Daniel Akill's Blog | 321: SADDAM HUSSEIN, THE BUTCHER OF BAGHDAD: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE

321: SADDAM HUSSEIN, THE BUTCHER OF BAGHDAD: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE

14 July, 2008

SADDAM HUSSEIN, THE BUTCHER OF BAGHDAD: Wanted, Dead or Alive

The Reader’s Digest November 1991 Adjusted to fit

In the central Iraqi town of Ramadi, the Father-Leader swaggered before a crowd of supporters, whipping a pistol from his holster and firing repeatedly in the air. The cause of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein told his people, had not been the invasion of Kuwait but, rather, a Western and Israeli plot against Iraq. He bragged that Iraq had stood up to the overwhelming power of more than 30 nations and survived. You were victorious, he said, because you rejected humiliation and suppression. At his huge birthday party, the Baghdad Symphony played an appropriately defiant tune. It was the Frank Sinatra staple: My Way.

The man who had coolly ordered the rape, looting and destruction of Kuwait, a peaceful neighbour, and who had unleashed a war that ultimately killed tens of thousands of his own soldiers, was still doing it his way; the man who had used innocent men, women and children as human shields, whose officers had tortured and humiliated American and allied prisoners of war; was still smoking Cuban cigars. The man who had extracted an awesome price in resources and lives from the civilized world to halt his aggressions was busily re-organising his army and secret police.

He was still considered one of the world's richest men, bent on ensuring that his lavish life-style recovered quickly from the war. He had reportedly ordered $35,000 worth of fine bone china from Harrods's and Fortnum’s in London. He was believed to have skimmed at least $10 billion from Iraqi oil profits and deposited it in secret bank accounts and hidden investments. Independent investigators hired by the Kuwaiti government asserted that those were administered by his half brother, Barzan Takriti, who doubled as Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. Immediately after he had been captured, a huge trunk was discovered containing $500,000 – in cash.

With what appeared to be his crushing defeat in February, hopes were raised that the Butcher of Baghdad might be toppled from power, but those hopes died when coalition forces stood by as Saddam crushed rebellious Kurds in the north of Iraq and Shiite Moslems in the south. His Republican Guards slaughtered thousands and continued the systematic destruction of Kurdish villages.

Kuwait, a shattered country, remained beneath a pall of smoke from the hundreds of oil wells that the routed Iraqis had deliberately ignited, but the prospect of Saddam being brought to account, let alone punished, for the monumental human, economic and environmental devastation of his war grew ever dimmer.

As the United States and its allies rapidly withdrew the bulk of their forces from the Gulf, they put their faith in sanctions. Iraq's trade was restricted until it fully complied with the conditions imposed by the UN. The sanctions, backed by threats of further military action, were intended to force Iraq to pay billions in reparations, destroy its ballistic missiles, and dismantle its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programmes, but they only slightly hobbled Iraq's efforts to repair its bomb-shattered infrastructure. Meanwhile, Ordinary Iraqis suffered; women were reduced to selling their wedding gold for food money, but Saddam and the ruling Baath Party elite remained insulated from the hunger and hardship of ordinary people; well-to-do Iraqis pulled up to Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel in Mercedes-Benz sedans for $100-a- person lunches. At night, music thumps from the hotel's One Thousand and One Nights disco, where Saddam's dissolute and violent son, Uday, was wont to arrive in a gleaming black Porsche.

While rewarding those loyal to him and terrorizing others through his secret police, Saddam steadily strengthened his position by drawing his ruling circle ever closer. He streamlined his army, molding it around the hard core of his estimated 120,000 Republican Guards. Iraqi soldiers were reported to have brazenly driven through the UN demilitarized zone, back into Kuwait, loading up tons of weaponry; from artillery shells to hand grenades which they left behind the previous spring.

In one audacious raid into the demilitarized-zone town of Umm Qasr, Iraqis carted off 15 Silkworm surface-to-surface missiles – one of Iraq's deadliest weapons. Saddam’s goons had also been re-equipping units from hidden caches of ammunition and heavy weapons dispersed throughout their country.

Saddam grew bolder and more contemptuous with each passing day as he saw the United States and its allies unwilling to go beyond economic and diplomatic pressure to bring him to ground. When it served his purposes immediately after the war, he engaged in a flurry of reform, allowing some token opposition political parties and reportedly disbanding the vaunted Revolutionary Command Council; but that was abandoned.

Nowhere was Saddam's arrogance more clearly displayed than in his shell-game – hide-and-seek – with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors dispatched to Iraq to determine the extent of his nuclear-weapons programmes.

Saddam lied about his nuclear capability development; then he grudgingly coughed up little bits of information as needed; enough to reveal that he did indeed have a biological-weapons research facility operating (it had been billed as a food-testing laboratory), and that he had a chemical-weapons capability dramatically higher than Western intelligence had previously believed or estimated.

But as it became apparent to Saddam that the allies did not have the stomach to renew a bombing campaign, he became less co-operative. In one bizarre episode at a nuclear-weapons-manufacturing site, Saddam's security forces fired shots in the air and held IAEA inspectors at bay. Meanwhile, soldiers loaded canvas-shrouded machinery onto scores of flatbed trucks, which were then driven off into the desert, en route to Iran and Syria – and right under the collective noses of the IAEA inspectors, too!

Experts could not be certain how much enriched uranium, crucial to Iraq's atomic-bomb production, had been produced and hidden, but they were stunned at the scope of the Iraqi enrichment effort, involving at least four manufacturing methods. The widely scattered secret sites were so cleverly disguised that Western intelligence agencies had no idea of their existence – and it seems, from all the carping, ranting, canting, and FARTING FROM BOTH ENDS, they still have no idea of their existence at the time!

The UN had required Iraq to reveal all its nuclear-weapons capabilities by 25^th July to avoid or forestall any renewed bombing raids. The deadline passed, and nothing was done. On 2^nd August, which was the anniversary of the invasion of Kuwait, the US State Department told Iraqi expatriate opposition leaders that the US would not intervene militarily to create a new government in Baghdad, nor would it encourage a popular uprising against Saddam; little wonder, then, that Saddam continued to play chicken with the West, thwarting UN observers, and daring the United States to respond.

After Operation Desert Storm, Saddam carefully and systematically perpetuated the image of himself as a martyr, the true Pan-Arab leader. His controlled press portrayed Iraq as resisting traitorous forces from without, orchestrated always by Americans and Zionists. The Baghdad newspaper Al-Iraq boasted that all such efforts would be met with crushing defeat and eternal disgrace. Saddam deftly played the suffering of the Iraqi people as a propaganda card. In the meantime, he released scarce goods and funds to keep his Republican Guards and his army – and the wealthy in Baghdad – soothed in the postwar chaos.

But all of that begged the question: What about justice, and what about retribution for the crimes he had committed?

In October 1990, and as the United States led a massive military buildup in the Gulf, President Bush Senior called Saddam Hussein Hitler revisited, and Reminded everyone that when Hitler's war ended, there were the Nuremberg trials. By April 1991, the U.S. government still had no plans to capture Saddam and bring him physically to justice.

The August before, in an exercise that could be called the theatre of frustration, the American Bar Association held a mock trial of Saddam Hussein at its annual meeting in Atlanta. An actor, mustachioed and decked out in Iraqi uniform, sat in the dock while Saddam's war-crimes guilt was debated. Was that the closest the world would get to justice in the matter of Civilization and Humanity vs. Saddam Hussein?

An expert on international law with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that Saddam remained at risk for the rest of his life for war-crimes prosecution but there was a catch. It all boiled down to the US’s ability to apprehend him. A Political Analyst said the United States should formally cancel the Presidential order against assassinating the head of a foreign government, and someone suggested offering a $10-million reward for Saddam, dead or alive.

In the weeks after the war had ended, former Under-secretary of Defense warned that Saddam would play a deft game with the UN; fending it off while trying to consolidate his internal position. Saddam did just that. He weathered a summer of probes and threats and emerged unscathed. On the anniversary of the invasion of Kuwait in August 1991, a diplomat in Baghdad was quoted as saying that he thought Saddam's dream was still intact, and that Saddam still believed that God had given him another chance; but another chance to do what? That was a man who enjoyed terror; a man who reportedly killed one of his cabinet ministers, had his body hacked to pieces and delivered in a black bag to his wife. That was a man whose delusions of political grandeur left perhaps 100,000 hapless Iraqi conscripts to be buried in mass graves in the desert along the Kuwaiti border.

An analyst with Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center warned that the West underestimated Saddam's cunning, adaptability and perseverance. Worse, they underestimated his ruthlessness. He would strive to exact revenge so long as there is life in his body. He would smirk and conciliate and retreat and whine and apply for fairness and generousity, and the day would come when he would hit with whatever weapons he had at his disposal – and there were Weapons of Mass Destruction among them.

The US Secretary of Defence emphasized that Saddam's military was largely ineffective as an offensive fighting force, but that only underlined the point that the best time to have solved the Saddam problem was in the spring of 1990. The former Secretary of Defence warned, at the time, that there was no possibility of a lasting peace in the region if Saddam Hussein were left in power with any military force at his command, and that it was time to rid the world of that scourge against humanity.

In the final months of World War II, as the Allies closed in on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and final victory seemed only a matter of time; a war poster appeared in the United States showing an American hand grasping the neck of the enemy, Hitler, and the words: “It's a fight to the finish!”

So long as Saddam strutted on the stage in Iraq, nursing his appetite for revenge, feeding on his dreams of neo-Babylonian glory; so long as he held power, the Gulf War was not over, peace is not sure, and the fight was not finished.

The Butcher of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, had been wanted, dead or alive. He was caught alive, and found dead, after he had been prosecuted, convicted and sentenced by an Iraqi court, and hanged by Iraqi Officials – and which was too good for the Butcher of Baghdad.

N.B: If it hadn’t been for The USA and her allies and the coalition forces, the Butcher of Baghdad would have annexed Kuwait, and gone on to take Saudi-Arabia and one or two other Arab states. Perhaps there is a Kuwaiti citizen among the readers out there who could, or might, tell us how Saddam’s army – goons – ran amok in Kuwait City and all over Kuwait – looting, robbing, and stealing anything and everything that could be lifted and carried off, and destroying or damaging anything and everything that couldn’t; and killing or beating up and/or raping everyone in sight!

I know not a few Kuwaitis who, if asked, would say: MAY GOD BLESS AMERICA! Kindly read my postings: 7 / 13 / 28 / 158 / 162 / 179 / 199 / 309

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