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Mark Bowden, the author of The Atlantic's May cover story, talks
about the strange life of Saddam Hussein and why his downfall is
inevitable
.....
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hough many Americans are at a loss to name even the most
powerful of world leaders, nearly all are familiar with Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein. Saddam is so frequently the instigator of trouble
both in his own region and”thanks to his influence over the
international oil market”worldwide, that his pompadoured,
moustachioed, military-clad image has become a commonplace
sight in American newpapers and television broadcasts. (Just this
week we saw him urging Arab countries to curtail oil production
in protest against Israel's military offensive.)
But as Mark Bowden makes clear in his May cover story, "Tales
of the Tyrant," there is far more to Saddam than the belligerent
caricature with which most of us are familiar. By conducting
extensive interviews with a number of expatriate Iraqis who have
had personal dealings with him, and by digging through the
extensive literature on Saddam, Bowden has pieced together a
comprehensive portrait of this enigmatic despot”shedding light
on how he developed into the monstrous figure he is today.
Not so long ago, Saddam was admired as a thoughtful, articulate,
intelligent politician who was an asset to Iraq's reform-minded
socialist-revolutionary party. Some of those who knew him in the
sixties and seventies recall enjoying idealistic bull-sessions with
him about Iraq's future. And as he gained power within the party,
he began to implement a number of reforms to Iraq's health-care
and educational systems that both seemed to fulfill his early
promise and earned him praise in the West.
But in 1979, just when he may have been poised for election to
the party's top position, he seized the party leadership in an abrupt
and violent manner”accusing a number of influential party
leaders of treason, and then having them publicly executed.
"Everyone now understood exactly how things would work from
that day forward" Bowden writes. Saddam now wielded absolute
power, and those who crossed or challenged him would be
eliminated.
This dramatic change in Saddam perplexed many outside
observers, but several Iraqis with whom Bowden spoke suggested
that Saddam's sudden ruthlessness may have represented not so
much a transformation of his character as the emergence of an
impulse that had been hidden within him all along. Saddam, they
pointed out, had grown up in a primitive village where subsistence
was difficult and competition and violence among family clans
was the rule. Saad al-Bazzaz, a former newspaper editor and
television producer in Baghdad, described Iraqi village life thus:
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.
Perhaps, al-Bazzaz suggested, Saddam had long been planning to
become "the ultimate Iraqi patriarch, the village leader who has
seized a nation." If so, Saddam may have been interested in
reform only insofar as it could further his own power.
A pathological sense of vanity, Bowden explains, has also played
an important role in Saddam's quest for absolute power. He seems
to want more than anything to go down in history as a great
man”a glorious champion of the Arab people. With a view to
this, he has had giant statues erected in his honor, poems lauding
him presented on television, and a nineteen-part biography written
about his accomplishments. He has even had his lineage traced to
the daughter of the prophet Muhammad and”in honor of that
alleged divine connection”had a 600-page copy of the Koran
hand-written in his own donated blood. "Can ego alone explain
such displays?" Bowden asks. "Might it be the opposite? What
colossal insecurity and self-loathing would demand such
compensation?"
His utter conviction that Allah has appointed him the avenger of
his people has rendered him impervious to reason when it comes
to making foreign-policy decisions. Thus, believing that he cannot
but prevail, he frequently takes foolish, hubristic military and
political action that ends up getting many of his citizens
needlessly killed or injured. His people despise him both for this
and for the atrocities he regularly commits, seemingly at whim,
against those he perceives as his enemies.
"Ultimately," Bowden writes, "Saddam will fail," because nearly
every move he makes creates new enemies who may one day turn
on him. In the meantime, Saddam works hard to elude that fate by
hiding behind the high walls of his palaces, sleeping as little as
possible (and never in the same place for more than one night at a
time), and scrupulously concealing from the public such signs of
aging and vulnerability as his graying hair, his bad back, and his
worsening eyesight. "Survival [has become] his one overriding
passion. So he regulates his diet, tests his food for poison,
exercises behind well-patrolled walls, trusts no one." Despite
Saddam's extensive wealth and power, then, the life of the tyrant
is hardly enviable. "One might think that the most powerful man
has the most choices," Bowden writes, "but in reality he has the
fewest."
Mark Bowden, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is the
author of Black Hawk Down (1999) and Killing Pablo (2001). He
spoke with me by phone on April 15.
”Sage Stossel
You emphasize that Saddam Hussein scrupulously hides the
intimate details of his life from the general public, but you've
managed to paint a fairly full picture of his background, his
personal habits, and his daily routines. Was it difficult to
figure out how to access that kind of information?
Obviously I wasn't going to get to hang around with Saddam
Hussein himself”although I did try! I sent a letter and phoned the
Iraqi consulate in New York, asking if I could interview him. But
they never responded. So I didn't get anywhere with that.
The hardest thing was to try to sort out the truth from fantasy.
There have been a number of books written about Saddam,
several of them by Iraqi expatriates, and one by the British
journalists Alexander and Leslie Cockburn. But the problem with
those books is that they repeat a lot of rumors about him. Given
that he is such a despised figure in his own country and around the
world, anything bad that's said about Saddam is repeated and
written down as though it were definitely true. My hunch going in
was that if I were trying to write about the intimate details of his
personal life, it was going to be difficult to sort out the tall tales
from the truth. The only way to try to get at the truth was by
finding people who had personal relationships with him and
getting them to talk about their experiences. In my reporting, I try
to get first-hand stories because I have the best shot at getting
reliable information that way.
And they had to be people who aren't under his influence
anymore, right?
Yes. These are people who fled Iraq, so they aren't friends of
Saddam's”at least not any longer.
I tried to weigh the credibility of the people I interviewed on the
basis of my own judgment: In meeting them did they appear to be
the kind of people who make up stuff? Or did they try to stick
pretty much to the facts. I was particularly pleased that someone
like General Wafic Samarai, who was an important source for me,
and whom I quoted somewhat extensively, defended Saddam in a
number of ways, and debunked some of the more outrageous
rumors about him. That enhanced his credibility in my eyes.
Because here is someone who is politically opposed to
Saddam”who thinks he's wrong and misguided”but who has a
certain amount of respect for him as a person. Not that I was
thrilled that he liked Saddam, but I appreciated that he wasn't just
out to get him. That's what I look for.
Many of the people you interviewed talked about having been
impressed with how articulate and open-minded Saddam was
in his younger, socialist-revolutionary days: he seemed to
enjoy engaging in genuine give-and-take discussions with
others, and he took many significant steps to improve the
quality of life for the Iraqi people. Is it your impression that,
as some of the people you interviewed suggest, his period of
reasonableness was just a carefully calculated charade,
masking an underlying ruthlessness that has stayed with him
since his rural upbringing? Or do you think it's more a matter
of his somehow changing over time as he grew older and
gained power?
My guess is that it's the latter”that he was corrupted by power.
As they say, Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. I think Saddam was a good politician back when he
needed support from other people in order to become more
powerful. At the time that he was being more open-minded and
more human, I suspect that was somewhat genuine. But I think
there was never anything selfless about Saddam. There's no
question that his ultimate goal was always to gather power to
himself”to advance himself and his family and his own village
and their interests. The people who knew him earlier feel very
betrayed. And in their sense of betrayal, they tend to ascribe to
Saddam a kind of all-knowingness”as if he knew exactly where
he was heading and exactly what he intended to do right from the
beginning. But I think that, like most people, he couldn't foresee
where he would be ten, twenty years down the road; what kind of
power he would wield and what he would do with it. I suspect the
truth is that he has somewhat surprised even himself.
So is it your sense that the eventual emergence of Saddam's
tyranny and masochism wasn't inevitable? That if he hadn't
managed to gain a certain amount of power, he would have
remained a reasonable person, and no one would ever have
known that he was capable of such atrocities?
I think so. In order to be able to become the sort of exaggeratedly
cruel and tyrannical figure he is now, he needed to amass a huge
amount of power. And one of the things that I tried to point out in
the article is that other people have to collaborate in making a
tyrant. What happened was that a lot of people hitched their
wagons to Saddam and used him to further their own interests.
And he turned on them at some point. He became so powerful that
he got rid of everybody who disagreed with him or tried to
influence him in ways that he didn't like. So the people who bet
on Saddam were right in the sense that he was going to become a
very powerful leader, but they were wrong in assuming that he
had any ambitions beyond his own, or any larger social ambitions
for his country.
I thought it was interesting that you began the article with a
description not, as one might expect, of Saddam's shocking
atrocities, but of the pathetically constrained and lonely life he
leads. I have to admit I was surprised to find myself almost
feeling sorry for him at first. Was that an intended effect?
What I began with was a description of his person”of his body.
You know, what he looks like. At age sixty-six how's he holding
up? I wanted to give a sense of him as a man. The whole point of
the article is to penetrate the myths and the legend and write about
him as a human being. Saying that makes it sound like my goal
was to try and write about him sympathetically, but really it was
just to try to understand him as a person. So I began the story by
demonstrating to the reader that this is not a typical piece about
Saddam Hussein; this is a story that's going to try and tell you
something personal about him. And if you were struck by his
isolation, and felt a little sorry for him because of it, that's because
it is sad. That is the natural state of the tyrant”to live in fear, to
live in isolation.
I'm curious about the presentation of the article, with its
division into sections titled "Shakhsuh (His Person)," Tumooh
(Ambition)," "Hadafuh (His Goal)," and so on, with each
heading followed by a quote from one of Saddam's speeches. Is
that format modeled after anything in particular? Or is it just
something you came up with to help organize the piece?
It was kind of influenced by Ryszard Kapuscinski. He's a Polish
journalist whom I admire greatly. He wrote a book some years ago
called the Shah of Shahs about the Shah of Iran. It wasn't exactly
like what I did in this story, because he began by actually
assembling artifacts as though he were a detective”a photograph,
a passport, a newspaper clipping, whatever. And he would use
these items to inspire long passages in which he would tell stories
and analyze the Shah in various ways. That impressed me as a
useful way of organizing a piece that, by necessity”because
obviously you can't get close this person”is both speculation and
fact.
You write that "The sheer scale of the tyrant's deeds mocks
psychoanalysis. What begins with ego and ambition becomes a
political movement." In the course of informing yourself about
Saddam, did you look into the lives of any other tyrants and
dictators as a means of comparison?
I've read a lot of books about tyrants, including some by Gabriel
Garcia Marquez. He's written several times about tyrannical
figures”in Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His
Labyrinth. I've read about Mao; I've read about Stalin; I've read
about Hitler. I read Jon Lee Anderson's book Che, which has some
really interesting insights into Castro. So I had a kind of
familiarity with the subject. And one of the things that interested
me about doing the piece on Saddam is that it was an opportunity
for me to think about and reflect on the nature of the tyrant”how
someone becomes a tyrant, what that means to their lives, what
their motivations are. It's a recurring theme in modern world
history
Does he conform to some kind of typical pattern? Are there
aspects of his personality or situation that stand out as
unusual?
Some things about him are different. In modern times tyrants have
tended to be motivated primarily by ideology. So you have Pol Pot
and Mao and Stalin and Hitler and Castro, all of whom were
driven by fantasies of creating a higher social order. And then you
have tyrants like Mobutu Sese-Sekou and Idi Amin and Papa Doc
Duvalier, who were primarily motivated by greed”who were just
trying to amass as much power, and have sex with as many
women, and eat as much food as they could. Saddam is different
in that he appears to be motivated primarily by vanity. And by this
romantic fascination with Arabian history”the glory of Arabia.
You talk about how he's despised by his own people and by the
people of neighboring countries. Does his devotion to the glory
of Arabia earn him any respect?
I've never had an opportunity to travel widely in Iraq. But my
impression from people whom I've interviewed and from what I've
read is that his fantasies no longer resonate very much anywhere
in that world. Not in his own country, and not in the region.
What about Saddam's decision yesterday to stop oil exports to
the West in solidarity with the Palestinians? Does that win him
any points with the Arab world?
Yes. This is probably the first thing that he's done in recent years
that has enhanced his prestige in that part of the world. To people
in the street, and also to the leadership, Saddam is an exceedingly
unpopular person. Even though the leaders of that region would
publicly oppose a United States invasion of Iraq, or an effort to rid
Iraq of Saddam, privately they would support it”or at the very
least, be happy if it was successful. But I do think he's gained
points for himself with the oil embargo, without a doubt. It's one
of the ways that this crisis in the Middle East between Israel and
Palestine has serious implications for the United States and the
rest of the world.
You emphasize that Saddam is very out of touch with the
world beyond his palace walls, both because he can't safely
venture outside to learn what's going on first-hand and
because people are afraid to tell him anything he doesn't want
to hear. You do mention, though, that he watches international
television stations like al-Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC. How
attuned is he to the Western media, and what are the chances
that he would become aware of the existence of an article like
this detailing all the things about him that he doesn't want
anyone to know?
I think he almost certainly will become aware of this article. But I
think of all the things that are written and said about him, this is
hardly the most terrible. I'd be curious to know his reponse to it.
And, you know, if he complained to me, I'd say, Well, I asked to
spend some time with you and interview you, but you wouldn't let
me, so I did the best I could!
You explain that Saddam has washed his hands of his dissolute
and deranged elder son Uday, and currently seems to be
grooming his quieter, more responsible son Qusay to be his
successor. What do you know about Qusay? Might he make
for a more reasonable and judicious leader than his father?
I sincerely doubt the regime of Saddam Hussein will survive
Saddam. Even if he does live out his normal life span, it's very
doubtful that his sons would carry on. They would have to be
formidably powerful in the way that he is, which I think is
unlikely. It follows the pattern of tyrants worldwide: it's a rare
tyrannical figure whose regime survives death.
What end do you foresee for him? Are there circumstances
under which his own people would overthrow him without
outside help? And how receptive would the Iraqi people be to
assistance from the U.S. in eliminating Saddam and/or in
setting up a successor government?
My guess would be that Saddam will fall, probably fairly soon.
He'll probably be killed by somebody in his inner circle. But it
will be connected in some way to an American effort”in
conjunction with American military strikes. That's just pure
conjecture on my part, but that would be my guess.
If the military people around Saddam were convinced that the
United States was definitely going to invade, they would know
they were going to be defeated. And since I doubt that there's
really any intense personal loyalty to Saddam, I suspect that the
people around him would not fight to the death to protect him, but
rather would begin to maneuver to try and head off an American
invasion and defeat by getting rid of Saddam themselves.
So you don't think the United States will end up having to go
after him?
I don't think so. But we have to be ready to do it, and that has to
be apparent to Iraq. We may even have to launch some strikes into
Iraq, just to demonstrate that we are serious about getting rid of
him. If we do that, I think he will be gotten rid of.
Would eliminating just Saddam put a stop to Iraq's
development of chemical and biological weapons?
It could. I think that any regime that followed Saddam and that
wanted to avoid his fate would be wise to cooperate with the
Western world in winning back Iraq's place among civilized
nations.
The point of going in and getting rid of Saddam would be to
create or support a regime there that would lead to
democratization”an opening up of the society and a government
that wasn't belligerent to the United States and the rest of the
world.
You talked about some of the reforms Saddam made back
before he evolved into a tyrant”building schools and
hospitals, and improving health care and national literacy.
You write that, earlier in his career, Saddam was considered
"the best hope for secular modernization." Do you think Iraq
might be relatively well primed to adopt a democratic style of
government because of the groundwork that Saddam laid long
ago?
I doubt it. But there are certainly people who argue that. The Iraqi
National Congress, which is the group of expatriates that the
United States has been supporting, claims that the ground there is
fertile for democracy and that getting rid of Saddam will enable
the creation of a secular democratic society. I think, frankly, that
that's a long shot. But I don't claim to know enough about Iraq to
predict with any certainty what would be likely to happen. One of
the problems about going after Saddam is the uncertainty about
what would follow.
Knowing what you know, how would you advise the decision-
makers in Washington to deal with Saddam?
After working on this story, I really do think that Saddam poses a
serious threat to the United States and the rest of the world”not
that he will attack Israel or the United States directly, but if he
possesses or develops nuclear weapons of mass destruction, I have
no doubt that he will find a way to get those weapons into the
hands of groups like al Qaeda and others who will use them.
Saddam has been making a very serious effort for some years now
to develop the kinds of weapons that really can only be developed
by a state. So I think that in the interest of self-defense it's really
important that we do something to end his regime. But as for how
to go about it? I'm afraid that's, as they say in the military, "over
my pay grade."
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