man who would be Stalin, The

Spectator, The, Nov 30, 2002 by Pryce-Jones, David

The man who would be Stalin

David Pryce-jones SADDAM: THE SECRET LIFE by Con Coughlin

Macmillan, 20, pp. 384, ISBN 0333782003

SADDAM HUSSEIN by Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn

Verso, B, pp. 352, ISBN 1859844227

Recently I received a letter from an MP inviting me to sign a petition protesting against military action against Iraq. Signatures had already been obtained from trade unionists, actors and writers. Here was a moment for nostalgia. These are very like the people - in some cases they were the people - who in good old fellow-travelling days used to proclaim the wondrous sanctity of the Soviet Union and abominate the United States. You don't know whether to laugh or cry when Rowan Williams, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, chips in with his contribution in an article in the Daily Telegraph: `We need, God knows, ways of pressurising Iraq towards justice for its own citizens.' That'll really oblige them to mend their ways in Baghdad.

Backwards, Christian soldiers, sneaking out of war,

so that this great tyrant may kill thousands more.

The hatred such people nurture for the democratic West that keeps them safe is beyond rational analysis. In addition, they live privileged and cloistered lives and can't imagine what it is like to be victims of Saddam, any more than the dear old Red Dean of Canterbury could imagine that Stalin's idea of justice was gulag. Immersed in self-flattering rectitude, they seem to be merely the sort of higher fools that only modern intellectuals can be. But there is also a racist component in this indifference to the fate of those powerless to help themselves. Those protesting against the liberation of Iraq take it for granted that Iraqis are born to inflict and endure persecution, and there is nothing that can be done about it.

An experienced journalist who has reported on the Middle East for a long time, Con Coughlin depicts the reality. Iraq is not a power like the Soviet Union but a disjointed ethnic and sectarian mix of the ruling Sunni minority, the majority Shia, and Kurds and lesser elements too. In the circumstances, there is no effective nationstate, and no political institutions either, but only a fiefdom for whoever can seize it.

And Saddam is not Stalin, although in sedulous imitation he too worked his way upwards, stealthily and murderously. Once he had his hands on the oil wealth and absolute power, he was able to destabilise the whole region, attacking Iran, Kuwait, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and sponsoring Palestinian and Islamist terror groups. In the world he has fashioned for his people, torturers stub cigarettes out in their victims' eyeballs, and they drag corpses away with meat-hooks in the eye-sockets. They dissolve living men in acid. They rape a man's wife or kill her and his children in front of him. In an autobiographical film, Saddam explained, `We must kill those who conspire against us,' and he claims to be able to detect loyalty or treason by a mere look. Not the least part of his hateful legacy are his two sons, Uday and Qusay, murderers and thieves like him, and his own likely executioners on the day that he falters.

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Iranians have been killed with poison gas, and just to drop harmless flour out of aircraft was enough to stampede the surviving Kurds. Hundreds of thousands more have been driven out of the country in Saddam's attempt to arabise Iraq. Crushing revolution after the 1991 Gulf war, he shelled his own cities of Karbala and Najaf with their Shia shrines, and he has drained the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates, putting an end to the Marsh Arabs, who had maintained a unique way of life there throughout recorded history. Saddam's is a regime of showtrials and purges and executions. He has had his first cousin killed, and also his two sons-in-law and several of their relations in a very public shoot-out. In Stalinist fashion he has eliminated close colleagues and friends, indeed pretty well everyone who helped him throughout his ghastly career, and the many would-be liberators who at different times bravely attempted to kill him.

How to explain the horror of it? There have been several previous biographies of Saddam, a few of them written by sponsored apologists. Coughlin has competently put together such evidence as there is, quite enough to shock him. The broad outline is clear, but we cannot be sure of every detail because Arab leaders concoct heroic biographies in order to engender the respect and fear obligatorily due to a oneman ruler. A Sunni himself, Saddam grew up near or in the Sunni stronghold of Tikrit. He may never have known his father, and was always moody, a loner, educated only in tribal culture, someone for whom violence was the natural instrument of a career. Saddam had his moment as a modernising administrator, and was briefly popular. Absolute power soon corrupted him. Estimates suggest that since 1981 he has skimmed off $200 billion from oil sales.

The decisions to invade Iran and Kuwait proved disastrous to him and all Iraqis, leading to sanctions, the United Nations inspectors of his weapons of mass destruction, and the present renewed crisis. To some extent, the difficulty of ruling Iraq can be seen as a mitigating factor, but fundamentally he proved to be too limited and brutal a character for the complexities of his position. In Coughlin's opinion, Saddam's single-minded concentration on power has increasingly detached him from reality.