Interesting Book Review
The nature of the beast
(Filed: 27/10/2002)
William Shawcross reviews Saddam: The Secret Life by Con Coughlin
Con Coughlin has written an extraordinary investigation into the life and rule of Saddam Hussein, one of the world's most disgusting and dangerous dictators. It is a grand guignol portrait of a man obsessed with gaining and keeping power at any cost - to the Iraqi people, to their neighbours and to his own family; a story of murder, on a mass and a minute scale, of paranoia, rage, self-delusion - and survival.
In Coughlin's hands Saddam appears as a brilliant and ruthless political operator who had a real presence as a young man as he manoeuvred himself up and up, killing as necessary, until he became President of Iraq in 1979. The early chapters of Coughlin's book are especially detailed and useful on Saddam's rise to power and, for a time, his role in building the Iraqi nation on the back of its vast oil revenues.
Once in complete control, his natural brutality took over and he became an increasingly sadistic paranoid. Coughlin shows the immense difficulty that the rest of the world has in dealing with unpredictable evil on such a grand and determined scale. Throughout the Eighties the West underestimated the dangers posed by Saddam. He was supported during his long and brutal war with Iran in the 1980s because the Iranian Ayatollahs were deemed to be a greater threat. This was understandable, particularly after the Iranian-backed terrorist group, Hezbollah, blew up more than 300 US marines in Beirut. But it was not decent.
The Reagan administration began to support Iraq in 1983. Donald Rumsfeld, then a senior Reagan official, visited Baghdad and the CIA even provided Saddam with aerial intelligence of Iranian troop movements. Then, in 1987, Saddam became the first national leader to use chemical weapons against his own people. He attacked the Kurds - fearing that they would side with Iran - in Halabja and about 20 other villages, with a hydrogen cyanide compound.
Saddam's entire career has been devoted to the assassination, not only of opponents and critics, but also of friends and family. In 1988 his malevolent and violent son Uday murdered Kamal Hana Geogeo, one of Saddam's own entourage who fixed up his love affairs. Uday and his mother, Sajida, then still Saddam's wife, were afraid that his latest mistress might replace her. Saddam was furious and at first insisted that his son be tried for murder. But eventually the charges were dropped, Uday was fully rehabilitated, Saddam murdered Sajida's brother, got rid of Sajida and married the mistress.
Despite many other such crimes and atrocities, the true nature of Saddam and his regime was brushed under the carpet by Western governments. Lucrative trade contracts were pursued. It was not until he executed the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft, in 1990, that the West finally began to acknowledge that the man they had been assisting was a demon.
By this stage Saddam had built up an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and was still pursuing nuclear weapons. At the same time the Iraqi economy had been ruined by the war and he began to threaten the Gulf states, demanding aid. When Kuwait in particular did not respond, he invaded the country in August 1990. Coughlin describes this as "one of the great military miscalculations of modern history".
It aroused worldwide condemnation. Saddam offered all kinds of inducements to the French, the Russians and others to temper their opposition, but he would not retreat. President Bush formed an international coalition to expel Saddam from Kuwait with UN backing and in January 1991 the allied air attack began. Within weeks he was driven out of Kuwait, but the allies left him in power - for reasons which were understandable at the time, but with consequences that are still appalling.
If President Bush and other Western leaders expected Saddam to be overthrown, they had reckoned without his guile and ruthlessness. At first they encouraged the Kurds and the Shiites of the south to rise up against him - but then they left them to be brutally defeated by him.
As part of the ceasefire agreed by Saddam, the UN imposed sanctions on Iraq until Saddam surrendered his weapons of mass destruction. But that was the last thing he was prepared to do. Since the end of 1998 he has not allowed the UN inspectors in, though now, in the face of pressure from the United States, he is finally talking of doing so. Meanwhile, the Iraqi people have been desperately impoverished by the sanctions, but Saddam, his family and his clique have been hugely enriched by smuggling and black market eering.
When Clinton became president in 1993, his administration dithered, both encouraging and then failing to support coup attempts and uprisings by the opposition. Meanwhile Saddam has achieved his main purposes - he has survived, together with his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes. These survived even the defection to Jordan of his two sons-in-law who provided Western intelligence with a detailed account of Saddam's secret weapons programmes, including the claim that Saddam had been only three months from testing an atomic bomb in January 1991. Astonishingly the brothers-in-law were persuaded to return to Baghdad, where they were predictably murdered as their relatives were forced to look on.
I imagine Coughlin must have wiped his brow at times as he described horror after horror and said to himself "Can this really all be true?" The answer is clearly Yes. Anyone who thinks that President Bush is wrong to urge regime change and who believes that the world is a better, safer place with him staying in power should read Coughlin's excellent and disturbing book - the case for getting rid of this terrifying madman as soon as possible is overwhelming.
arts.telegraph.co.uk |
