Bombing Iraq

Greetings,

On the tenth anniversary of the bombing of Iraq, the death toll
of Iraqis continues to rise today.  The article below was 
published yesterday, and it is well worth the time.  Robert Fiski s 
one of the most prolific writers in Britain today who is not afraid of 
telling the truth about Palestine or any other issues related to the 
Middle East.  KS

For more information on Iraq:
http://www.MiddleEast.Org/iraq.htm
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             SADDAM HUSSEIN: THE LAST GREAT TYRANT
                     By Robert Fisk 

[The Independent - 30 December 2000]
When the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Heikal visited Iraq during the early 
years 
of Saddam's rule, he met the minister for industry. Heikal was impressed by 
the 
intense, hard-working, intellectual man running Iraq's dynamic industrial 
output. 
So on his next visit, Heikal asked to meet him again. Officials explained 
that 
they had no information about the minister and all enquiries should be 
addressed 
to His Excellency the President. So when at last Heikal turned up for his 
interview 
with the dictator of Iraq, he asked about the minister for industry. 

"He's gone," Saddam said. "Gone?", asked Heikal There was a pause. "We 
scissored 
his neck – he was suspected of being a traitor." But was there any evidence 
of 
this, the appalled Heikal asked. Was there any proof? "In Iraq, we don't need 
proof," Saddam replied, "suspicion is enough." In Cairo, he went on, 
Egyptians 
might have a white revolution. "In Iraq we have a red revolution." Heikal was 
horrified. But should he have been surprised? 
There is about Saddam Hussein a peculiar ruthlessness, an almost calculated 
cruelty, 
perhaps even an interest in pain. It wasn't enough to order the murder of his 
sons-in-law after their return from exile in Jordan. They had to be dragged 
away 
with meat hooks through their eyes. It wasn't enough to order the hanging of 
the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in 1990; Bazoft was to be left unaware 
of his fate until a British embassy official turned up at the Abu Ghorraib 
prison 
to say goodbye. At Abu Ghorraib, women prisoners are allowed a party the 
night 
before one of them is to be hanged. 

Women are dispatched on Thursdays. Families are asked to bring their own 
coffin 
when a relative has been executed. 

And yet we loved him. In the days when Saddam clawed his way to power, 
personally 
shot members of his own cabinet, or used gas for the first time on his 
recalcitrant 
Kurds, we loved him. When he invaded Iran in 1980, we gave him Bailey bridges 
and Mirage jets and radio sets and poison gas – the Mirages from France, the 
poison gas, of course, from Germany – and US satellite reconnaissance 
pictures 
of the Iranian front lines. I once met the Cologne arms dealer who personally 
took the photos from Washington DC to Baghdad. The Russians poured in their 
new 
T-72 tanks. Saddam's war against Iran – the greatest mass killing in modern 
Middle 
Eastern history until the UN sanctions of the last decade – was designed to 
appeal 
to both Arabs and the West. For the Arabs who tamely poured their millions 
into 
his armoury, Kuwait among the most prominent, his Iraqi sons were wading 
through 
anharr al-damm – literally "rivers of blood" – to defend the al-bawwabah 
al-sharqiyah, 
the "Eastern Gateway" to the Arab world and Saudi Arabia. To the West, he was 
fighting off Khomeini's Islamic hordes. Asked why the Iraqis used gas against 
their enemies, one of his senior confidants replied: "When you weed the lawn, 
you have to use weed-killer." 

Blundering, ignorant of Western (though not Arab) history, largely 
uneducated, 
an original Tikriti corner-boy whose first political act was an attempted 
assassination 
and an escape, wounded, into the desert; how did he do it? How come the man 
who 
defied George Bush senior is still there to defy George Bush junior? How 
come, 
10 years after the "mother of all battles" – a phrase typical of Saddam – 
and 
10 years after UN sanctions that have killed at least a million Iraqis, 
Saddam 
is still enjoying his palaces and cigars? 

The French are a clue. They idolised Saddam in the late Seventies. He was 
feted 
on his arrival at Orly, dined out by the Mayor of Paris (a certain M Chirac), 
swamped with champagne as he watched a bull-running circus in central France. 
For the French, he was a kind of Jacobin, the reformer-turned-extremist whose 
reign of terror had a power all its own. Saddam's "red revolution" was always 
rubber-stamped by the democratic mockeries of Iraq – he asked the Kurds of a 
northern Iraqi town if he should hang Bazoft and their cries of affirmation 
doomed 
the correspondent – but somehow, in a crazed way, it was modern and 
progressive. 
Iraq's hospitals and medical care were on a par with Europe, women's rights 
were 
rigorously enforced, religious insurrection was suppressed in blood. 

And he was – and is – a very intelligent man. When I first saw him, in 
1978, 
he was espousing the merits of nuclear power, of binary fission (technology 
courtesy 
of his beloved France). Self-confident, quoting from Arab poets and writers, 
replying to foreign journalists who snapped at him, with humour and history. 
Asked, in view of his little speech, about the danger of nuclear weapons 
proliferation, 
he replied: "Ah, you must not ask me about Israel's 250 warheads in the Negev 
desert – you must ask the Israelis!" He always wore a massive wrap-around 
jacket 
with too many buttons, but his shirts and shoes were always the latest in 
Paris 
fashion. 

I visited his abandoned palace in Kurdistan in 1991, one of the series of 
massive, 
fortified royal residences he continues to build across Iraq, evidence, 
according 
to Madeleine Albright, that sanctions haven't yet brought him low and thus 
must 
continue. In truth, they are evidence that sanctions clearly do not work – 
because 
they don't touch Saddam – and thus should not continue. But what was so 
evident 
about his northern palace was its tawdry nature, the poor quality of the 
concrete 
round the swimming pool, the cracked pseudo-Grecian columns in the 
dining-room, 
the under-weeded flower beds. In Baghdad, the palace lawns are better tended, 
but the same sense of spent taste and vulgarity pervades the president's 
imagery. 
Saddam on horseback, in Kurdish clothes, embracing babies and war heroes, 
riding 
on a charger in medieval armour to confront the Persians at the Battle of 
Qaddasiyeh, 
dressed as Nebuchadnezzar, he who conquered Syria and Palestine, sacked 
Ashkelon 
and subdued all the tribes of the Arabs. Like the king of Babylonia, Saddam 
decided 
to rebuild Babylon; and so the ancient city was ripped apart and 
reconstructed, 
Disney-style, in the image of the great man. 

Even the giant egg-shell monument to the Iraqi war dead of 1980-88 is a 
personal 
museum to Saddam's family. Visit the crypt and beside the names of half a 
million 
dead you find a photograph of the young, revolutionary Saddam, on the run 
from 
the royal family, of Saddam studying in Cairo (his hero was not Hitler but 
Stalin), 
of Saddam with his first wife. Now there is a second wife – the feuding 
between 
the wives' two families is one of the causes of the ferocious bloodletting 
within 
the family. His son Oday, partly crippled in an assassination attempt while 
on 
his way to a nightclub, murdered a bodyguard at a party. "My son must be 
tried 
like any other Iraqi," Saddam announced. Then the family of the dead man – 
surprise, 
surprise – forgave Oday. Unpunished, he continued to run the highest security 
apparatus of the state, all the while enjoying the title of head of the Iraqi 
Olympic committee. 

Greatness, for Saddam, is a simple affair. Victorious in war, the people love 
you. Strength is all. In an Arab world that sadly admires power more than 
compassion, 
he was a hero for millions of Egyptians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Lebanese, even 
Syrians. 
"He may be ruthless," a Lebanese journalist remarked to me in 1990, "but you 
have to admit he's strong. He stands up to people." In reality, Saddam walks 
tall when his enemies are beaten. He dreams like a sleepwalker. I recall 
huddling 
with Iraqi commandos in a shell-smashed city in southern Iran in 1980 when an 
officer announced a personal message from Saddam to all his fighting forces. 
They were participating, he announced, in "the lightning war". There was even 
a song that played continuously on Iraqi television: "The Lightning War". 
Like 
the "Mother of All Battles", it was a mockery of the truth. 

There were other hints in his war with Iran, had we but known it, of Saddam's 
behaviour in Kuwait. In 1983, after proclaiming the Iraqi-occupied Iranian 
city 
of Khorramshahr a bastion to be defended to the last man – Saddam's personal 
Stalingrad – he simply ordered his thousands of troops to abandon the 
fortress 
and march back to Iraq, just as he ordered his men to abandon Kuwait the 
moment 
the Western armies broke into Iraq in 1991. If his behaviour seems 
irrational, 
it is certainly consistent. He believed that a strong Iraq must be 
self-sufficient. 
It must make its own weapons, its own tanks, its own bullets. 

A year to the day after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, I was prowling through 
the 
wreckage of the Iraqi army along the Basra highway when I came upon an 
upturned 
ammunition truck whose cargo of battalion and brigade notebooks had been 
scattered 
across the desert, partly buried in sand. "Message from the Supreme 
Commander," 
it said in one. And there, page after page, was the text of a secret Saddam 
speech 
to his high command. Iraq, he said, must abandon its traditional confidence 
in 
other nations; it must set up its own arms factories, invent its own secret 
weapons. 
There it all was, in blue Biro, the authentic voice of Saddam speaking from 
beneath 
the very floor of the desert. 

It is not so difficult to struggle into the mind of Saddam when you read 
this. 
He had invaded Iran and the West loved him. Why should they object – or fight 
him – when, threatened by Kuwaiti demands for the billions of dollars in 
"loans" 
used to pay off the Iran war and with the Kuwaitis apparently "stealing" 
Iraqi 
oil from beneath the Rumailah field, he invaded Kuwait? Only four months 
earlier, 
just after Bazoft's hanging, a group of American senators visited Saddam in 
Baghdad 
and assured him that "democracy is a very confusing issue – I believe that 
your 
problems lie with the Western media and not with the US government" (this 
from 
Senator Alan Simpson). Senator Howard Metzenbaum, announcing himself "a Jew 
and 
a staunch supporter of Israel", went on to tell Saddam that "I have been 
sitting 
here and listening to you for about an hour, and I am now aware that you are 
a strong and intelligent man and that you want peace." 

So what had Saddam to fear from the US? In that last fateful interview with 
US 
ambassador April Glaspie, less than a month before the invasion of Kuwait, 
Saddam 
told Ms Glaspie that Kuwait's borders were drawn in colonial days. Saddam had 
always been an anti-colonialist. "We studied history at school," the luckless 
Glaspie replies. "They taught us to say freedom or death. I think you know 
well 
that we... have our experience with the colonialists. We have no opinion on 
the 
Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." In a 
post-war 
press interview, as the writer Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, Glaspie 
gave the game away. "We never expected they would take all of Kuwait," she 
said. 

The Americans were going to let Saddam bite a chunk out of the Kuwaiti 
border. 
Saddam thought he had permission to gobble up all of Kuwait. And so we went 
to 
war with the Hitler of the Euphrates. And so he lives on in his palaces and 
bunkers 
while his people die for lack of clean water and medicines under the UN 
sanctions 
that are supposed to harm Saddam. We still bomb him every day – our war with 
Saddam has lasted 10 years now – and slowly, the Arabs, dismayed by the 
bloodshed 
in the Palestine-Israel war, are warming once more to the man who never gave 
in. Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia – 
almost 
all of them America's allies in 1991 – are now breaking the air embargo by 
flying 
into Baghdad. Saddam lives. 





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