Los Angeles Times
October 8, 2004
WASHINGTON — Shortly before the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq last
year, Saddam Hussein gathered his top generals together to share what came to
them as astonishing news: The weapons that the United States was launching a
war to remove did not exist.
"There was plenty of surprise when Saddam
said, 'Sorry guys, we don't have any' " weapons of mass destruction to use
against the invading forces, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.
The unexpected peek inside Hussein's inner circle in the days and weeks before
the regime was toppled comes in a report by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group released
Wednesday, as well as from Senate testimony Wednesday by Charles A. Duelfer,
head of the survey group, and from a briefing for reporters by an official
familiar with the interrogations of Hussein and his aides.
The new
accounts contradict many U.S. assumptions about relations between Hussein and
his senior aides, as well as American views on what Hussein was doing and how he
saw the outsi de world before the invasion.
For example, many in the
U.S. intelligence community had believed that Hussein's sycophantic generals
kept him in the dark about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons programs — that is, that the dictator was misled by associates who
told him what he wanted to hear.
Far from being misinformed, the
report says, Hussein was micromanaging Iraq's weapons policy himself and kept
even his most loyal aides from gaining a clear picture of what was going on
— and, more important, not going on — with the program.
"Saddam's centrality to the regime's political structure meant that he was the
hub of Iraqi WMD policy and intent," the report concluded.
His paranoia
and his fascination with science and technology "meant that control of WMD
development and its deployment was never far from his touch," it said.
Although the interrogation reports may shed new light on Hussein's role, they
also raise a question: If Hu ssein understood that he had no stockpiles of
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, why did he limit the activities of the
United Nations inside Iraq, violate U.N. Security Council resolutions and defy
the outside world from the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 until his regime
was toppled in 2003?
Hussein often denied U.S. assertions that he
possessed banned weapons in defiance of U.N. resolutions, but for years he also
persisted in making cryptic public statements to perpetuate the myth that he
actually did have them. The Iraq Survey Group believes that he continued making
those statements long after he had secretly ordered the destruction of his
stockpiles.
Based on the interrogations, it appears that Hussein
underestimated how seriously the United States took the weapons issue, and he
believed it was vital to his own survival that the outside world —
especially Iran — think he still had them.
It was a strategy,
Hussein has told his FBI interrogators during the l ast 10 months, that was
aimed primarily at bluffing Iraq's neighbor to the east.
"The Iranian
threat was very, very, palpable to him, and he didn't want to be second to Iran,
and he felt he had to deter them. So he wanted to create the impression that he
had more than he did," Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group head, told members of the
Senate on Wednesday.
And, the man known for colossal miscalculations
made perhaps his greatest strategic blunder by refusing to believe that
President Bush would make good on threats to forcibly remove him from
power.
"He kept trying to bargain or barter, and he had not realized the
nature of the ground shift in the international community," Duelfer said. "That
was Saddam's intelligence failure."
Captured in December hiding in a
hole in northern Iraq, Hussein is imprisoned at Camp Cropper, a U.S.-run
facility at Baghdad's fortified airport. He spends much of his days writing,
reading and tending to a solitary tree inside a walled courtyard on the camp
grounds.
Yet despite reports that Hussein is delusional and often
engrossed in romance novels, the senior U.S. official said he had shown himself
in recent interrogations by an FBI agent to be lucid and even capable of
appearing charismatic.
Before the interrogations began, Duelfer tried to
determine what incentive U.S. officials could offer the ex-dictator to get him
to cooperate. In the end, they decided to appeal to Hussein's vanity.
"The only thing we could offer was an opportunity to help shape his legacy," the
official recalled. They asked Hussein whether he wanted "to be remembered by
what these characters are saying about you" — referring to other captured
Baathist officials who were talking to U.S. interrogators.
According to
the report, Hussein told interrogators that two experiences in particular
convinced him that Iraq's possession — or at least perceived possession
— of banned weapons assured his survival.
During the late 1980s,
when Iraq appeared to be losing its war against Iran, Hussein's outnumbered army
managed to stave off fast-moving Iranian forces by firing more than 100,000
munitions containing mustard gas and other lethal blister agents and nerve
gases. The chemical attacks caused as many as 80,000 Iranian casualties,
according to U.N. reports, and ultimately led to a cease-fire.
Second,
Hussein and his aides were convinced that their chemical and biological weapons
saved the Baath Party regime after a U.S.-led military coalition forced Iraqi
troops out of Kuwait in 1991. U.S. and allied troops halted their advance deep
in southern Iraq, and Hussein and his regime unexpectedly were allowed to remain
in power.
At the time, aides to then-President George H.W. Bush thought
the reason Hussein had not used illicit weapons against the coalition was that
Washington had delivered a clear warning that it would respond with overwhelming
force, implying a nuclear attack if necessary.
Yet Hussein and his
aides appa rently read U.S. thinking differently. As they described it to
interrogators, they thought Washington left him in power because U.S. officials
knew of his orders to load and disperse his nerve gases and germ agents, and his
orders that the weapons were to be used if U.S. troops entered Baghdad.
In the years after the Gulf War, the senior official said, Hussein became
convinced that Washington would decide it was in its interest to deal with his
regime because Iraq was large, secular, educated and had oil. That view may
have been reinforced by the fact that during much of the Reagan administration,
Washington supported Hussein as a counterweight to Iran.
The alliance
became strained, however, and was ruptured when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
"He believed that ultimately the U.S. would come to deal with
Baghdad," the official said. "The mistake he made was thinking he would still
be in Baghdad."
The official predicted that Hussein would be "very
compelling" when he was finally brought to trial in Baghdad for war crimes and
crimes against humanity.
"He's looking forward to the stage, the
theater, that the trial will offer him," he said. "Don't expect someone
bug-eyed … or waving his arms."
The Iraq Survey Group report also
reveals a passion that Hussein had for certain aspects of Western culture, and
how he personally related to certain fictional characters, such as Santiago in
Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea."
In the story, the
fisherman Santiago hooks a marlin that drags his boat out to sea. When the
marlin dies, Santiago fights an ultimately futile battle with sharks that tear
into the fish and reduce it to a skeleton.
"Saddam tended to
characterize, in a very Hemingway-esque way, his life as a relentless struggle
against overwhelming odds, but carried out with courage, perseverance and
dignity," the report concludes.
"Much like Santiago, ultimately left
with only the marlin's skeleton as the trophy of his success, to Sa ddam even a
hollow victory was by his reckoning a real one."