Los Angeles Times
October 12, 2004
WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein was convinced he won the Persian Gulf War in
1991.
And when he destroyed all his weapons of mass destruction after
that war, Hussein was sure the CIA knew it.
As a result, he saw 12 years
of United Nations resolutions, trade sanctions and threats of war as a charade
to humiliate him.
In Hussein's view, Washington and Baghdad should
have been close allies. He could have helped curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, and
solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He offered to become America's "best
friend in the region, bar none." He was certain U.S. forces would never
invade.
Hussein's looking-glass view of the world is vividly described
in the report last week by Charles A. Duelfer, the CIA's chief weapons
investigator. The document is based on a variety of sources, including
interrogations of Hussein himself. A close reading of the report, along with
interviews with intelligence officials and outside experts, sheds new light on
Hussein's mind-set leadin g up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Duelfer
argues that for Americans to understand Hussein's baffling decision to defy U.N.
resolutions and face disaster they must "see the universe from Saddam's point in
space."
Yet the reverse is also true. If Hussein misunderstood the
West, it's clear that successive administrations in Washington since 1991
projected their own misconceptions and misjudgments onto Hussein. They also had
a looking-glass view.
They saw evidence of banned weapons when none
existed. They missed signs that now seem obvious. President Bush, for example,
insisted before the war that the failure by U.N. teams to find any evidence of
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons despite 731 inspections in the four
months before the invasion simply proved that Hussein was hiding them —
not that they didn't exist.
"I sometimes wonder, what part of the word
'no' didn't we understand?" mused a Pentagon official who has long studied
Hussein's regime.
Duelfer cle arly wrestled with the conundrum of years
of miscommunication between the two foes. Seeking clarity from the alternate
realities in Washington and Baghdad, his report sometimes reads like a script
from "The Twilight Zone."
To understand Hussein, Duelfer writes, one
must step back from "reality and time. We would collect the flow of images,
sounds, feelings and events that passed into Saddam's mind and project them as
with a Zeiss Planetarium projection instrument…. Events would flow by the
reader as they flowed by Saddam."
Duelfer urges people to forget the
images that portrayed Hussein as a buffoon. In the dictator's mind, he was the
latest in a line of great leaders such as Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar and
Saladin.
"Saddam saw adulation in a crowd cheering him when he fired a
rifle over their heads — not what we Westerners may see as a guy in a
funny hat recklessly firing a weapon," Duelfer writes. Imagine the dictator's
thoughts, he adds, when he saw Bush on TV "calling him a madman."
Duelfer has spent a decade studying Hussein, first as deputy head of the U.N.
weapons inspections program and then as chief U.S. investigator in Iraq. His
960-page report is based on 16 months of work in Iraq, interviews with Hussein
and most of his top aides and scientists, and a review of an estimated 40
million pages of documents retrieved from Iraq.
A single FBI agent has
conducted all U.S. interrogations of Hussein since he was captured in December
and placed in a solitary cell at a U.S. military base outside Baghdad. By all
accounts, Hussein has been lucid, rational and deliberate in months of
sessions.
"It would be easier to understand if he really was loony,"
said a former senior intelligence official who has read many of the debriefings
and who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There's nothing that's come through
in the interviews that would lead you to believe the guy's got a screw
loose."
But the former senior official said the interrogations of
Hussein ar e frustrating for those trying to understand the ousted dictator's
motivations and decision-making — as well as the regime's use of torture,
assassination and mass murder.
"What you'd hope is he'd
lay out why he did what he did, or what he was thinking when he did all these
stupid things," he said. "He's not giving us those kinds of insights. He
doesn't reveal that much…. It's like having Hitler on the couch but he's
not telling you anything about concentration camps."
The former
official said the CIA never understood that Hussein was bluffing about his
long-abandoned weapons chiefly to deter Iran, Iraq's longtime enemy. To
Hussein, Tehran's alleged push to gain the nuclear arms that he was denied posed
an unacceptable danger to his country and a challenge to his rightful place in
history.
CIA officials heard dire threats in Hussein's bombastic
speeches. They assumed banned weapons were in trucks and buildings they could
not enter. They believed defectors with codenames like "Curveball" and "Red
River," who told them what they wanted to hear. They reasoned that Hussein
would not endure U.N. sanctions, and lose an estimated $100 billion in trade,
if he had nothing to hide.
In the end, Hussein's bluff backfired.
Washington's failure to read the bluff would have a huge impact on both
countries.
Hussein's mistake "was one of the more monumental
miscalculations of history," the former official said. "Even larger than ours
of not understanding what he was doing…. We're used to people going out of
their way to pretend they don't have bad stuff. But we hadn't before
encountered someone who went out of his way to pretend he did. I know he said
he didn't [have banned weapons], but all his actions said he
did."
In Hussein's view, the U.S. priority in the region was to ensure
that Iran's Islamic Revolution did not spread to other nations and give radical
Shiite clerics a chokehold on global oil supplies. He was convinced that
Washingt on's national interest lay in containing Iran's suspected nuclear arms
program, not in toppling his regime.
Indeed, he depended on it.
David Kay, who preceded Duelfer as the chief U.S. weapons sleuth, said he asked
Tarik Aziz, Iraq's former deputy prime minister, in an interrogation last year
why Hussein didn't keep his illicit weapons if he was so nervous about Iran's
effort to build a nuclear bomb. "He said every time they raised it with Saddam,
he said, 'Don't worry about Iran because if it turns out to be what we think,
the Israelis or the Americans will take care of them,' " Kay said. "In other
words, he was relying on us to deal with his enemy."
Aziz said Hussein
got his news from the Arabic-language radio services of the BBC and Voice of
America. But Hussein was more interested in books and news about rival Arab
leaders. He especially resented the Saudi rulers for their U.S. ties.
Hussein's own view of the United States was conflicted. In his mind, he was a
heroic leade r who gained prestige in the Arab world for his defiance of the
sole superpower. But Hussein told aides it would be equally prestigious to
become a U.S. ally. So he used U.N. diplomats, journalists and others to
carry back-channel offers to improve relations with Washington.
"They
really thought they could cut a deal," said a former CIA officer who was
contacted by a senior Iraqi official shortly before the invasion in March 2003.
"He thought it was power politics to the end. He really couldn't believe we
would eliminate his country from the map. That's the way he looked at it."
All of Hussein's entreaties were rebuffed, and it's impossible to know
if he was serious about cooperating with Washington. But he complained to an
interrogator that "he was not given a chance because the U.S. refused to listen
to anything Iraq had to say."
Dr. Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist
who has profiled Hussein for the CIA, said Hussein was "not psychotic." But he
said the dictator had little recent exp erience outside Iraq, and had a
distorted worldview.
"He thought the real threats from the West were the
kind of hyperbole that one often hears in the Arab world," Post said. "And he
was surrounded by sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear, not what he
needed to know."
An interrogation of Ali Hassan Majid, the senior aide
known as "Chemical Ali" for his alleged role in using poison gas to slaughter
Iraqi Kurds in 1988, illustrated the point. Asked how Hussein responded to bad
news, Majid indicated he "has never known any instance of anybody bringing bad
news to Saddam," according to Duelfer's report.
Hussein's second son and
heir apparent, Qusai, was no better. The former commander of the Nebuchadnezzar
Republican Guard division told a U.S. interrogator that Qusai "thought most of
us were clowns. We pretended to have victory, and we never provided true
information as it is here on planet Earth…. Any commander who spoke the
truth would lose his head."
Ironically, S addam Hussein misread U.S.
intentions in part because he believed the CIA was far better at spying than it
turned out to be. Senior aides told interrogators that Hussein was convinced
the U.S. intelligence agency knew he had no illicit weapons.
Hussein
assumed that the CIA had penetrated his regime, just as his own intelligence
services used wiretaps, secret cameras and informants to spy on the U.N.
weapons teams.
He was wrong. In July, the Senate Intelligence Committee
reported that the CIA had no informants or spies inside Iraq for at least five
years before the war.
"Saddam believed in the myth of the CIA," said
Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who worked in northern Iraq. "He really
thought we knew what was going on inside his regime. He couldn't believe that
we didn't have any sources."
Other Iraqis also believed in the CIA.
Duelfer recounts how a top regime official, Abdel Tawab Mullah Huweish, began to
worry that Hussein was hiding banned weapons after Bush named Iraq as part of an
"axis of evil" in January 2002.
"Huweish could not understand why the
United States would challenge Iraq in such stark and threatening terms unless it
had irrefutable information," Duelfer writes.
In other ways, the Iraqis
understood U.S. thinking all too well. Top regime leaders "had a much better
understanding of how the West viewed their programs than the other way around,"
Duelfer concludes.
In the 1990s, as tensions between Iraq and the
international community waxed and waned, U.S. analysts studied images from spy
satellites and identified prominent regime buildings as potential targets for
cruise missile attacks. The U.S. did launch limited strikes on occasion,
targeting missile facilities and suspected weapons labs.
But Iraqi
officials quickly understood U.S. strategy and emptied many of the sites of key
equipment and records before any attack, according to Duelfer.
More than
a decade of regular U.S. and British bombing of Iraqi antiaircraft, commu
nications and other military sites in the "no-fly" zones in northern and
southern Iraq were worth the cost to Hussein. Sooner or later, the dictator
thought, he would shoot down a plane.
"This was a battle he was
fighting with a very favorable exchange ratio," Duelfer writes. "He cost the
United States a lot with almost no cost to himself, and he could readily sustain
the battle indefinitely."
In other cases, U.S. officials simply
misunderstood the high-tech intelligence they had.
On Feb. 5, 2003, for
example, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appeared at the U.N. Security
Council to make the administration's case for war. He played a tape of a phone
call that he said was intercepted on Jan. 30 between a Republican Guard officer
and an underling in the field. According to Powell, the officer issued orders
to "clean out all the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure
nothing is there."
Powell said the tape proved Hussein was hiding "the
presence of weapons of m ass destruction." U.S. investigators never found the
officers. But they concluded that Powell misinterpreted the tape. The call
concerned materials from Iraq's long-defunct, pre-1991 arms program, not new
weapons.
In fact, on Jan. 25, five days before the call was taped, a
senior regime official met Republican Guard military leaders and warned that
"the government would hold them responsible" if U.N. inspectors found any of
the old material in their areas "or if there was anything that cast doubt on
Iraq's cooperation."
Until the final few months, Hussein was convinced
that Bush would not invade. He told aides America still suffered from the
"Vietnam syndrome."
"He probably didn't think he'd be alive at this
point," said Kay, the former U.S. weapons inspector. "Every day he probably
wonders what went wrong."