Looks like the Demonstrations are making a difference. But not on Bush. Sounds like Saddam is counting on the "Anti-War" movement to stop us. Rather usually gets his Op-Eds published in the New York Times. I wonder why this one is in the Wall Street Journal.
A Latter-Day Saladin
Saddam is calm--eerily so.
BY DAN RATHER
Friday, February 28, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Baghdad Palace. "Old Baghdad Palace" Iraqis call it, to distinguish it from the many others that have sprung up since the British had this one built in 1921 after they took over from the Turks in the wake of World War I.
It is a huge, rambling structure, hard by the Tigris River. When Saddam Hussein enters the room his footsteps sound sharp reports that reverberate off the hard tiles to the high ceilings above. He displays a keen awareness of his personal bearing, and he tries hard to radiate what military people call "command presence." Despite some stiffness, perhaps the result of reported back problems, he stands upright, at his full height of about 6 feet 2. Now 68 years old, he is thinner than when I last saw him. Down from about 240 pounds to an estimated 215 to 220. His gait is unhurried. From the outset, he is calm, almost eerily, preternaturally so.
This week, more than 12 years after I first asked Saddam Hussein if our meeting in August 1990, on the eve of the Gulf War, might be our last, this reporter found himself again interviewing the Iraqi president. After a year and a half of trying, after several trips to Iraq, and with the help of a number of contacts inside and outside the United States, I wound up, on this trip, in a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. He listened and then said that they liked the fact that I knew the region well and had a reputation for being independent. He would take my request directly to the president, with the clear understanding that there would be no conditions whatsoever about questions to be asked in any interview. There was a long night and day of waiting. Then, a phone call in my hotel room, a pickup by armed guards, and a long circuitous drive, first to a "guesthouse," then to the palace. Saddam Hussein would see me there.
How Saddam, notorious despot, reviled murderer, and enemy of the United States, got from the Gulf War to here is in some ways a complex story of conflict and diplomacy. Of--in varying degrees and depending on whom you ask--an imperfect Gulf War victory, failed insurrections and a mishandled United Nations regime of inspections and sanctions. It is also a very straightforward story, one that can be told in a single line: Saddam Hussein considers himself to be the consummate survivor.
If that, despite the sufferings of his country and his people, is what Saddam is, it is something he has achieved through consummate calculation, a trait manifest in a demeanor that is a studied mix of the natural and the affected. He is self-possessed. His awareness of the impression he leaves on others is strong, though obviously imperfect (one is reminded of the indelible, televised spectacle of him running his hand through the hair of a young British boy, one of the human shields he briefly held hostage in the prelude to the Gulf War).
During the first 12 minutes or so of our interview, Saddam's body language and gestures suggested appraisal. I had experienced this the first time we met, and I felt it again: He was sizing up the man across the table--leaning back, fingers joined in a spire, chest-high. He is a skilled practitioner of the art of eye contact. The dictator's dark eyes are penetrating. He gives the impression of not just looking at you but looking through you. It is a look that simultaneously challenges and conveys the message that you are scarcely worth the effort.
When one speaks, Saddam listens. Intently. He waits. What he actually hears, and the lessons he takes away, one cannot say. But after our interview he asked many questions, primarily about American public opinion. He heard this reporter explain the profound effect that 9/11 had had on the United States, and the deep concerns the American people harbor about anyone who might pose a similar threat. One hesitates to go too far with this, but one got the sense that he was taking this information in and processing it with survival in mind.
As the on-camera interview progressed, Saddam appeared to weigh his answers carefully. His physical attitude began to change: His weight shifted forward, and he emphasized certain points--such as the historic fate of empires, as he saw it, that involve themselves in the affairs of Mesopotamia--by banging on the small, round table between us. Not with a fist, but with his right index finger. Again, it was a measured, disciplined motion that rode the line between determination and aggression.
There were two times when Saddam struck me as having difficulty answering the questions put to him. Tellingly, both instances required him to speak to different, competing constituencies; accustomed as he is to being his nation's sole voice of consequence, it is not a political art at which he has become adept.
The first instance came when I asked whether he agreed with the 9/11 attacks in principle. Saddam knew the proper answer for the American and Western audience, and he knew the answer for the various Arab streets, as he perceived them. "Let me answer absolutely clearly," he said, and then proceeded to deliver a classic nonanswer, a cryptic response about the laws "governing relations in humanity."
The second time occurred when he was asked, repeatedly, about his standing relative to that of Osama bin Laden as a "champion of the Arab streets." The question seemed to rankle, and one was left with the impression that this self-styled latter-day Saladin feels the pressure of competing on the one hand with President Bush in the court of world opinion and, on the other, with Osama bin Laden for the hearts and minds of the Arab and Muslim worlds.
These are the two walls that hem the Iraqi ruler in, as he finds himself cornered now as never before. I believe that Saddam appreciates the seriousness of his situation, in a way that I did not feel on our first meeting, in 1990, when he openly doubted that the United States and the first President Bush would be willing to risk spilling American blood to repel his invasion of Kuwait. He knows that vast forces are arrayed against him. As he put it, "I understand. I hear and I see."
From all he said, explicitly and nonverbally, it is evident that the consummate survivor remains confident--almost strangely and, one could say, illogically so--that he will somehow endure this present test, and whatever lies after. After spending almost three hours in his presence, one got the sense that his mind is turning furiously as he tries to discover a way out of his corner. Saddam is ever the calculator, and when and if war comes, he believes he will find a way to absorb the first, devastating blow he knows will fall. Then, one imagines, he may think that he can slip, foxlike, into the underbrush, to gather his resources for the next battle.
And through it all, his words and actions make clear, he will measure victory not in terms of lives, territory, weapons, or national infrastructure but by one solipsistic criterion: his own survival.
opinionjournal.com |
