Wide open secret coup

National Review, March 16, 1992 by Albert Wohlstetter

LEAKS about PsyOps (psychological warfare operations) and other American covert operations to bring about a palace coup in Iraq are reaching flood tide. If there is anything in these leaks from unnamed American officials, no covert operation has ever been more overt. This is not one of your sneaky secret operations (like the Iran affair). Anonymous officials want everyone to be clear that it hasn't preceded, it has followed, a formal presidential "finding" and notification of Congress.

On December 15, Saddam took formal notice of the "daily" Western reports about an imminent military coup against him in an Iraqi TV broadcast. Noting that the West was seeking agents for such a coup in his inner circle, he volunteered himself to be its leader. And Ibrahim Izzat, one of the military officers seated with him, could act as deputy.

Neither Saddam nor any of his inner circle would be likely to win an election. He doesn't need to. Saddam rules by fear. And maybe the most terrified are "the tense-looking military men," to quote the Reuters dispatch, on whom he pinne "'Mother of All Battles' sashes and medals" at this same TV conference.

The daily leakers have tried to make clear that their PsyOps aim only at a palace coup. They expresly avoid talk of replacing the dictatorship by some democratic alternative of the sort that dissident Iraqis, representing Sunni and Shia Arabs as well as Kurds, have been trying to organize since before Desert Shield.

A coup replacing Saddam with another dictator chosen from his inner circle will not be easy. Saddam, as some of us have pointed out for over a dozen years, is no great military strategist. He is, however, an expert on internal coups and their prevention and cure. A cunning and brutal dictator, he is wholly unimpressed by hardships imposed on innocent Iraqi civilians by the UN embargoes. Embargoes are blunt, indiscriminate instruments. The narrower the ruling circle at which embargoes are aimed, the easier it is to insulate that ruling circle from their effects. A totalitarian dictator can tolerate pain inflicted on his civilian subjects more easily than democractic rulers can inflict it.

It should have been apparent during Desert Shield to the many who opposed authorizing the use of force by President Bush that the embargo by itself was quite unlikely to get Saddam out of Kuwait; or even to get him to accept only the part of Kuwait which many proponents of the embargo were willing to offer him. Iraq began the eight-year war that followed its invasion of Iran with $35 billion in credits and ended ti $85 billion in debt, a net loss of $120 billion; and emerged as the dominant military power in the Gulf, ready to wipe out that debt by coercion and conquest. No one familiar with that record, or the huge human losses Iraq suffered during the war, or the horrific gassing of Iragi Kurds carried out immediately after the war by the Ba'ath leadership, should have believed that the pre-Desert Storm embargo alone would get Saddam out of Kuwait. And none of President Bush's men who understood very well the inadequacy of the embargo before Desert Storm should have been under any illusion that an embargo after Desert Storm would be enough to get Saddam out of power.

There he stands, one year later. He may outlast our elections. He may even outlans President Bush.

So it is only natural if, once again, the Administration, and possibly the Saudis, are thinking about psychological operations appealing to the Iraqi people, an especially to Saddam's inner circle, to risk a coup.

Such appeals might be successful. But we shouldn't count on it. Saddam has recently repeated one of his most cruel and effective strategems directed at keeping his inner circle in line. In 1979, while French, American, and other intelligence agencies were describing Iraq's supposed move toward moderation, he filled a large auditorium with his aides, and he himself made a videotape, which has been circulating ever since, of the proceedings. As his tense captive audience watched and perspired, he announced that he could tell when an aide was about to betray him, even before the aide knew it himself. He then called out successive imminent traitors, and invited others members of the audience to take part in their execution.

More recently, Saddam has allowed the circulation of videotapes showing some of the aftermath of the coalition PsyOps during Desert Storm. Saddam, of course, had used the artillery, tanks, and other heavy combat equipment which we had left undestroyed to annihilate the rebellion of the dissident majority and minorities. The tapes that have recently appeared on Western TV display some of the most prominent members of Saddam's inner military circle, the one we're trying to penetrate, slapping, kicking, and otherwise abusing and torturing some of the dissidents who responded to our PsyOps. Saddam counts on such displays to have a sobering affect on prospective dissidents. At the same time, it implicates them in the suppression of the widespread dissidence in the population as a whole.