The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
severe back pains from sleeping on the concrete. I made up mathematical puzzles and solved them. I thought about the people who had accepted the regime, who could have fought it when it was weak and did not. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced I had done the right thing. I knew that my family would understand the reasons for it. I wished Bernice would take the kids and leave the country. That would have been much easier for me. She said that as long as I was alive, she would never leave the country.
Hussain Shahristani eventually escaped from Abu Ghraib during an American air raid in February 1990 after friends helped him disguise himself as an Iraqi intelligence officer, and he made his way via Suleimaniya to Iran. Bernice remembered a visit to her husband in prison when she could not recognise his face. ‘I could only recognise his clothes,’ she said. ‘But I knew it was him because I saw a tear running down his cheek.’
Just two months after Dr Shahristani’s mind-numbing transfer from Abu Ghraib prison to the palace in 1980, Saddam decided to deny what he had already admitted to Shahristani the previous year: his plan to possess nuclear weapons. I watched this typical Saddam performance, staged on 21 July 1980, in front of hundreds of journalists – myself among them – in the hall of Iraq’s highly undemocratic national assembly. Perhaps the chamber was just too big, because when he entered, the first impression was of a tiny man in an overlarge double-breasted jacket, a rather simple soul with a bright tie and a glossy jacket. He began not with the cheery wave adopted by so many Arab leaders but with a long, slightly stilted salute, like a private soldier desperately ill at ease among generals. But when Saddam spoke, the microphone – deliberately, no doubt – pitched his voice up into Big Brother volume, so that he boomed at us, his sarcasm and his anger coming across with venom rather than passion. You could imagine what it was like to be denounced before the revolutionary command council.
With an autocrat’s indignation that anyone should believe Iraq wanted to build an atom bomb – but with the suggestion that the Arabs were perfectly capable of doing so if they chose – he denied that his country was planning to produce nuclear weapons. He also condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and US military involvement in the Gulf, sneered at the Syrian Baathist leadership, accused British businessmen of bribery and belittled accurate reports of Kurdish unrest in Iraq. ‘We have no programme concerning the manufacture of the atomic bomb,’ he said. ‘We have no such programme for the Israelis to thwart … we want to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes.’
His argument was artful. ‘A few years ago, Zionists in Europe used to spread the news that the Arabs were backward people, that they did not understand technology and were in need of a protector. The Arabs, the Zionists said, could do nothing but ride camels, cry over the ruins of their houses and sleep in tents. Two years ago, the Zionists and their supporters came up with a declaration that Iraq was about to produce the atom bomb. But how could a people who only knew how to ride camels produce an atom bomb?’ Iraq had signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but no one asked if the Israelis were making atom bombs at their nuclear centre at Dimona in the Negev desert. ‘Arab nations are on the threshold of a new age and will succeed in using atomic energy. Millions of Arabs will be able to use this advanced technology.’ Saddam kept using the word ‘binary’ over and over again, as if Iraq had just split the atom.
His statements were laced with references to the ‘Arab nation’, and the ghost of Gamal Abdel Nasser – whose name he invoked on at least three occasions – was clearly intended to visit the proceedings. Regarding his own regime as an example of the purest pan-Arab philosophy, he clearly saw himself as the aspiring leader of the Arab world. But he could not resist, just briefly, hinting at the truth. ‘Whoever wants to be our enemy,’ he shouted at one point, ‘can expect us as an enemy to be totally different in the very near future.’ He had made his point: if the Arabs were able to use advanced nuclear technology in the near future and if Israel’s enemy was going to be ‘totally different’, this could only mean that he was planning to possess nuclear weapons. It was no secret that Iraq’s Osirak reactor was expected to be commissioned in just five months’ time.
Then came Iran. He believed, he said, in the right of the Iranian people to self-determination, but ‘Khomeini has become a murderer in his own country.’ At one point, Saddam began to speak of the 35,000 Iraqi Shiites of Iranian origin whom he had just expelled from Iraq – he did not mention the figure, nor the fact that many of them held Iraqi passports – and he suddenly ended in mid-sentence. ‘We have expelled a few people of Iranian origin or people who do not belong to Iraq,’ he began. ‘But now, if they want to come back …’ And there he suddenly ended his remark. It was an oblique but ominous warning of the punishment Saddam intended to visit upon Iran’s Islamic Revolution.
His press conference went on long into the night and into the early hours of the next morning. He spoke without notes and, although he would not regard the comparison as flattering, he often improvised his speech as he went along in much the same way that President Sadat of Egypt used to do. I noted in my report to The Times next day that ‘when the president smiled – which he did only rarely – he was greeted by bursts of applause from fellow ministers and Baath party officials.’ When several of us were close to Saddam after his speech, he offered his hand to us. In my notes, I recorded that it was ‘soft and damp’.
Two years later, Richard Pim, who had been head of Winston Churchill’s prime ministerial Map Room at Downing Street during the Second World War, used exactly the same words – ‘soft and damp’ – when he described to me his experience of shaking hands in Moscow with Josef Stalin, upon whom Saddam consciously modelled himself. It was one of Stalin’s biographers who noted in 2004 that in the 1970s Saddam had dutifully visited all of Stalin’s fifteen scenic seaside villas on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia, some of them Tsarist palaces; these were presumably the inspiration for the vast imperial – and largely useless – palaces which Saddam built for himself all over Iraq.*
For the West, however, Saddam was a new Shah in the making. That, I suspected, was what his press conference was all about. He would be a Shah for us and a Nasser for the Arabs. His personality cult was already being constructed. He was a new version of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, it was said in Baghdad – he would soon become a far more disturbing version of an ancient Arab warrior – and his face now appeared across the country, in Kurdish dress, in Arab kuffiah, in business suit, digging trenches in guerrilla uniform, revolver tucked Arafat-style into his trouser belt, on dinar banknotes. He was, a local poet grovellingly wrote, ‘the perfume of Iraq, its dates, its estuary of the two rivers, its coast and waters, its sword, its shield, the eagle whose grandeur dazzles the heavens. Since there was an Iraq, you were its awaited and promised one.’
Saddam had already developed the habit of casually calling on Iraqis in their homes to ask if they were happy – they always were, of course – and my colleague Tony Clifton of Newsweek was himself a witness to this kind of Saddamite aberration. During an interview with the president, Clifton rashly asked if Saddam was never worried about being assassinated. ‘The interpreter went ashen-grey with fear and there was a long silence,’ Clifton was to recall. ‘I think Saddam knew some English and understood the question. Then the interpreter said something to him and Saddam roared with laughter and clapped me on the shoulder. He didn’t stop laughing, but he said to me: “Leave this room now! Go out onto the street! Go and ask anyone in Iraq: Do you love Saddam?” And he went on laughing. And all the people in the room burst out laughing. Of course, you couldn’t really do that, could you? You couldn’t go up to Iraqis and ask them that. They were going to tell you that they loved him.’*
Saddam had inherited the same tribal and religious matrix as the British when they occupied Iraq in 1917. The largest community, the Shia, were largely excluded from power but constituted a permanent threat to the Sunni-dominated Baath party. Not only were their magnificent golden shrines at Najaf and Kerbala potent symbols of the great division in Islamic society, but they represented a far larger majority in Iran. Just so long as the Shah ruled Iraq’s eastern neighbour, its religious