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CounterPunch
February
14, 2003
Up Close and Personal
My Encounter
with Saddam
By PEGGY THOMSON
As one of only a very few western journalists
who have actually met Saddam Hussein, I wish I could share some
profound insights about the man which would explain why removing
him from power right now is not only necessary but also a matter
of some urgency. Unfortunately I cannot because in my opinion
there is no justification--moral or otherwise--for the Bush administration's
apparently unstoppable march to war. (Although on almost any
given day you are still likely to hear someone as high up in
the ranks as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice say almost as an aside that
war is in fact "not inevitable.") Is such language
double-speak or just some kind of twisted yet wishful thinking?
The fact that it could be either -- or both -- only reinforces
what many ordinary Americans have come to suspect, which is that
even at this late date the Bush administration still has no clear
game plan whatsoever for dealing with Iraq.
My own brief encounter with Saddam Hussein
took place during the spring of 1985. The Iran-Iraq war, which
had been going on by then for nearly five years, was in a "lull"
at the time, or so people said. While I was in Iraq, however,
the situation abruptly changed, with the onset of a frightening
new phase in the conflict which became known as the "war
of the cities." Mysterious booms and explosions became all
too common, even in the middle of the Iraqi capital.
I had gone to Iraq to attend an international
women's conference, which was being sponsored by the Iraqi Women's
Federation. (The image of Iraqi women as progressive and westernized
-- which indeed in many ways they were and still are -- fit well
at the time with the ostensibly secular, anti-Islamic state Saddam
wanted to present.)
One day during the conference we were
told rather unexpectedly that our group would be going to hear
the president deliver a speech before the country's puppet National
Assembly. Oh, sure, I said to myself. The moment I arrived in
Iraq I had put in the standard interview requests both for Saddam
and for his wife Sajida, who generally kept a very low profile,
but I didn't expect (and hadn't received) anything more than
the usual wall of silence from the presidential offices.
Skeptical though I was, I had little
choice but to go along with "the program" since doing
your own thing is almost never an option in Iraq. On arriving
at the parliament building, we were ushered through a series
of vast reception rooms filled with gorgeous Persian carpets.
Even after going through several metal detectors and other security
procedures, I still doubted whether I would actually see the
Iraqi leader in person since even back then his plans changed
frequently and without warning.
To my surprise, I eventually found myself
sitting in the public gallery overlooking the assembly floor.
I was still in a state of disbelief when suddenly Saddam appeared
on the stage below. Without a moment's hesitation, he strode
to the lecturn and began delivering a rapid-fire, obviously impassioned
address. I remember being struck by his obvious physical stamina,
a characteristic few today would doubt the man possesses. For
some reason, Castro came to mind, even though it is Stalin who
is usually considered Saddam's idol.
Every time he paused for breath a gaggle
of young women in green army fatigues, also seated in the gallery,
would jump to their feet and begin clapping and chanting. Saddam's
cheerleaders, I couldn't help thinking. "Two, four, six,
eight, who do we appreciate?" For some reason incongruous
memories of my own days as a high school cheerleader popped into
my head, and I found myself suppressing a nervous giggle.
After Saddam finished his fiery speech,
which seemed to go on for hours, again to my surprise I was permitted,
even encouraged, to go downstairs and onto the floor of the parliament,
where nothing short of utter pandemonium had broken out. The
ecstatic legislators--all of whom had been approved by the Baath
party and screened by the security services before their election--were
swarming around Saddam, cheering and shouting his name. Before
I knew what was happening, I found myself being swept along by
the crowd until I was right under Saddam's mustachioed nose.
I had heard somewhere that he understood -- and even spoke --
more English than he would admit to knowing. Figuring I had nothing
to lose, I shouted a question over the din about how Iraq was
doing in the war. This seemed safe enough since it was beginning
to look like Iraq was gaining the upper hand in the seemingly
interminable conflict with its neighbor -- thanks largely to
U.S. satellite intelligence and other support. Saddam smiled
but said nothing, looking down at me benevolently, as if I were
a worrisome but slightly amusing child.
Eventually I extricated myself from the
rapturous crowd only to find that my encounter with Saddam wasn't
over. I soon learned that whether I wanted to or not I would
be having my picture taken with the Iraqi leader in the reception
area just outside the parliamentary chamber . Since such photographs
are often used for propaganda purposes in the Third World, I
knew that posing with Saddam might imply that I approved of his
regime. Not surprisingly, I had little choice in the matter and
of course felt rather used. (Several years later, during the
Gulf War, I couldn't help identifying with the little British
boy Stuart Lockwood, one of Saddam's human shields, who was forced
to appear on television with the Iraqi dictator.)
The next day a red leather folder with
gold embossed Arabic writing arrived at my hotel. Inside were
several identical eight-by-ten color photographs. Sure enough,
there we were--me in my mid-calf length black skirt and pink
polyester blouse, looking tiny next to Saddam, who was wearing
the ordinary olive green army uniform he seemed to favor back
then for most public occasions. Two other women were in the picture
with us. One was an elderly British travel writer, who was also
attending the women's conference, while the other was Manal Younis,
who was president at the time of the Iraqi Women's Federation.
It would be a couple of more years or so before Saddam would
begin using doubles for some public appearances, and in any case
he probably wouldn't have used one on this occasion, since at
such close range both the legislators and Mrs. Younis, who knew
Saddam well, would almost certainly have recognized an imposter.
Today, however, the problem of Saddam's numerous doubles and
of knowing whether "the real Saddam" has indeed been
killed or captured no doubt poses a genuine, although rarely
discussed, challenge for the Bush administration when it comes
to attempting to remove him.
My encounter with the Iraqi dictator
did absolutely nothing to turn me into any sort of Saddam Hussein
apologist. Still, I would argue that the moral and human cost
of attempting to remove him from power at this particular moment
is nearly as objectionable as the very regime our government
wishes to eradicate.
Not long after September 11, the Indian
writer Arundhati Roy wrote that Osama bin Laden was "sculpted
from the spare rib of a world laid waste by American foreign
policy." I would argue that Saddam Hussein is yet another
creation of this same policy--a policy which invariably has unbridled
support for Israel as its centerpiece.
I don't think it was a coincidence that
I was invited to Iraq only four months after the U.S. and Iraq
had resumed full diplomatic relations. As it turned out, however,
the "honeymoon" I came in on turned out to be a shortlived
one. In fact, unbeknownst to me, and presumably to Saddam, the
seeds of the Iran-Contra scandal were already being planted while
I was in Iraq. (I am certainly glad I wasn't visiting the country
a year or so later when Saddam discovered the duplicitous Israeli-American
arms-for-hostages scheme.)
Clearly America's Israel-centered policies
have been costly over the years in terms of developing any sort
of reasonable relationship with Iraq. In fact, Iraq broke off
all diplomatic relations with the U.S. for seventeen years to
protest American support for Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war. This long break in diplomatic relations no doubt contributed
to our chronic lack of reliable intelligence from inside Iraq,
a deficiency which persists even today and which some say has
led to an over-reliance by the U.S. on potentially self-serving
Israeli intelligence. Still, for better or worse, and despite
the State Department's oft-expressed reservations about the Reagan
administration's attempts to work with and even to "rehabilitate"
Saddam, the resumption of U.S.-Iraqi relations went ahead in
December, 1984, although it was common knowledge at the time
that Iraq had been using chemical weapons against Iranian troops
for more than a year.
In addition to a chronically unbalanced
U.S. foreign policy, another rarely heard argument which may
explain in part the predicament we currently find ourselves in
is that over the years Israel's behavior may have aggravated
certain aspects of Saddam's behavior. For example, the Iraqi
leader openly cited Israel's 1967 takeover of the Golan Heights
in particular as justification for his invasion of Kuwait. Saddam's
argument was that if Israel is allowed to ignore with impunity
some sixty UN resolutions calling for it to withdraw from the
occupied territories, then why shouldn't he ignore the UN resolutions
passed against his regime? And as far as weapons of mass destruction
are concerned, Saddam would no doubt argue that his effort to
amass a nuclear arsenal is strongly motivated by the fact that
Israel is thought to possess between two and three hundred nuclear
and thermonuclear weapons. He might also point out that Iraq
has been a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty since
1968 while Israel is not and never has been.
Indeed, the central question remains:
Why Iraq and why now? For the past several months reports coming
primarily out of Europe have suggested that Israel is pressing
for a U.S. assault on Iraq as "cover" for a planned
expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Jerusalem.
While on fact-finding missions to the
region in August and again in October, I posed the question of
whether expulsion was likely--or even possible -- to virtually
everyone I met -- Israeli and Palestinian alike. Many recoiled
from such a scenario, although few dismissed it out of hand.
Others seemed to be in denial that this might be a possibility,
even though signs and graffiti saying things like "transfer
= security +peace" are clearly in evidence nowadays both
in Israel and in the territories.
In response to the idea that Israel might
be pressuring the United States to attack Iraq as a way of "solving"
the Palestinian problem, Gershon Baskin, Jewish co-director of
the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information in Jerusalem
appeared not so much disingenuous as caught in a time warp when
he said, "Israel is a tiny country. It can't force the United
States do anything."
Still, one thing most Israelis and Palestinians
seem to agree on is that the current situation in the occupied
territories cannot continue indefinitely. Although in many ways
invisible -- at least as far as American television news coverage
is concerned -- the Israeli army's increasingly permanent system
of draconian checkpoints and curfews in virtually every major
West Bank city and town is creating an unprecedented pressure
cooker of Palestinian anger and frustration.
Another theory is that Israeli pressure
for a U.S. war against Iraq springs in part from Israel's jealousy
of an Arab state which has long been seen as having great economic
and cultural potential. (A similar explanation was put forth
as a reason for Israel's 1982 war on Lebanon.) Proponents of
this idea argue that Israel has always had nothing less than
zero tolerance for the emergence of any regional rival which
might try to woo away its American benefactor. Indeed, if Israel's
concerns really are the impetus behind the plan to wage war against
Iraq -- and certainly the pro-Israel cabal in Washington vociferously
champions this course of action -- then at least theoretically
the goal might ultimately be for Israel to embrace the entire
region from the Euphrates to Israel proper, including Jordan,
Syria and Lebanon. (Some rabbinical authorities go so far as
to interpret the lands belonging to the Jewish state as including
part of Iraq --as well as Kuwait and even a chunk of Saudi Arabia!)
Taking this hypothesis a step further, if Israel were to gain
at least indirect control not only of Iraq but of at least some
of the Iraqi oil then what an Israeli settler told me about his
dream of his country someday becoming financially independent
of the United States starts to make sense and even to seem realistic.
In fact, on close examination, the "new
order" in Iraq -- and throughout the Middle East -- that
the Bush administration and the pro-Israel pundits are clamoring
for sounds rather ominously like the "new order" Sharon
and other Israeli right-wingers once dreamed of establishing
on a smaller scale in Lebanon. That dream was of course never
realized: Israel's 1982 invasion of its neighbor to the north,
which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian
civilians, failed miserably in its attempt to install a government
sympathetic to Israeli interests. The current effort to effect
a "regime change" in Iraq is obviously a much more
ambitious scheme than was Israel's Lebanon war. (The strange
argument Israel-firsters might be putting forward could go something
like "we failed at Lebanon so let's try something even bigger.")
Still, in the absence of a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian peace
agreement, history suggests an American-led attack on Iraq will
have consequences which will be at least as disastrous as those
produced by Israel's Lebanon adventure.
Peggy Thomson
is an American journalist who worked in London for twelve years
for a number of news organizations, including the London-based
magazine Middle East International. She has also reported from
the Middle East for newspapers and radio. She can be reached
at: thomson@counterpunch.org.
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