War Stories (4 page)

But that wasn't all the Baath Party erected with its newfound wealth. Archaeologists, funded by the RCC's Ministry of Antiquities, probed ancient Mesopotamian ruins for evidence of Iraq's unique place in world history, all in an effort to build a national identity among the nation's disparate people.

But all of these public expenditures notwithstanding, there was still more money left on the table than the RCC had imagined when they seized power in 1968. By the mid-1970s, Saddam was first among equal vice presidents in the Baath hierarchy, and using billions of dollars to erect a labyrinth of competing intelligence and security organizations—all aimed at suppressing any form of dissent inside Iraq, and eliminating any threats posed by the increasing numbers of Iraqi exiles living overseas.

The RCC also went on an international arms shopping spree. At the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad, Baath Party officials—not military officers—decided among competing bids from Soviet, Yugoslav, French, Belgian, and Italian arms brokers.

By 1974, the Iraqi military was, on paper, one of the most powerful in the world. When the Kurds began to agitate for the autonomy promised in the 1970 Manifesto, Saddam, as the Baath government official responsible for internal security, unleashed the army. Instead of self-rule, the Kurds were given brutality. The carnage among the pesh merga fighters and their families in the Kurdish highlands was horrific. By March of 1975, nearly one million Kurds had fled to Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

Fearful of growing internal discord in his own country, the shah of Iran, who had covertly supported the cause of militant Kurdish nationalism for years, suddenly abandoned his highland allies. In
exchange for an agreement ending a long-standing dispute over the Shatt al Arab waterway, he went to Algiers, embraced Saddam, and closed the border. Betrayed by Tehran and besieged by Baghdad, the pesh merga were crushed. Mustafa Barzani fled into exile, and Saddam was lionized for eliminating yet another “threat to the revolution.”

By 1978 Saddam Hussein was, in all but name, the head of state in Iraq. His cousin and mentor, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, might have borne the title of president of the republic, but the leaders of the RCC made certain that every decision was approved by Saddam. He had, he seemed to think, everything under control. Then came the ayatollah.

Even though they deeply distrusted each other, Saddam and Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi—sitting ruler of the Peacock Throne in Tehran—had come to an accommodation. In Algiers, they had settled their countries' dispute over the Shatt al Arab, reached an odious agreement on the fate of the Kurds, and even ended several disagreements over competing claims to oil deposits along their common border. So in October 1978, no one thought it particularly unusual that Saddam would acquiesce to a request from the shah to evict a sixty-three-year-old Shi'ite imam, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, from Najaf, where he had resided beside the Tomb of Ali since November 1964. Saddam gave the old man twenty-four hours to get out of Iraq. He saw the ayatollah's departure as a returnable favor to the shah—and a good way of ridding a potential Shi'ite opponent from the neighborhood. But the white-bearded ascetic with the severe visage and furrowed brow wasn't gone long.

From Paris, Khomeini continued to incite his Shi'ite followers to overthrow the shah and replace the monarchy with an Islamic theocracy, one that would be led by imams and mullahs who also happened to be his devotees. On January 16, 1979, besieged by student riots and suffering from the cancer that would eventually kill him, Shah Pahlavi
stepped down and departed Iran for a wandering exile. Fourteen days later, Khomeini returned to Tehran and proclaimed an Islamic revolution.

The rest of the world watched with dismay as the Iranian
pasdaran
, inspired by the mullahs and imams close to Khomeini, purged the Iranian armed forces, ripped up international agreements, and sacked Western libraries, hospitals, Christian missions, and, eventually, consulates and embassies. And while Iran's neighbors didn't shed many tears over the destruction of the American embassy in Tehran or the seizure of fifty-three American hostages, they were horrified to hear Khomeini now advocating a worldwide Shi'ite uprising and preaching regularly about the need to replace secular regimes in all Islamic nations with clerical governments.

By the summer of 1979, the Syrian strongman Hafez al Assad, feeling vulnerable, sought to find some common ground with his Iraqi neighbors and flew to Baghdad. When Assad arrived at the airport on June 16, 1979, Saddam refused to meet him.

A month later, Khomeini started broadcasting appeals directly to the Shi'ite population of Iraq to “bring an end to the infidel Baath regime.” Saddam ordered the army to crack down on Shi'ite terrorist groups like the al-Dawah and the al-Mujahedin, which he believed were operating out of mosques in Karbala and Najaf. Senior army officers, concerned that their Shi'ite conscripts might mutiny, refused to act. Saddam decided he'd had enough.

On July 28, Saddam announced that the Interior Ministry had discovered a plot to overthrow the Iraqi government—not by Iran but by Syria. Eleven days later, at a meeting of the Baath Central Committee, Saddam watched impassively as twenty-one members of the Baath Party leadership were hauled from their seats, denounced, marched into the hallway, and shot by members of the Amn Al Khass, part of his Hydra-headed security organ. When the carnage of
August 8, 1979, was over, President al-Bakr was “retired” and Saddam Hussein was president, prime minister, chairman of the RCC, and chairman of the Baath Party. Within thirteen months, and with much of the world distracted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Saddam would plunge his country into the bloodiest military confrontation since World War II.

On the night of September 17, 1980, Saddam Hussein went on Iraqi national television and tore up—literally—the Algiers agreement on the Shatt al Arab that he and the shah had so carefully negotiated in 1975. Everyone knew that the act meant war. But no one imagined that it would last more than seven years and consume more than a million lives.

When Saddam attacked along a 750-mile front on September 22, most of the world expected that the Iraqi army would make short work of the heavily purged and demoralized Iranian army. Khomeini and his zealots had decimated the Iranian officer corps. Not only that, the United States had cut off the supply of parts and ammunition to the American-built Iranian military. Most of the West had done the same. Within a matter of weeks, the Iraqis had captured the Iranian port of Khorramshahr and surrounded the oil fields and refineries at Abadan. Saddam predicted an end to the war before the end of the year. He couldn't have been more wrong.

By the end of the year, instead of victory, Saddam had a stalemate, as the carnage continued. And though the war was being fought mostly on the Iranian side of the border, Iraqi casualties mounted—as did public disaffection, principally among the Kurds in the north and the Shi'ite population in the south.

While both sides were supposedly subject to the same UN-imposed arms embargo, Saddam convinced his neighbors that Iraq was fighting for them. He told them that his cause was their cause,
against a radical theocratic regime that was a threat to every Islamic country. Consequently, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan became conduits and suppliers of every kind of weapon and ammunition. And they weren't alone. Ordnance from the Soviet bloc continued to be delivered to Iraq via Egypt and Libya and, most of it, through Jordan.

NATO turned a blind eye to Italian land mine shipments. The Germans sent explosives and chemicals. Belgian-made machine guns were delivered by the thousands. And until June 7, 1981, when the Israelis bombed the reactor at Osirik, the French provided parts and know-how to Saddam's nuclear program.

Yet despite the volume of weaponry, the Iraqi army could advance no farther. In early 1982, the Iranians started sending human wave attacks through the minefields east of Basra—killing tens of thousands of youngsters, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old—and drove the Iraqis back. Al Faw Peninsula fell to Iranian assaults, and Basra was left little more than a bombed-out wreck.

By 1987, the war had degenerated into what had come to be called “the tanker war,” with Iraqi and Iranian air and naval units targeting oil tankers leaving each other's ports. To keep the sea lanes open, the U.S. Navy began patrolling the Persian Gulf. Then, on March 17, an Iraqi pilot flying a French-built Mirage F-1 fighter fired two French Exocet AM39 missiles into the side of the USS
Stark
, killing thirty-seven U.S. sailors.

Suddenly Iraq was back on the front pages of American newspapers, and it soon became apparent that Saddam had been regularly employing chemical weapons against the Iranians and had begun using them against his own people as well. In April, he ordered Ali Hassan al-Majid, the secretary-general of the Baath Party's “northern bureau,” to use chemical weapons against a Kurdish guerrilla stronghold in the mountains of northwest Iraq. By February 1988, chemical
weapons—including mustard gas, hydrogen cyanide, and sarin, a nerve agent—were being routinely used against not only the Iranians, but also the Iraqi people.

By the time Saddam and Khomeini agreed to a UN-brokered cease-fire on July 21, 1988, as many as one million Iranians and Iraqis were dead, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. More than 1,200 entire Kurdish towns had succumbed and 250,000 of the surviving Kurds were forcibly disarmed and relocated. When the killing was over, every single Iraqi who survived knew the name of someone who had been killed in the prior eight years of carnage.

A year after the war ended, Saddam Hussein, resplendent in the dress uniform of a field marshal and mounted on a white stallion, led the Iraqi army beneath Baghdad's newest monument. Called the Victory Arch, it comprises two massive forearms rising up from the ground at each end of the parade ground. Each hand holds an enormous sword, said to be replicas of the sword carried by Saad ibn Waqas, the leader of the outnumbered Islamic force that beat the Persian cavalry at Qadisiyah in 637 A.D.

The symbolism was inescapable. Saddam didn't want the war seen as a draw so he simply declared it to be an Iraqi victory. Yet not an inch of Iranian territory had been permanently taken. Ayatollah Khomeini was still in Tehran, exporting terror and fomenting threats. There were nearly half a million Iraqi casualties—many dead at the hand of Saddam, not Iran. Despite all of this, Saddam reinforced his “victory” by telling his people that they had stopped the Iranian revolution inside Iran. Saddam had won! That's how the man on the white horse presented himself to the world—not as a man who had barely survived stalemate and defeat, but as a victor. Before all the dead could be counted, before his shattered cities were rebuilt, Saddam began thinking of other victories. In the land between the rivers he
had a million-man army, 4,000 tanks, chemical weapons, missiles, and long-range rockets, and he knew how to use them all. The only question was where and when.

   
The Gulf War Legacy

      
Baghdad

      
August 1990–February 2003

Shortly after midnight on August 2, 1990, more than 150,000 Iraqi troops, accompanied by 350 Soviet-built tanks and five hundred armored personnel carriers, swarmed across the northern border of Kuwait. Thirty-five hours later, the last Kuwaiti army unit had either surrendered or been driven south across the border into Saudi Arabia. The emir of Kuwait and the al Sabah family barely escaped with their lives. Iraqi armored units crossed the Kuwait-Saudi border to occupy the city of Khafji on the coast highway. If American and British intelligence had been half as good as it was thought to be, this disaster might never have happened.