October 7, 2004
HIS INTENTION WAS TO BRUTALIZE WHOEVER HE COULD GET HIS HANDS ON, NO?:
Report unveils Saddam's true strategic intentions (Steven Komarow and John Diamond, 10/07/04, USA TODAY)
On the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein met with his top commanders. They chatted about a new uniform design as waiters served food. Then the dictator ordered the doors closed and turned to business: repelling the expected U.S.-led effort to liberate Kuwait."I want to make sure that the germ and chemical warheads, as well as the chemical and germ bombs, are available," Saddam said.
When it came to weapons of mass destruction, Saddam was a believer. Fusillades of poison gas had beat back waves of Iranian troops a few years earlier, and Saddam thought such weapons might help save him again.
His truculent attitude, captured on a tape uncovered and translated years later by U.S. weapons inspectors, would last but a few days. After a U.S. warning that use of such weapons would bring a massive response, Saddam fired only conventional warheads at Israel and Saudi Arabia. And within a year of Desert Storm, Saddam would back down again and order his banned weapons destroyed to meet United Nations demands.
The episode reflects the complex picture of Saddam that emerges from the 1,000-page report of chief U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer. The Iraqi dictator, now in U.S. military custody awaiting a war crimes trial in Iraq, comes across not as a madman but as a calculating adversary, ruthless but also ready to make a tactical retreat.
As the report makes clear, successive U.S. administrations misjudged not just Saddam's arsenal, but Saddam himself and in so doing may have missed opportunities to avoid war. To be sure, the Iraqi dictator comes across as brutal, perfectly willing to execute subordinates who defy him, or gas civilian populations. He was belligerent to the world.
Do they really not get that the brutality and belligerence raise the question of whether it would have been desirable to avoid war? Posted by Orrin Judd at October 7, 2004 11:13 PM
US administrations may have misjudged Saddam, but he too was clearly totally ignorant of how to best manipulate Americans.
Saddam could easily have avoided the humiliating defeat in Kuwait, and kept the Kuwaiti oil fields, if he'd been better informed; he could easily have avoided the current war, if he'd acted swiftly and correctly.
It's not at all unusual that the heads of two so radically different nations and societies would find each other behaving "irrationally".
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at October 8, 2004 2:17 AM