The disordered psyche of Saddam Hussein

A remarkable article in The Washington Post, based on U.S. interrogations of high-ranking former members of the Hussein regime including Tarik Aziz, may help explain some of Saddam Hussein’s uncanny and self-destructive behavior leading up to and during the Iraq war. While none of these explanations are accepted by U.S. authorities as simply true, they certainly raise interesting possibilities. In the end, however, we’re still left with a mystery. It is the mysterious nature of Plato’s Tyrannical Man, who, in releasing his own darkest impulses, ultimately loses touch with reality and destroys himself.

First, assuming that Hussein did not have as many weapons of mass destruction and weapons programs as was universally believed, why did he go on letting American and other intelligence services and the UN inspectors believe that he had them—especially since the result of that false belief on the part of the Americans would be an invasion of his country and his own likely death?

… [S]everal high-ranking detainees have said they believe that Hussein was afraid to lose face with his Arab neighbors. Hussein concluded, these prisoners explained, that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other countries paid him deference because they feared he had weapons of mass destruction. Hussein was unwilling to reveal that his cupboard was essentially bare, these detainees said, according to accounts from officials.

However, others doubt this:

In the end, say investigators, all of this fragmentary testimony about Hussein’s thinking about special weapons is uncorroborated by hard documentary evidence or an unimpeachable inside source.

“The question we all have is, ‘What was so damned important that you were willing to go through all of this?’ ” said Killip of the Iraq Survey Group. He continued: “I’ve not heard any totally convincing explanation that’s backed up with facts. And it’s truly puzzling.”

In addition to a possible fixation on “face” and the power that others’ belief in his power gave him, Hussein seems to have been gulled into imagining that he could survive a war—by the French and Russians. According to some accounts, French and Russian intermediaries told Hussein that the Americans would engage in a long air campaign as they did in ‘91, giving the French and Russians time to broker a cease-fire agreement, which would allow Hussein to survive once again.

However, leaving aside what this account may indicate of the staggering perfidy of our Russian and French “allies” (whose interference may have persuaded Hussein to go on defying the U.S.), it strikes me as hard to believe, considering that the American plans for an early land invasion were openly published in the Western press prior to the war. I myself read on the Internet two weeks before the war a highly detailed description of an extremely rapid U.S. infantry invasion that would proceed simultaneously with the air campaign, which in fact was what happened.

Finally, why was there so little effective defense of Baghdad? And why did the Iraqis not use chemical weapons, as everyone expected them to do? It seems that each Iraqi general believed that all the other generals except for himself had chemical weapons. The picture is one of a literally insane degree of control by Hussein, in which he told separate and distinct lies to each of his subordinates so as to maintain better control over them, an approach which, while it may have satisfied his need for a sense of total power, made rational military command impossible.

All these factors may help explain the system-wide breakdown described by the former Iraqi higher-ups:

Investigators of the Iraq Survey Group have discovered that in the months before the war, many specific military and civilian defensive measures ordered by Hussein in past conflicts were only partially carried out or were completely ignored. There appears to have been “some kind of breakdown in the structure that was controlling things,” Killip said.

Former military leaders, including dozens of detained generals who have undergone interrogations, have cited the Iraqi president’s military incompetence, isolation, and reliance on family and tribe in a time of crisis as central factors in the regime’s collapse.

In discussing Hussein’s failure to use chemical weapons in the defense of Baghdad, officials said, the generals often rant sarcastically that Hussein’s government did not even prepare land mines and other basic military defenses to block or slow the U.S. advance. Why, they ask, should chemical weapons be any different?

“There was no unity of command. There were five different armies being used, no cooperation or coordination,” retired Maj. Gen. Abed Mutlaq Jubouri, 63, a former division commander later jailed by Hussein for conspiring against the regime, said in an interview with The Post. “As to the defense of Baghdad, there was no plan.”

Of course, this being The Washington Post, the story doesn’t mention another explanation for the Iraqi army’s amazing failure to carry out commands: the extraordinary American effort secretly to contact Iraqi generals and persuade them to order their units to stand aside from the conflict.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 03, 2003 10:13 PM | Send