Saddam Hussein:
In desperate pursuit of a hero
Khaled Diab
The
US-UK occupation of Iraq is succeeding in achieving the once implausible feat
of turning a reviled dictator into something of a cult hero. This demonstrates
the utter failure of the Anglo-Saxon military adventure there. It also reveals
the desperate need in some Arab quarters to find a hero amongst the villains
who pass for leaders in the region and to salvage some pride amidst all the
humiliation and defeat.
January 2007
Part I – Anti-heroics and
wishful thinking
Part II – Champion or
villain of the Arab cause?
Part IV – Emulating
history
The dead don’t
talk
Saddam Hussein was certainly guilty of the
crime for which he swung, but he was not the only villain involved in Iraq in
need of a reckoning. It was unsurprising that the Americans did not hand him
over to the International Criminal Court, given their refusal to sign up to it
out of fear that their own besmirched leaders may be held accountable for war
crimes.
In addition, the court suffered from such an
extreme case of tunnel vision that it hardly delved into his most serious
crimes. His hurried trial and execution may have had something to do with the
fact that the dead don’t talk, especially ones with dangerous stories to tell.
According to several US officials and diplomats, Saddam Hussein has been no
stranger to the Americans, even before his rise to power, and for decades was
seen as a useful buffer, first against the Communists and, later, against the
Islamic Republic next door in Iran. His attempt to assassinate the Iraqi
dictator Abdel-Karim Qassim – who had overthrown the British-installed monarchy
and pulled Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact, which the British and Americans had
set up as an ‘alliance’ against the spread of Soviet influence – was reportedly
blessed and supported by the CIA and Egyptian intelligence.
Roger Morris, a National Security Council
staffer in the 1960s, alleged that the US funded and backed the Ba’ath coup in
1963 and the infamous 1968 party purges which turned Saddam Hussein into the
uncrowned king until his cousin and mentor, President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr,
retired in 1979. In many ways, he is the secular version of Osama bin Laden,
armed and funded by the Americans as a proxy in the battle against the Soviet
Union, only to turn on his former masters later. There are also parallels
between Saddam and former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and former
Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
Away from the murky world of espionage where
charges are hard to prove or disprove, there can be little doubt of the support
Washington and other western capitals provided to Iraq in its bloody war
against Aytollah Khomeini’s Iran. “For the West… Saddam was a new Shah in the
making,” observes Robert Fisk in his tome The Great War for Civilisation –
The Conquest of the Middle East. “He would be a Shah for us and a Nasser
for the Arabs.”
The United States, Britain, France and others
helped arm him and almost certainly provided Iraq with the chemical know-how he
would employ with such devastating effect first on the Iranians and then on the
Kurds. Ironically, most of his worst atrocities were committed at the time his
Iraq was receiving tacit western support.
Had the trial probed more deeply it may have
stumbled across, or Saddam Hussein may have revealed, what he and Donald Rumsfeld
discussed behind closed doors when the former defence secretary visited him, in
1983, in his earlier incarnation as Ronald Reagan’s special Middle East envoy
at the height of the Iran-Iraq war? His visit came at a time when Iraq was
using gas (some of which was supplied by US labs) to kill thousands of Iranian
soldiers on the front and which Rumsfeld failed to condemn or mention to the
Iraqi president. Instead, Regan was exploring ways of lifting the official arms
restrictions against Iraq which was on the verge of defeat by the Iranians.
Earlier, in 1975, Hussein received a very
public welcome from the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, who offered the
visiting Iraqi “my esteem, my consideration and my affection”.
Part I – Anti-heroics and
wishful thinking
Part II – Champion or
villain of the Arab cause?
Part IV – Emulating
history
Further reading
How I learned to start worrying and hate the bomb
November 2006 – With North Korea’s recent
nuclear test and Iran’s suspected nuclear designs, Khaled Diab explains why he
learned to start worrying and hate the bomb and suggests how the proliferation
of nuclear weapons can best be arrested – and reversed. Read on
Extraordinary
renditions –
The
playwright and the president
January 2006 – Jeff Sommers,
Khaled Diab and Charles Woolfson explore the dynamics between playwright and
president as American foreign policy stands in the dock. Read on
Extended
analysis
Dressed
to kill –
Under
the cloak of Bush’s foreign policy
December 2005 – Jeff Sommers, Khaled Diab and Charles
Woolfson expose what lies beneath the cloak of US President George W Bush’s
foreign policy. Read on
The price of war
October 2002 – Whether or not Iraq, after more than a
decade of ‘containment’ and sanctions, poses a threat to the United States and
its allies, any military action would most likely have serious economic and
political ramifications for Europe. Read on
ã2007
K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the
copyright of Khaled Diab.