In the pantheon of bloodthirsty dictators, Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was almost relegated to the dustbin of history.
He is now remembered as part of what appears to be a quaint “Axis of Evil,” They have psychotic sons, Uday and Qusay, a murderous cousin named “Chemical Ali,” and, perhaps best of all, no weapons of mass destruction.
The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was premised on claims that Saddam had amassed chemical and biological weapons and was prepared to use them.
But with no one around, the cavalry charge into Baghdad became a decade-long quagmire that cost more than $728 billion. 4,492 US military personnel died.
Now, his final secrets are revealed in a new book based in part on. saddam’s secret tapes The author fought a legal battle to obtain it.
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of the American Invasion of Iraq, by Steve Cole, details what Saddam told his CIA and FBI interrogators over a cigar, and the details of his 24-year history. It uses recordings of the Nixon style made during his time in office. Recovered by the CIA from his ruined palace in Baghdad.
They reveal a Saddam no one knew about and show how much the CIA misunderstood the Baghdad butcher.
For example, Saddam prided himself on his creative talent, writing four novels and financing a film while in power. He was more passionate about his writing than military issues just as the Bush administration’s rhetoric intensified its attacks on him. In the days before he was hanged in December 2006, he began writing poetry.
The author, Coll, is a veteran journalist and is completely unforgiving when it comes to the CIA’s massive “miscalculations” and “blunders” in the invasion of Iraq.
But he did not leave Saddam alone, making it clear that the Ba’athist dictator had underestimated the US decision to invade and that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction. It exposed both a failure to do enough and a failure on the Ba’athist dictator’s part. own ego and poor political strategy.
“Why did Mr. Hussein sacrifice his long reign in power, and ultimately his life, by giving the impression that he had a dangerous weapon when he did not? ” In an essay for the New York Times, Coll wrote: It has to do with the release of his book.
Kol then explained that Hussein: did He secretly ordered the destruction of all chemical and biological weapons, something he was ordered to do by the United States and the United Nations, but he did so for fear of appearing weak not only to his own people but also to the West. I hid it.
According to Coll’s book, “One of the mistakes some people make is that when an enemy decides to harm you, they think that by taking a certain action you might be able to lessen the harm.” Believe it,” Coll said to his staff. “In fact, he said, ‘It doesn’t make it any less damaging.'”
(“Hussein recorded his conversations with private leaders as diligently as Richard Nixon,” Coll writes.)
However cunning and ruthless Hussein was, it didn’t help that he was the product of a harsh rural peasant upbringing near the provincial city of Tikrit, where violence was a part of daily life. Hussein’s father died before he was born, and his stepfather is said to have been a formidable man with an evil personality and was harsh towards Saddam.
Meanwhile, Saddam wrote in his autobiography that he was a fearful boy who brandished a gun to intimidate other children and pistol-whipped people who didn’t move to make room on the bus. There is.
But when it comes to dealing with the fog of perception and mixed messages coming from the West, or what Cole calls Saddam’s “tragic, decades-long conflict with Washington,” which included cooperation with the CIA in the 1980s, , his tribesman toughness didn’t help. , the 1990 and 1991 Gulf War.
His tragedy has also been in the West, since the invasion of Iraq ultimately led to the rise of ISIS and empowered Iran, which naively assumed that Washington was more “omniscient” and competent than it actually was. Mr. Coll claims that there was.
He believed that the CIA “already knew” that he did not have a dangerous weapon.
Again, he was a virulent anti-Semite and thought the CIA was run entirely by Jews. He forbade his country’s spies from learning Hebrew in case they became sympathetic to Jews.
But in between revelations of Hussein’s own self-destruction, Coll paints a sometimes sympathetic portrait of Saddam before he was captured and hanged.He was discovered by the US military in December 2003 Hiding in the “spider hole” Near a farmhouse near Tikrit
“The thing I can say about Saddam as an adult is that he wasn’t really a crazy person,” Coll told the Post. “It may sound strange to say it, but he was happy with who he was.”
He first came to power in 1979 through a ruthless purge of the ruling Ba’athist elite and is seen mostly in military uniform.
At home, he experienced suffering and death on an astonishing scale. He went to war with Iran in 1980, and the eight-year conflict became a quagmire of trench warfare similar to World War I.
And he used poison gas against Iranian forces and then against his own people, repeatedly gassing rebellious Kurds, an atrocity that he – at the time – It showed that he had no qualms about using weapons of mass destruction or using them.
He invaded Kuwait in 1990, thinking he would get away, as revealed on the tape, and asked why the United States didn’t warn him beforehand not to invade.
But he considered himself more than just a political leader.
“He considered himself a man of culture,” Koll told the Post. “He invited poets to his office, and it was clear that he wanted to be seen as a multidimensional human being. “He read like a devil. He read biographies of great people; I read literature from the Arab world after World War II.”
When traveling abroad, Saddam dressed like a dandy in “burnt orange, double-breasted, wide-striped business suits” and tipped lavishly.
Saddam wrote four propaganda-heavy novels and much poetry, and financed his 1983 work. “Clash of Loyalties” An epic propaganda film starring Oliver Reed about the 1920 Iraqi revolution against British occupation.
British actor Mark Sinden was hired as a co-star, but before leaving the UK for filming in Iraq, he convinced him to do double duty as a spy.
Sinden’s espionage work included taking photographs of modern-day Baghdad and its layout, primarily for British intelligence, peering down from hotel rooms, and seeing trucks full of boys on the front lines at the time. This included leaving for war with Iran and watching them return laden with corpses. said in a 2014 interview.
Sinden and Oliver Reed are invited to the presidential palace for a dinner with Saddam, a group of his generals, and Saddam’s brutal son Uday.
“He was kind of mean,” Sinden said. “Mean man. At one point Saddam went on the most extraordinary revolutionary rant. I had no idea what he was saying, but it was in Arabic. I can only liken it to watching Goebbels.” The power of his oratory skills drew us in. He might have ordered more food, but we were all captivated.”
Cabinet files reveal that ministers experienced similar unstoppable abuse, much of it anti-Semitic.
Coll’s aides also sent his handwritten manuscript to the team for editing, but their suggestions were rarely accepted, Coll said.
Saddam’s first book, Zabiba and the King, was published in 2000 and is nominally a love story about a powerful ruler in medieval Iraq and Zabiba, a beautiful commoner who marries a cruel man who rapes her.
The book was widely seen as an allegory of rulers representing Saddam and rulers representing Saddam. Zabiba, the people of Iraq. and her evil husband, the United States, and inevitably Israel.
Zabiba and the King was also made into a 20-part television series and musical play on Iraqi television.
His other books include The Fortified Castle, Men in the City, which details the rise of the Ba’ath Party in Tikrit, and Begone Demons, a novel that is said to have been completed the day before the US invasion. there were. Biblical allegories, Zionist and Christian conspiracies against Arabs and Muslims.
“The more he wrote,” Coll writes, “the more he recognized himself as a man of letters.” “One night, Saddam, at the height of his novel-writing, heard a television host make a grammatical error as he read out his statement.
“The President protested by phone to the Minister of Culture. An investigation ensued. The presenter properly reread the statement on air and was suspended for six months.”
However, Coll was less enthusiastic about Saddam’s literary endeavors.
“He had no outstanding talent,” Coll says. “But he had a lot of stamina when it came to sitting down and actually writing and finishing books and poems.”
Despite being distracted by his desire to become a literary dictator (at the time the CIA believed he was accumulating even more weapons of mass destruction), Saddam was in charge of the United States in 2002 and early 2003. The country was considering the possibility of being invaded by a coalition of the willing.
But the tapes reveal that he prophetically told aides that that would never happen and that an invasion would hurt Bush’s popularity at home.
