The Rise and Fall of Saddam: Getting into the Supreme Leader's mind

National Review, March 24, 2003 by David Pryce-Jones

In the recent history of Iraq, each ruler has been butchered by his successor, who himself has been butchered in turn. The one exception is Saddam Hussein, strangely enough, who spared the life of his predecessor and patron Ahmad al-Bakr, though he quickly made sure to murder all those among Bakr's associates who might have emerged as possible rivals, just in case anyone mistook him for soft-hearted. Current reports out of Baghdad cannot be trusted, but according to one plausible item, Saddam has placed under house arrest his defense minister, Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmad al- Jabburi Tai. General Tai's daughter is married to Qusay, Saddam's hateful younger son and putative heir. Some crony like the general could hope to ingratiate himself with President Bush by the timely murder of Saddam.

An alternative prospect that American forces will kill or capture him seems not to worry Saddam unduly; he has been here before, in 1991, and lived to fight ever since. As he presents it, that earlier Gulf War was a genuine victory, which he continues to celebrate in his speeches and in monumental statuary. All it cost him, as Supreme Leader and Father of Iraq, was the lives of tens of thousands of his nameless soldiers. Portraits of him in many glorious poses adorn the walls of Iraq, and passing Western journalists are busy finding Iraqis praising the very man who terrifies them, and has brought them to ruin.

Saddam has initiated international havoc of a magnitude not experienced since the age of Hitler and Stalin. The major powers are now at loggerheads. Countries in between, like Turkey, are confused. NATO is crippled, and the United Nations is staging a Babes-in-the-Wood pantomime of poor Hans Blix and his band of inspectors. The peace demonstrations are evidence to Saddam that any attack on Iraq will precipitate political upheavals throughout the Western and Muslim worlds, and he manipulates them with great craft. Do Bush and Blair really have the stomach to go through with a military campaign? Will Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak really be able to sit it out on the sidelines, rather than join their Arab brethren in Iraq? Besides, the Americans can lay hands on al-Qaeda's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but where are Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar? Ahlan wasalhan, or "Welcome!" is the flourish with which Arabs greet all comers. It is both a greeting and a defiance. Saddam is daring his opponents to do their worst.

In his television interview with Dan Rather, Saddam said that he would indeed sooner die than go into exile. He declared himself a proud Iraqi. "We will die here. We will die in this country and we will maintain our honor, the honor that is required, in front of our people." Unlike his shameless opponents, what he felt was "respect" for people everywhere.

The man's air of gravity, and the lordly way he smokes a cigar as he preens himself on Iraqi television, prompts curiosity about what can really be going on in his head. He has no sustained firsthand experience of the West, and he has spent very few days outside Iraq these past 25 years. Informed commentators are more or less unanimous that he bases his political judgments on what he learns from only two sources, his intelligence services and the Western television he watches. The information available to him is therefore skewed and limited. He is weighing developments and options from the perspective of a man who came up the truly hard way, from the sub-branch of a minor tribe in a smallish town in the provincial Iraq of 60 years ago.

Dr. Jerrold Post of George Washington University had a career in the CIA, during which he more or less invented the field of "political psychology." This involves assembling all possible facts from the background of some leader or politician in order to be able to predict his likely behavior. Something of an exercise in neo-Freudianism, the science is imperfect, and made far harder in this instance because Saddam has constructed a heroic biography for himself as orphan, victim, runaway, killer taking revenge on those who did him wrong (as well as on those who did him no wrong), and finally Supreme Leader of his country. Post regards Saddam as rational, but driven to miscalculate through narrowness of experience. Two other leading Saddam specialists are Prof. Amatzia Baram of Haifa University and Kenneth M. Pollack, a National Security Council staffer with responsibility for Iraq in the Clinton administration and author of The Threatening Storm, and both concur that Saddam doesn't appreciate how he is risking danger on a scale that may rightly be called suicidal. Amir Taheri, formerly editor of an Iranian newspaper and one of the most judicious and well-informed commentators on the Middle East, goes further, saying that Saddam is living out some fantasy about destroying the "global hegemony" of the United States, and this makes him immune to reality.

The missing element for understanding the Supreme Leader on his final flightpath up to world-historical importance, I suggest, is to be sought in the Arab culture that formed him. In that culture, the individual must strive to acquire honor and conversely avoid shame, because these values certify status in the sight of everyone else. This conditions behavior and judgment in a way very remote from neo-Freudianism and other such tools of Western interpretation. When Saddam boasted to Rather, "We will maintain our honor, the honor that is required, in front of our people," he was giving a perfect example of what his culture expects from a man of strength and pride and power. The other side of the coin is the accusation that the United States is "arrogant" in its policy of opposing him, and he rejects the "humiliation" this involves.