Category Archives: Quagmire News

Saddam’s delusions

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The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 opened a secretive and brutal regime to outside scrutiny for the first time. The U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) commissioned a secret comprehensive study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein’s regime based on previously inaccessible primary sources.

In the words of the journal Foreign Affairs,

Two years in the making, the report of the “Iraqi Perspectives Project” draws on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents from all levels of the regime, and is destined to rewrite the history of the war from the ground up. Excerpts from the report itself are presented exclusively in a special double-length article from the upcoming May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.

Highlights include:

  • Did Iraq have WMD? No — but Saddam wanted others, particular in the region, to think he did, so he maintained a calculated ambiguity on the question. In the last months before the war he realized that it was too dangerous to continue playing this double game and finally decided to cooperate fully with international inspectors. But at that point his track record of repeatedly lying meant that no one believed him.
  • What made Saddam so complacent? His belief that the United States did not have the will to take casualties in a serious war and that if necessary France and Russia would keep him safe.
  • What did Saddam care about? First and foremost, preventing a coup. His entire regime was set up to prevent the emergence of any alternate centers of power that could threaten his position. He created an astonishing array of different military and paramilitary forces to maintain domestic control, but made sure to stock them with lackeys and cronies, have them check and balance each other, and have everybody watched carefully at all times. This allowed him to stay in power, but it meant that his armed forces were almost completely ineffective at dealing with actual military operations against a competent foreign enemy.
  • Did Saddam plan the current insurgency? No. He thought the United States would never attack, and was confident that even if it did, the resulting war would follow essentially the same script as the first Gulf War in 1991, without a full-scale invasion all the way to Baghdad. He did preposition a lot of military materiel around the country before the war started, but only to disperse it and keep it safe, so that it would be available either in the later stages of a long and drawn-out campaign against the coalition, or to reestablish control at home afterwards (as he did in 1991, when the Kurds and Shia revolted).
  • How did Saddam think the war was going? Swimmingly. Because everyone knew that Saddam severely punished anybody who told him unpleasant truths, the entire regime was built on lies. During wartime, this meant that junior officers told senior officers that everything was going well, they reported it up the chain of command, and Saddam himself remained a prisoner of his delusions.

    • Full, fascinating, text here.

    A couple of striking passages:

    A 1982 incident vividly illustrated the danger of telling Saddam what he did not want to hear. At one low point during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. With some temerity, the minister of health, Riyadh Ibrahim, suggested that Saddam temporarily step down and resume the presidency after peace was established. Saddam had him carted away immediately. The next day, pieces of the minister’s chopped-up body were delivered to his wife. According to Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, the head of the Military Industrial Commission and a relative of the murdered minister, “This powerfully concentrated the attention of the other ministers, who were unanimous in their insistence that Saddam remain in power.”

    And this…

    Fear of Saddam’s reaction to bad news was not limited to his ministers and soldiers. Its pernicious effects reached even into Saddam’s immediate family. One former high-level official related the following story about Qusay:

    At the end of 2000, it came to Saddam’s attention that approximately seventy military vehicles were immobile. Saddam told Qusay to resolve the problem. Republican Guard mechanics claimed they could repair the vehicles if the funds were made available. Qusay agreed to the work, and funds were provided for the task. Once the work was completed, Qusay sent a representative to inspect the vehicles and he found them lined up on a vehicle park, thirty-five vehicles on each side. The vehicles looked like new, having been freshly painted and cleaned.

    After Qusay’s representative inspected them, a second inspection was conducted to verify that they were now operational. The staff was told to supply drivers to move all [the] vehicles to the opposite side of the vehicle park to ensure they were in working order. None of the seventy vehicles would start. When this was reported to Qusay, he instructed that Saddam not be informed, as Qusay had already told Saddam that the vehicles were operational.

    In the end, Qusay did not order mechanics to fix the vehicles — it appears that he was eager only to hide this failure from his father.

    Good news from Iraq (not)

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    Stung by complaints that the media report only bad news from Iraq, the ABC News Baghdad bureau went looking for something cheerful. Its reporters found a new romantic television comedy, “starring the Danny DeVito of Iraq”. Sadly, while they were recording this upbeat tale, they were interrupted by the news that the impresario behind the show had just been shot dead.

    The Economist, March 18, 2006, page 43.

    More on Fukuyama

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    Good review by Jacob Weisberg in Slate of Francis Fukuyama’s new book. Needless to say, Christopher Hitchens doesn’t think much of Fukuyama’s critical view of the neocons. But then you wouldn’t expect turkeys to be keen on Christmas, and in this context Hitch has become a rather tiresome turkey. Like the Bush regime, he’s running out of excuses, and it shows in the extent to which his piece is an ad hominen attack rather than a serious rebuttal of Fukuyama’s argument. Personal abuse, like patriotism, is often the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Dr Johnson might have said.

    Our mistake

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    Thoughtful Guardian column by Martin Kettle. Excerpt:

    In Vasily Grossman’s remarkable novel Life and Fate, there is a powerful scene in which two Bolsheviks encounter one another as prisoners in one of Stalin’s labour camps in 1942. The younger Bolshevik, Abarchuk, who is convinced he is there in error, remains a believer in the cause; but his older mentor, Magar, has gained wisdom through experience. When the two comrades snatch what turns out to be their final conversation, Magar looks around the camp and distils their years of revolutionary experience in words of terrible simplicity and force. “We made a mistake,” he tells Abarchuk. “And this is what our mistake has led to.”

    It has become increasingly hard for a truthful person not to apply those same words to the situation facing the US and Britain in Iraq. It is not Stalin’s Russia and Bush’s Iraq that are the same, of course. It is the dreadful clarity of Magar’s conclusion about the way events can evolve. In Iraq we too made a mistake. Adapting a comment by the 19th-century diplomat Talleyrand, I see Britain’s role in the invasion not as a crime, but as an error – and the scenes of desecration and murder this week across Iraq are what our mistake has led to.

    Why Salon published the new Abu Ghraib photos

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    Salon has published the new set of Abu Ghraib prison photographs (in contrast with most of the US media). Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ explanation of their decision:

    Abu Ghraib cannot be allowed to fade away like some half-forgotten domestic political controversy, which may have prompted newsmagazine covers at the time, but now seems as irrelevant as the 2002 elections. Abu Ghraib is not an issue of partisan sound bites or refighting the decision to invade Iraq. Grotesque violations of every value that America proclaims occurred within the walls of that prison. These abuses were carried out by soldiers who wore our flag on their uniforms and apparently believed that Americans here at home would approve of their conduct. Rather than hiding what they did out of shame, they commemorated their sadism with a visual record.

    That is why Salon is willing to publish these troubling photographs, even as we are ashamed to live in a country that somehow came to accept that torture and prisoner abuse were simply business as usual — something that occurs while a sergeant catches up on his paperwork.

    Those Iraqi ‘security’ forces

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    From an interesting piece by Paul Rogers in openDemocracy.net

    In the second week of December 2005 one of Saddam Hussein’s largest palace compounds – in the former dictator’s home town of Tikrit – was handed over by US forces to their Iraqi counterparts. The elaborate ceremony of this richly symbolic event included the arrival by helicopter of the American ambassador and the commander of US forces in Iraq, in order to demonstrate the success of Iraqi forces in taking on more and more security functions. Within days, however, the very Iraqi security forces that had taken charge had systematically looted the 2,000-hectare compound; truckloads of its furnishings later were found on sale up at local markets (see Ellen Knickmeyer, “After Handover, Hussein Palaces Looted”, Washington Post, 13 January 2006)

    Iraq war ‘could cost US over $2 trillion’

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    From today’s Guardian…

    The real cost to the US of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion (£1.1 trillion), up to 10 times more than previously thought, according to a report written by a Nobel prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert.The study, which expanded on traditional estimates by including such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the conflict as well as the impact on the American economy, concluded that the US government is continuing to underestimate the cost of the war.

    It’s not like Vietnam…

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    Fred Halliday, writing in OpenDemocracy.net on the US predicament.

    Many analogies are being made with Vietnam, but it is perhaps the analogy with the Soviet war in Afghanistan which is most telling. When the Soviets sent the Red army into Kabul in 1979 they sought to limit the political and economic costs by restricting numbers to around 120,000 i.e. to that necessary to garrison the major towns: hence the official term “limited contingent” for their troops in that country over the following ten years.

    The US in Iraq has faced a similar problem, in that it has not been able to commit the full level of forces it could and which was necessary effectively to control the country. Those limits have now had their own consequences – in a US force increasingly restricted and vulnerable, without adequate local counterparts, and with almost no significant intelligence on enemy plans and dispositions.

    The reply of the Iraqi guerrillas to Bush’s Annapolis speech on 30 November was incontestable: with a lightly-armed unit, and recorded by video cameras, they took control of an important Sunni town, Ramadi, and held it for several hours; a few days later, and also observed by video, they attacked a US patrol and killed ten of its members. Bush, Cheney and the US army have by now realised they are in an unwinnable situation: how long it takes them to act on this remains to be seen.

    That ‘victory’ in Iraq…

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    Interesting interpretation by Paul Rogers in Open Democracy:

    The discussion about the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, however, is a masquerade. The real project for the United States administration over the next few months is to present to a domestic public the idea that the US is starting a pullout. The deeper reality is what even a relatively small evacuation of troops may signify: a change in the US’s strategy in Iraq and a turn to the “plan B” described in earlier columns in this series (see “Iraq: thinking the unthinkable” [30 June 2005] and “Planning for failure in Iraq” [15 September 2005]).

    What “plan B” amounts to is large-scale disengagement from Iraq’s main urban settlements, leaving these either to Iraqi security forces under government control or (in many areas) an increasingly powerful group of Kurdish or Shi’a militias that have the capacity to enforce control by often brutal methods – including detentions, torture and death squads. Meanwhile, US forces would concentrate on building and defending a series of major, well-protected bases outside urban areas, using helicopters and strike aircraft in support of the Iraqi government of the day. Now that militias work closely with Iraqi security forces – to the extent of infiltration and even takeover – this scenario means that US air power may well end up indirectly supporting such militias.

    The quiet pursuit of this alternative strategy has seen the US armed forces constructing the appropriate facilities on a massive scale – not least at Balad, where the helicopter base now being prepared by the KBR company will approach the size of some of the largest bases in Vietnam during the American war there.

    The result of this approach, if and when it is followed through, will be twofold: US leaders will be able plausibly to present to their citizens the impression that the Iraq war is beginning to wind down, and they will make any Iraqi government fundamentally dependent on US military power for its survival.

    Which, I guess, would mean they would be co-operative over the matter of oil supplies…