
   600-page hand-lettered copy of the Koran that was written with
  Saddam's own blood, which he donated a pint at a time over three
          years. It is now on display in a Baghdad museum.
                                  
If Saddam has a religion, it is a belief in the superiority of Arab
 history and culture, a tradition that he is convinced will rise up
 again and rattle the world. His imperial view of the grandeur that
   was Arabia is romantic, replete with fanciful visions of great
  palaces and wise and powerful sultans and caliphs. His notion of
    history has nothing to do with progress, with the advance of
 knowledge, with the evolution of individual rights and liberties,
with any of the things that matter most to Western civilization. It
     has to do simply with power. To Saddam, the present global
 domination by the West, particularly the United States, is just a
 phase. America is infidel and inferior. It lacks the rich ancient
 heritage of Iraq and other Arab states. Its place at the summit of
   the world powers is just a historical quirk, an aberration, a
  consequence of its having acquired technological advantages. It
                          cannot endure.
                                  
 In a speech this past January 17, the eleventh anniversary of the
    start of the Gulf War, Saddam explained, "The Americans have
 not yet established a civilization, in the deep and comprehensive
   sense we give to civilization. What they have established is a
  metropolis of force ... Some people, perhaps including Arabs and
    plenty of Muslims and more than these in the wide world ...
considered the ascent of the U.S. to the summit as the last scene in
  the world picture, after which there will be no more summits and
     no one will try to ascend and sit comfortably there. They
 considered it the end of the world as they hoped for, or as their
                scared souls suggested it to them."
                                  
 Arabia, which Saddam sees as the wellspring of civilization, will
   one day own that summit again. When that day comes, whether in
  his lifetime or a century or even five centuries hence, his name
   will rank with those of the great men in history. Saddam sees
     himself as an established member of the pantheon of great
  men”conquerors, prophets, kings and presidents, scholars, poets,
scientists. It doesn't matter if he understands their contributions
   and ideas. It matters only that they are the ones history has
         remembered and honored for their accomplishments.
                                  
   In a book titled Saddam's Bombmaker (2000), Khidhir Hamza, the
   nuclear scientist, remembers his first encounter with Saddam,
 when the future dictator was still nominally the vice-chairman. A
   large new computer had just been installed in Hamza's lab, and
     Saddam came sweeping through for a look. He showed little
   interest in the computer; his attention was drawn instead to a
  lineup of pictures that Hamza had tacked to the wall, each of a
  famous scientist, from Copernicus to Einstein. The pictures had
                     been torn from magazines.
                                  
                  "What are those?" Saddam asked.
                                  
"Sir, those are the greatest scientists in history," Hamza told him.
                                  
     Then, as Hamza remembers it, Saddam became angry. "What an
insult this is! All these great men, these great scientists! You don't
  have enough respect for these great men to frame their pictures?
              You can't honor them better than this?"
                                  
  To Hamza, the outburst was irrational; the anger was out of all
  proportion. Hamza interpreted it as Saddam's way of testing him,
       of putting him in his place. But Saddam seemed somehow
      personally offended. To understand his tantrum one must
understand the kinship he feels with the great men of history, with
 history itself. Lack of reverence for an image of Copernicus might
              suggest a lack of reverence for Saddam.
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=I"}

    n what sense does Saddam see himself as a great man? Saad al-
     Bazzaz, who defected in 1992, has thought a lot about this
  question, during his time as a newspaper editor and TV producer
 in Baghdad, and in the years since, as the publisher of an Arabic
                       newspaper in London.
                                  
  "I need a piece of paper and a pen," he told me recently in the
 lobby of Claridge's Hotel. He flattened the paper out on a coffee
   table and tested the pen. Then he drew a line down the center.
 "You must understand, the daily behavior is just the result of the
   mentality," he explained. "Most people would say that the main
 conflict in Iraqi society is sectarian, between the Sunni and the
 Shia Muslims. But the big gap has nothing to do with religion. It
 is between the mentality of the villages and the mentality of the
                             cities."
                                  
 "Okay. Here is a village." On the right half of the page al-Bazzaz
  wrote a V and beneath it he drew a collection of separate small
  squares. "These are houses or tents," he said. "Notice there are
  spaces between them. This is because in the villages each family
    has its own house, and each house is sometimes several miles
  from the next one. They are self-contained. They grow their own
     food and make their own clothes. Those who grow up in the
    villages are frightened of everything. There is no real law
  enforcement or civil society. Each family is frightened of each
other, and all of them are frightened of outsiders. This is the tribal
   mind. The only loyalty they know is to their own family, or to
their own village. Each of the families is ruled by a patriarch, and
the village is ruled by the strongest of them. This loyalty to tribe
   comes before everything. There are no values beyond power. You
can lie, cheat, steal, even kill, and it is okay so long as you are a
loyal son of the village or the tribe. Politics for these people is a
    bloody game, and it is all about getting or holding power."
                                  
  Al-Bazzaz wrote the word "city" atop the left half of the page.
 Beneath it he drew a line of adjacent squares. Below that he drew
another line, and another. "In the city the old tribal ties are left
 behind. Everyone lives close together. The state is a big part of
 everyone's life. They work at jobs and buy their food and clothing
   at markets and in stores. There are laws, police, courts, and
schools. People in the city lose their fear of outsiders, and take an
interest in foreign things. Life in the city depends on cooperation,
   on sophisticated social networks. Mutual self-interest defines
   public policy. You can't get anything done without cooperating
 with others, so politics in the city becomes the art of compromise
 and partnership. The highest goal of politics becomes cooperation,
  community, and keeping the peace. By definition, politics in the
   city becomes nonviolent. The backbone of urban politics isn't
                         blood, it's law."
                                  
 In al-Bazzaz's view, Saddam embodies the tribal mentality. "He is
 the ultimate Iraqi patriarch, the village leader who has seized a
    nation," he explained. "Because he has come so far, he feels
anointed by destiny. Everything he does is, by definition, the right
  thing to do. He has been chosen by Heaven to lead. Often in his
   life he has been saved by God, and each escape makes him more
  certain of his destiny. In recent years, in his speeches, he has
   begun using passages and phrases from the Koran, speaking the
  words as if they are his own. In the Koran, Allah says, 'If you
 thank me, I will give you more.' In the early nineties Saddam was
on TV, presenting awards to military officers, and he said, 'If you
   thank me, I will give you more.' He no longer believes he is a
  normal person. Dialogue with him is impossible because of this.
 He can't understand why journalists should be allowed to criticize
    him. How can they criticize the father of the tribe? This is
      something unacceptable in his mind. To him, strength is
    everything. To allow criticism or differences of opinion, to
  negotiate or compromise, to accede to the rule of law or to due
               process”these are signs of weakness."
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=S"}

  addam is, of course, not alone in admiring The Godfather series.
 They are obvious movies for him to like (they were also a favorite
   of the Colombian cocaine tycoon Pablo Escobar). On the surface
   it is a classic patriarchal tale. Don Vito Corleone builds his
  criminal empire from nothing, motivated in the main by love for
    his family. He sees that the world around him is vicious and
 corrupt, so he outdoes the world at its own cruelty and preys upon
  its vices, creating an apparent refuge of wealth and safety for
    himself and his own. We are drawn to his single-mindedness,
  subtle intelligence, and steadfast loyalty to an ancient code of
   honor in a changing world”no matter how unforgiving that code
    seems by modern standards. The Godfather suffers greatly but
  dies playing happily in the garden with his grandson, arguably a
     successful man. The deeper meaning of the films, however,
   apparently evades Saddam. The Godfather saga is more the story
 of Michael Corleone than of his father, and the film's message is
 not a happy one. Michael's obsessive loyalty to his father and to
 his family, to the ancient code of honor, leads him to destroy the
very things it is designed to protect. In the end Michael's family is
   torn by tragedy and hatred. He orders his own brother killed,
  choosing loyalty to code over loyalty to family. Michael becomes
 a tragic figure, isolated and unloved, ensnared by his own power.
                      He is a lot like Saddam.
                                  
   In Saddam's other favorite movie, The Old Man and the Sea, the
  old man, played by Spencer Tracy, hooks a great fish and fights
alone in his skiff to haul it in. It is easy to see why Saddam would
 be stirred by the image of a lone fisherman, surrounded by a great
  ocean, struggling to land this impossible fish. "I will show him
  what a man can do and what a man endures," the old man says. In
the end he succeeds, but the fish is too large for the dinghy, and is
   devoured by sharks before the trophy can be displayed. The old
 man returns to his hut with cut and bleeding hands, exhausted but
 happy in the knowledge that he has prevailed. It would be easy for
               Saddam to see himself in that old man.
                                  
  Or is he the fish? In the movie it leaps like a fantasy from the
  water”a splendid, wild, dangerous thing, magnificent in its size
and strength. It is hooked, but it refuses to accept its fate. "Never
have I had such a strong fish, or one that acted so strangely," the
old man proclaims. Later he says, "There is no panic in his fight."
  Saddam believes that he is a great natural leader, the likes of
which his world has not seen in thirteen centuries. Perhaps he will
fail in the struggle during his lifetime, but he is convinced that his
 courage and vision will fire a legend that will burn brightly in a
                    future Arab-centered world.
                                  
   Even as Saddam rhapsodizes over the rich history of Arabia, he
 concedes the Western world's clear superiority in two things. The
  first is weapons technology”hence his tireless efforts to import
     advanced military hardware and to develop weapons of mass
 destruction. The second is the art of acquiring and holding power.
  He has become a student of one of the most tyrannical leaders in
                      history: Joseph Stalin.
                                  
     Saïd Aburish's biography, Saddam Hussein: The Politics of
   Revenge (2000), tells of a meeting in 1979 between Saddam and
   the Kurdish politician Mahmoud Othman. It was an early-morning
  meeting, and Saddam received Othman in a small office in one of
   his palaces. It looked to Othman as if Saddam had slept in the
 office the night before. There was a small cot in the corner, and
          the President received him wearing a bathrobe.
                                  
    Next to the bed, Othman recalled, were "over twelve pairs of
   expensive shoes. And the rest of the office was nothing but a
   small library of books about one man, Stalin. One could say he
              went to bed with the Russian dictator."
                                  
 In the villages of Iraq the patriarch has only one goal: to expand
and defend his family's power. It is the only thing of value in the
   wide, treacherous world. When Saddam assumed full power, there
were still Iraqi intellectuals who had hopes for him. They initially
  accepted his tyranny as inevitable, perhaps even as a necessary
  bridge to a more inclusive government, and believed, as did many
 in the West, that his outlook was essentially modern. In this they
                    were gradually disappointed.
                                  
   In September of 1979 Saddam attended a conference of unaligned
  nations in Cuba, where he formed a friendship with Fidel Castro,
    who still keeps him supplied with cigars. Saddam came to the
      gathering with Salah Omar al-Ali, who was then the Iraqi
  ambassador to the United Nations, a post he had accepted after a
   long period of living abroad as an ambassador. Together Saddam
  and al-Ali had a meeting with the new Foreign Minister of Iran.
  Four years earlier Saddam had made a surprise concession to the
  soon-to-be-deposed Shah, reaching an agreement on navigation in
 the Shatt-al-Arab, a sixty-mile strait formed by the confluence of
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as they flow into the Persian Gulf.
 Both countries had long claimed the strait. In 1979, with the Shah
 roaming the world in search of cancer treatment, and power in the
          hands of the Ayatollah Khomeini (whom Saddam had
   unceremoniously booted out of Iraq the year before), relations
  between the two countries were again strained, and the waters of
the Shatt-al-Arab were a potential flash point. Both countries still
  claimed ownership of two small islands in the strait, which were
                     then controlled by Iran.
                                  
  But al-Ali was surprised by the tone of the discussions in Cuba.
     The Iranian representatives were especially agreeable, and
   Saddam seemed to be in an excellent mood. After the meeting al-
   Ali strolled with Saddam in a garden outside the meeting hall.
           They sat on a bench as Saddam lit a big cigar.
                                  
  "Well, Salah, I see you are thinking of something," Saddam said.
                  "What are you thinking about?"
                                  
 "I am thinking about the meeting we just had, Mr. President. I am
    very happy. I'm very happy that these small problems will be
  solved. I'm so happy that they took advantage of this chance to
   meet with you and not one of your ministers, because with you
     being here we can avoid another problem with them. We are
    neighbors. We are poor people. We don't need another war. We
        need to rebuild our countries, not tear them down."
                                  
    Saddam was silent for a moment, drawing thoughtfully on his
  cigar. "Salah, how long have you been a diplomat now?" he asked.
                                  
                         "About ten years."
                                  
        "Do you realize, Salah, how much you have changed?"
                                  
                       "How, Mr. President?"
                                  
     "How should we solve our problems with Iran? Iran took our
 lands. They are controlling the Shatt-al-Arab, our big river. How
   can meetings and discussions solve a problem like this? Do you
    know why they decided to meet with us here, Salah? They are
  weak is why they are talking with us. If they were strong there
   would be no need to talk. So this gives us an opportunity, an
  opportunity that only comes along once in a century. We have an
opportunity here to recapture our territories and regain control of
                            our river."
                                  
  That was when al-Ali realized that Saddam had just been playing
  with the Iranians, and that Iraq was going to go to war. Saddam
  had no interest in diplomacy. To him, statecraft was just a game
   whose object was to outmaneuver one's enemies. Someone like al-
Ali was there to maintain a pretense, to help size up the situation,
to look for openings, and to lull foes into a false sense of security.
               Within a year the Iran-Iraq war began.
                                  
It ended horrifically, eight years later, with hundreds of thousands
of Iranians and Iraqis dead. To a visitor in Baghdad the year after
  the war ended, it seemed that every other man on the street was
    missing a limb. The country had been devastated. The war had
 cost Iraq billions. Saddam claimed to have regained control of the
 Shatt-al-Arab. Despite the huge losses, he was giddy with victory.
     By 1987 his army, swelled by compulsory service and modern
   Western armaments, was the fourth largest in the world. He had
    an arsenal of Scud missiles, a sophisticated nuclear-weapons
   program under way, and deadly chemical and biological weapons
    in development. He immediately began planning more conquest.
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=S"}

   addam's invasion of Kuwait, in August of 1990, was one of the
 great military miscalculations of modern history. It was a product
   of grandiosity. Emboldened by his "victory" over Iran, Saddam
   had begun to plan other improbable undertakings. He announced
     that he was going to build a world-class subway system for
 Baghdad, a multi-billion-dollar project, and then proclaimed that
 he would construct a state-of-the-art nationwide rail system along
    with it. Ground was never broken for either venture. Saddam
   didn't have the money. One thing he did have, however, was an
   army of more than a million idle soldiers”easily enough men to
overrun the neighboring state of Kuwait, with its rich oil deposits.
    He gambled that the world would not care, and he was wrong.
  Three days after Saddam's takeover of the tiny kingdom President
   George Bush announced, "This will not stand," and immediately
  began assembling one of the largest military forces ever in the
                              region.
                                  
   Through the end of 1990 and into 1991 Ismail Hussain waited in
 the Kuwaiti desert for the American counterattack. He is a short,
   stocky man, a singer, musician, and songwriter. The whole time
  he was forced to wear a uniform, he knew that he did not belong
  in one. Although some of the men in his unit were good soldiers,
   none of them thought they belonged in Kuwait. They hoped that
    they would not have to fight. Everyone knew that the United
    States had more soldiers, more supplies, and better weapons.
    Surely Saddam would reach an agreement to save face, and his
    troops would be able to withdraw peacefully. They waited and
    waited for this to happen, and when word came that they were
 actually going to fight, Hussain decided that he was already dead.
    There was no hope: he foresaw death everywhere. If you went
 toward the American lines, they would shoot you. If you stayed in
   the open, they would blow you up. If you dug a hole and buried
   yourself, American bunker-buster bombs would stir your remains
     with the sand. If you ran, your own commanders would kill
  you”because they would be killed if their men fled. If a man was
   killed running away, his coffin would be marked with the word
  "jaban," or "coward." His memory would be disgraced, his family
   shunned. There would be no pension for them from the state, no
  secondary school for his children. "Jaban" was a mark that would
  stain the family for generations. There was no escaping it. Some
things are worse than staying with your friends and waiting to die.
 Hussain's unit manned an anti-aircraft gun. He never even saw the
            American fighter jet that took off his leg.
                                  
 It was apparent to everyone in the Iraqi military, from conscripts
  like Hussain to Saddam's top generals, that they could not stand
 up against such force. Saddam, however, didn't see it that way. Al-
      Bazzaz remembers being shocked by this. "We had the most
   horrible meeting on January 14, 1991, just two days before the
  allied offensive," he told me. "Saddam had just met with the UN
    Secretary General, who had come at the final hour to try to
  negotiate a peaceful resolution. They had been in a meeting for
  more than two and a half hours, so hopes were running high that
  some resolution had been reached. Instead Saddam stepped out to
    address us, and it was clear he was going to miss this last
   opportunity. He told us, 'Don't be afraid. I see the gates of
  Jerusalem open before me.' I thought, What is this shit? Baghdad
was about to be hit with this terrible firestorm, and he's talking to
             us about visions of liberating Palestine?"
                                  
  Wafic Samarai was in a particularly difficult position. How does
  one function as chief of intelligence for a tyrant who does not
 wish to hear the truth? On the one hand, if you tell him the truth
and it contradicts his sense of infallibility, you are in trouble. On
  the other, if you tell him only what he wants to hear, time will
      inevitably expose your lies and you will be in trouble.
                                  
   Samarai was a lifelong military officer. He had advised Saddam
  throughout the long war with Iran, and he had seen him develop a
    fairly sophisticated understanding of military terminology,
  weaponry, strategy, and tactics. But Saddam's vision was clouded
  by a strong propensity for wishful thinking”the downfall of many
    an amateur general. If Saddam wanted something to happen, he
   believed he could will it to happen. Samarai kept up a steady
 stream of intelligence reports as the United States and its allies
 assembled an army of nearly a million soldiers in Kuwait, with air
 power far beyond anything the Iraqis could muster, with artillery,
      missiles, tanks, and other armored vehicles decades more
   advanced than Iraq's arsenal. The Americans didn't hide these
   weapons. They wanted Saddam to understand exactly what he was
                            up against.
                                  
   Yet Saddam refused to be intimidated. He had a plan, which he
  outlined to Samarai and his other generals in a meeting in Basra
      weeks before the American offensive started. He proposed
   capturing U.S. soldiers and tying them up around Iraqi tanks,
   using them as human shields. "The Americans will never fire on
       their own soldiers," he said triumphantly, as if such
  squeamishness was a fatal flaw. It was understood that he would
   have no such compunction. In the fighting, he vowed, thousands
    of enemy prisoners would be taken for this purpose. Then his
   troops would roll unopposed into eastern Saudi Arabia, forcing
        the allies to back down. This was his plan, anyway.
                                  
   Samarai knew that this was nothing more than a hallucination.
   How were the Iraqis supposed to capture thousands of American
      soldiers? No one could approach the American positions,
especially in force, without being discovered and killed. Even if it
  could be done, the very idea of using soldiers as human shields
 was repulsive, against all laws and international agreements. Who
     knew how the Americans would respond to such an act? Might
     they bomb Baghdad with a nuclear weapon? Saddam's plan was
 preposterous. But none of the generals, including Samarai, said a
  word. They all nodded dutifully and took notes. To question the
   Great Uncle's grand strategy would have meant to admit doubt,
   timidity, and cowardice. It might also have meant demotion or
                               death.
                                  
  Still, as chief of intelligence, Samarai felt compelled to tell
 Saddam the truth. Late in the afternoon of January 14 the general
    reported for a meeting in Saddam's office in the Republican
 Palace. Dressed in a well-cut black suit, the President was behind
      his desk. Samarai swallowed hard and delivered his grim
  assessment. It would be very difficult to stand fast against the
   assault that was coming. No enemy soldiers had been captured,
    and it was unlikely that any would be. There was no defense
  against the number and variety of weapons arrayed against Iraq's
     troops. Saddam had refused all previous military advice to
   withdraw the bulk of his forces from Kuwait and move them back
  across the Iraqi border, where they might be more effective. Now
they were so thinly strung out across the desert that there was little
  to stop the Americans from advancing straight to Baghdad itself.
            Samarai had detailed evidence to back up his
     views”photographs, news reports, numbers. The Iraqis could
  expect nothing more than swift defeat, and the threat that Iran
    would take advantage of their weakness by invading from the
                              north.
                                  
 Saddam listened patiently to this litany of pending disaster. "Are
 these your personal opinions or are they facts?" he asked. Samarai
 had presented many facts in his report, but he conceded that some
          of what he was offering was educated conjecture.
                                  
       "I will now tell you my opinion," Saddam said calmly,
confidently. "Iran will never interfere. Our forces will put up more
   of a fight than you think. They can dig bunkers and withstand
America's aerial attacks. They will fight for a long time, and there
   will be many casualties on both sides. Only we are willing to
   accept casualties; the Americans are not. The American people
   are weak. They would not accept the losses of large numbers of
                          their soldiers."
                                  
    Samarai was flabbergasted. But he felt he had done his duty.
     Saddam would not be able to complain later that his chief
  intelligence officer had misled him. The two men sat in silence
     for a few moments. Samarai could feel the looming American
  threat like a great weight pressing on his shoulders. There was
   nothing to be done. To Samarai's surprise, Saddam did not seem
   angry with him for delivering this bad news. In fact, he acted
appreciative that Samarai had given it to him straight. "I trust you,
 and that's your opinion," he said. "You are a trustworthy person,
                       an honorable person."
                                  
Heavy aerial attacks began three days later. Five weeks after that,
  on February 24, the ground offensive began, and Saddam's troops
   promptly surrendered or fled. Thousands were pinned at a place
called Mutla Ridge as they tried to cross back into Iraq; most were
incinerated in their vehicles. Iran did not invade, but otherwise the
          war unfolded precisely as Samarai had predicted.
                                  
   In the days after this rout Samarai was again summoned to meet
   with Saddam. The President was working out of a secret office.
   He had been moving from house to house in the Baghdad suburbs,
      commandeering homes at random in order to avoid sleeping
   where American smart bombs might hit. Still, Samarai found him
  looking not just unfazed but oddly buoyed by all the excitement.
                                  
         "What is your evaluation, general?" Saddam asked.
                                  
"I think this is the biggest defeat in military history," Samarai said.
                                  
                      "How can you say that?"
                                  
 "This is bigger than the defeat at Khorramshahr [one of the worst
Iraqi losses in the war with Iran, with Iraqi casualties in the tens of
                            thousands]."
                                  
  Saddam didn't say anything at first. Samarai knew the President
      wasn't stupid. He surely had seen what everyone else had
   seen”his troops surrendering en masse, the slaughter at Mutla
   Ridge, the grinding devastation of the U.S. bombing campaign.
 But even if Saddam agreed with the general's assessment, he could
 not bring himself to say so. In the past, as at Khorramshahr, the
    generals could always be blamed for defeat. Military people
      would be accused of sabotage, betrayal, incompetence, or
   cowardice. There would be arrests and executions, after which
  Saddam could comfortably harbor the illusion that he had rooted
out the cause of failure. But this time the reasons for defeat rested
   squarely with him, and this, of course, was something he could
 never admit. "That's your opinion," he said curtly, and left it at
                               that.
                                  
 Defeated militarily, Saddam has in the years since responded with
    even wilder schemes and dreams, articulated in his typically
 confused, jargon-laden, quasi-messianic rhetoric. "On this basis,
  and along the same central concepts and their genuine constants,
     together with the required revolutionary compatibility and
   continuous renewal in styles, means, concepts, potentials, and
  methods of treatment and behavior, the proud and loyal people of
 Iraq and their valiant armed forces will win victory in the final
  results of the immortal Mother of All Battles," he declared in a
televised address to the Iraqi people in August of last year. "With
     them and through them, good Arabs will win victory. Their
  victory will be splendid, immortal, immaculate, with brilliance
 that no interference can overshadow. In our hearts and souls as in
 the hearts and souls of the high-minded, glorious Iraqi women and
   high-spirited Iraqi men, victory is absolute conviction, Allah
  willing. The picking of its final fruit, in accordance with its
 description which all the world will point to, is a matter of time
   whose manner and last and final hour will be determined by the
            Merciful Allah. And Allah is the greatest!"
                                  
  To help Allah along, Saddam had already started secret programs
       to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

                          Qaswah (Cruelty)
                                  
The flood has reached its climax and after the destruction, terror,
 murder, and sacrilege practiced by the aggressive, terrorist, and
criminal Zionist entity, together with its tyrannical ally, the U.S.,
     have come to a head against our brothers and our faithful
   struggling people in plundered Palestine. If evil achieves its
objectives there, Allah forbid, its gluttony for more will increase
and it will afflict our people and other parts of our wide homeland
                                too.
                                  
    ”Saddam Hussein, in a televised address to the Iraqi people,
                         December 15, 2001
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=I"}

  n the early 1980s a mid-level Iraqi bureaucrat who worked in the
     Housing Ministry in Baghdad saw several of his colleagues
  accused by Saddam's regime of accepting bribes. The accusations,
  he believes, were probably true. "There was petty corruption in
  our department," he says. The accused were all sentenced to die.
                                  
 "All of us in the office were ordered to attend the hanging," says
    the former bureaucrat, who now lives in London. "I decided I
  wasn't going to go, but when my friends found out my plans, they
   called me and urged me to reconsider, warning that my refusal
  could turn suspicion on me." So he went. He and the others from
 his office were led into a prison courtyard, where they watched as
    their colleagues and friends, with whom they had worked for
  years, with whose children their children played, with whom they
   had attended parties and picnics, were marched out with sacks
  tied over their heads. They watched and listened as the accused
    begged, wept, and protested their innocence from beneath the
  sacks. One by one they were hanged. The bureaucrat decided then
                      and there to leave Iraq.
                                  
 "I could not live in a country where such a thing takes place," he
 says. "It is wrong to accept bribes, and those who do it should be
   punished by being sent to jail. But to hang them? And to order
     their friends and colleagues to come watch? No one who has
  witnessed such cruelty would willingly stay and continue to work
                      under such conditions."
                                  
Cruelty is the tyrant's art. He studies and embraces it. His rule is
  based on fear, but fear is not enough to stop everyone. Some men
  and women have great courage. They are willing to brave death to
    oppose him. But the tyrant has ways of countering even this.
  Among those who do not fear death, some fear torture, disgrace,
  or humiliation. And even those who do not fear these things for
   themselves may fear them for their fathers, mothers, brothers,
 sisters, wives, and children. The tyrant uses all these tools. He
 commands not just acts of cruelty but cruel spectacle. So we have
 Saddam hanging the fourteen alleged Zionist plotters in 1969 in a
 public square, and leaving their dangling bodies on display. So we
    have Saddam videotaping the purge in the Baghdad conference
     hall, and sending the tape to members of his organization
   throughout the nation. So we have top party leaders forced to
     witness and even to participate in the executions of their
      colleagues. When Saddam cracks down on Shia clerics, he
  executes not just the mullahs but also their families. Pain and
 humiliation and death become public theater. Ultimately, guilt or
 innocence doesn't matter, because there is no law or value beyond
the tyrant's will; if he wants someone arrested, tortured, tried, and
   executed, that is sufficient. The exercise not only serves as
 warning, punishment, or purge but also advertises to his subjects,
his enemies, and his potential rivals that he is strong. Compassion,
   fairness, concern for due process or the law, are all signs of
  indecision. Indecision means weakness. Cruelty asserts strength.
                                  
 Among the Zulu, tyrants are said to be "full of blood." According
 to one estimate, in the third and fourth years of Saddam's formal
     rule (1981 and 1982) more than 3,000 Iraqis were executed.
  Saddam's horrors over the more than thirty years of his informal
  and formal rule will someday warrant a museum and archives. But
  lost among the most outrageous atrocities are smaller acts that
 shed light on his personality. Tahir Yahya was the Prime Minister
of Iraq when the Baath Party took power, in 1968. It is said that in
     1964, when Saddam was in prison, Yahya had arranged for a
 personal meeting and tried to coerce him into turning against the
  Baathists and cooperating with the regime. Yahya had served Iraq
as a military officer his whole adult life, and had at one time even
    been a prominent member of the Baath Party, one of Saddam's
    superiors. But he had earned Saddam's enduring scorn. After
     seizing power, Saddam had Yahya, a well-educated man whose
   sophistication he resented, confined to prison. On his orders
    Yahya was assigned to push a wheelbarrow from cell to cell,
collecting the prisoners' slop buckets. He would call out "Rubbish!
   Rubbish!" The former Prime Minister's humiliation was a source
 of delight to Saddam until the day Yahya died, in prison. He still
    likes to tell the story, chuckling over the words "Rubbish!
                             Rubbish!"
                                  
       In another case Lieutenant General Omar al-Hazzaa was
 overheard speaking ill of the Great Uncle in 1990. He was not just
 sentenced to death. Saddam ordered that prior to his execution his
 tongue be cut out; for good measure, he also executed al-Hazzaa's
  son, Farouq. Al-Hazzaa's homes were bulldozed, and his wife and
                other children left on the street.
                                  
    Saddam is realistic about the brutal reprisals that would be
 unleashed should he ever lose his grip on power. In their book Out
 of the Ashes (1999), Andrew and Patrick Cockburn tell of a family
    that complained to Saddam that one of their members had been
   unjustly executed. He was unapologetic, and told them, "Do not
  think you will get revenge. If you ever have the chance, by the
 time you get to us there will not be a sliver of flesh left on our
    bodies." In other words, if he ever becomes vulnerable, his
                  enemies will quickly devour him.
                                  
 Even if Saddam is right that greatness is his destiny, his legend
will be colored by cruelty. It is something he sees as regrettable,
 perhaps, but necessary”a trait that defines his stature. A lesser
  man would lack the stomach for it. His son Uday once boasted to
   a childhood playmate that he and his brother, Qusay, had been
      taken to prisons by their father to witness torture and
 executions”to toughen them up for "the difficult tasks ahead," he
                               said.
                                  
     Yet no man is without contradictions. Even Saddam has been
   known to grieve over his excesses. Some who saw him cry at the
   lectern during the 1979 purge dismiss it as a performance, but
    Saddam has a history of bursting into tears. In the wave of
   executions following his formal assumption of power, according
 to Saïd Aburish's biography, he locked himself in his bedroom for
    two days and emerged with eyes red and swollen from weeping.
  Aburish reports that Saddam then paid a brazen though apparently
    sincere condolence call on the family of Adnan Hamdani, the
 executed official who had been closest to him during the previous
         decade. He expressed not remorse”the execution was
   necessary”but sadness. He told Hamdani's widow apologetically
 that "national considerations" must outweigh personal ones. So on
   occasion, at least, Saddam the person laments what Saddam the
    tyrant must do. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln drew a
   sharp distinction between what he personally would do”abolish
     slavery”and what his office required him to do: uphold the
      Constitution and the Union. Saddam ought to feel no such
conflict; by definition, the interests of the state are his own. But
                              he does.
                                  
 The conflict between his personal priorities and his presidential
  ones has been particularly painful in his own family. Two of his
    sons-in-law, the brothers Saddam and Hussein Kamel, fled to
  Jordan and spilled state secrets”about biological, chemical, and
   nuclear-weapons programs”before inexplicably returning to Iraq
   and their deaths. Uday Hussein, Saddam's eldest son, is by all
 reports a sadistic criminal, if not completely mad. He is a tall,
      dark-skinned, well-built man of thirty-seven, who in his
  narcissism and willfulness is almost a caricature of his father.
Uday has all his father's brutal instincts and, apparently, none of
 his discipline. He is a flamboyant drunk, and famous for designing
    his own wild apparel. Photographs show him wearing enormous
 bow ties and suits in colors to match his luxury cars, including a
 bright-red one with white stripes, and one that is half red, half
white. Some of his suit jackets have a lapel on one side but not the
                              other.
                                  
 Ismail Hussain, the hapless Iraqi soldier who lost his leg in the
Kuwaiti desert, attracted Uday's attention as a singer after the war.
  He became the First Son's favorite performer, and was invited to
   sing at the huge parties Uday threw every Monday and Thursday
    night. The parties were often held at a palace, which Saddam
  built, on an island in the Tigris near Baghdad. The opulence was
 eye-popping. All the door handles and fixtures in the palace were
                           made of gold.
                                  
 "At the parties," says Ismail, who now lives in Toronto, "I would
     be performing, and Uday would climb up on the stage with a
  machine gun and start shooting it at the ceiling. Everyone would
  drop down, terrified. I was used to being around weapons, bigger
      weapons than Uday's Kalashnikov, so I would just keep on
    singing. Sometimes at these parties there would be dozens of
   women and only five or six men. Uday insists that everyone get
    drunk with him. He would interrupt my performance, get up on
  stage with a big glass of cognac for himself and one for me. He
 would insist that I drink all of it with him. When he gets really
  drunk, out come the guns. His friends are all terrified of him,
   because he can have them imprisoned or killed. I saw him once
 get angry with one of his friends. He kicked the man in the ass so
  hard that his boot flew off. The man ran over and retrieved the
    boot and then tried to put it back on Uday's foot, with Uday
                    cursing him all the while."
                                  
 Uday's blessing paves the way for a singer like Ismail to perform
   regularly on Iraqi television. For this service Uday demands a
    kickback, and he can unmake a star as quickly as he can make
     one. The same is true in sports. Raed Ahmed was an Olympic
     weightlifter who carried the Iraqi flag during the opening
  ceremonies of the Atlanta games, in 1996. "Uday was head of the
  Olympic Committee, and all sports in Iraq," Ahmed told me early
  this year, in his home in a suburb of Detroit. "During training
  camp he would closely monitor all the athletes, keeping in touch
 with the trainers and pushing them to push the athletes harder. If
 he's unhappy with the results, he will throw the trainers and even
  the athletes into a prison he keeps inside the Olympic Committee
  building. If you make a promise of a certain result, and fail to
 achieve it in competition, then the punishment is a special prison
  where they torture people. Some of the athletes started to quit
   when Uday took over, including many who were the best in their
  sports. They just decided it was not worth it. Others, like me,
 loved their sports, and success can be a stepping-stone in Iraq to
  better things, like a nice car, a nice home, a career. I always
  managed to avoid being punished. I was careful never to promise
anything that I couldn't deliver. I would always say that there was
   a strong possibility that I would be beaten. Then, when I won,
                        Uday was so happy."
                                  
   Ahmed sat like a giant in his small living room, his shoulders
  nearly as wide as the back of the couch. The world of Saddam and
   Uday now strikes him as a bizarre wonderland, an entire nation
    hostage to the whims of a tyrant and his crazy son. "When I
   defected, Uday was very angry," he said. "He visited my family
     and questioned them. 'Why would Ahmed do such a thing?' he
   asked. 'He was always rewarded by me.' But Uday is despised."
                                  
     Saddam tolerated Uday's excesses”his drunken parties, his
   private jail in the Olympic Committee headquarters”until Uday
  murdered one of the Great Uncle's top aides at a party in 1988.
   Uday immediately tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills.
    According to the Cockburns, "As his stomach was being pumped
   out, Saddam arrived in the emergency room, pushed the doctors
  aside, and hit Uday in the face, shouting: 'Your blood will flow
 like my friend's!'" His father softened, and the murder was ruled
    an accident. Uday spent four months in custody and then four
   months with an uncle in Geneva before he was picked up by the
  Swiss police for carrying a concealed weapon and asked to leave
 the country. Back in Baghdad, in 1996, he became the target of an
   assassination attempt. He was hit by eight bullets, and is now
     paralyzed from the waist down. His behavior has presumably
   disqualified him from succeeding his father. Saddam has made a
      show in recent years of grooming Qusay, a quieter, more
                   disciplined and dutiful heir.
                                  
  But the shooting of Uday was a warning to Saddam. Reportedly, a
   small group of well-educated Iraqi dissidents”none of whom has
      ever been apprehended, despite thousands of arrests and
     interrogations”carried it out. The would-be assassins are
    rumored to be associated with the family of General Omar al-
   Hazzaa, the officer whose tongue was cut out before he and his
  son were executed. This may be true; but there is no shortage of
                    aggrieved parties in Iraq.
                     {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=A"}

   s Saddam approaches his sixty-sixth birthday, his enemies are
      numerous, strong, and determined. He celebrated the 1992
   electoral defeat of George Bush by firing a gun from a palace
   balcony. Ten years later a new President Bush is in the White
    House, with a new national mission to remove Saddam. So the
walls that protect the tyrant grow higher and higher. His dreams of
pan-Arabia and his historical role in it grow ever more fanciful. In
    his clearer moments Saddam must know that even if he manages
 to hang on to power for the remainder of his life, the chances of
 his fathering a dynasty are slim. As he retreats to his secret bed
 each night, sitting up to watch a favorite movie on TV or to read
 one of his history books, he must know it will end badly for him.
     Any man who reads as much as he does, and who studies the
  dictators of modern history, knows that in the end they are all
                       toppled and disdained.
                                  
"His aim is to be leader of Iraq forever, for as long as he lives,"
  Samarai says. "This is a difficult task, even without the United
States targeting you. The Iraqis are a divided and ruthless people.
 It is one of the most difficult nations in the world to govern. To
   accomplish his own rule, Saddam has shed so much blood. If his
aim is for his power to be transferred to his family after his death,
I think this is far into the realm of wishful thinking. But I think he
          lost touch with reality in that sense long ago."
                                  
 This, ultimately, is why Saddam will fail. His cruelty has created
great waves of hatred and fear, and it has also isolated him. He is
 out of step. His speeches today play like a broken record. They no
  longer resonate even in the Arab world, where he is despised by
secular liberals and Muslim conservatives alike. In Iraq itself he is
   universally hated. He blames the crippling of the state on UN
 sanctions and U.S. hostility, but Iraqis understand that he is the
   cause of it. "Whenever he would start in blaming the Americans
 for this and that, for everything, we would look at each other and
    roll our eyes," says Sabah Khalifa Khodada, the former Iraqi
    major who was stripped and decontaminated for a meeting with
  the Great Uncle. The forces that protect him know this too”they
do not live full time behind the walls. Their loyalty is governed by
  fear and self-interest, and will tilt decisively if and when an
   alternative appears. The key to ending Saddam's tyranny is to
present such an alternative. It will not be easy. Saddam will never
 give up. Overthrowing him will almost certainly mean killing him.
He guards his hold on the state as he guards his own life. There is
                       no panic in his fight.
                                  
   But for all the surrounding threats, Saddam sees himself as an
  immortal figure. Nothing could be more illustrative of this than
the plot of his first novel, Zabibah and the King. Set in a mythical
  Arabian past, it is a simple fable about a lonely king, trapped
   behind the high walls of his palace. He feels cut off from his
    subjects, so he sets out on occasion to mingle. On one such
outing, to a rural village, the king is struck by the beauty of the
  young Zabibah. She is married to a brutish husband, but the king
   summons her to his palace, where her rustic ways are at first
  scorned by the sophisticated courtiers. In time Zabibah's sweet
      simplicity and virtue charm the court and win the king's
 heart”although their relationship remains chaste. Questioning his
   own stern methods, the king is reassured by Zabibah, who tells
    him, "The people need strict measures so that they can feel
 protected by this strictness." But dark forces invade the kingdom.
    Infidel outsiders pillage and destroy the village, aided by
   Zabibah's jealous and humiliated husband, who rapes her. (The
   outrage occurs on January 17, the day in 1991 when the United
 States and allied powers began aerial attacks on Iraq.) Zabibah is
    later killed; the king defeats his enemy and slays Zabibah's
      husband. He then experiments with giving his people more
    freedoms, but they fall to fighting among themselves. Their
    squabbles are interrupted by the good king's death and their
     realization of his greatness and importance. The martyred
     Zabibah's sage advice reminds them: the people need strict
                             measures.
                                  
   And so Saddam champions the simple virtues of a glorious Arab
 past, and dreams that his kingdom, though universally scorned and
defiled, will rise again and triumph. Like the good king, he is vital
 in a way that will not be fully understood until he is gone. Only
  then will we all study the words and deeds of this magnificent,
    defiant soul. He awaits his moment of triumph in a distant,
       glorious future that mirrors a distant, glorious past.



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