How Saddam Happened -- America Helped Make a Monster

What to do with him--and what happens after he's gone--has haunted us for a quarter century.

Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas

With Mark Hosenball, Roy Gutman and John Barry

NEWSWEEK

Monday, 23 September, 2002

The last time Donald Rumsfeld saw Saddam Hussein, he gave him a cordial handshake. The date was almost 20 years ago, Dec. 20, 1983; an official Iraqi television crew recorded the historic moment. The once and future Defense secretary, at the time a private citizen, had been sent by President Ronald Reagan to Baghdad as a special envoy. Saddam Hussein, armed with a pistol on his hip, seemed "vigorous and confident," according to a now declassified State Department cable obtained by NEWSWEEK. Rumsfeld "conveyed the President's greetings and expressed his pleasure at being in Baghdad," wrote the notetaker. Then the two men got down to business, talking about the need to improve relations between their two countries.

Like most foreign-policy insiders, Rumsfeld was aware that Saddam was a murderous thug who supported terrorists and was trying to build a nuclear weapon. (The Israelis had already bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak.) But at the time, America's big worry was Iran, not Iraq. The Reagan administration feared that the Iranian revolutionaries who had overthrown the shah (and taken hostage American diplomats for 444 days in 1979-81) would overrun the Middle East and its vital oilfields. On the--theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the Reaganites were seeking to support Iraq in a long and bloody war against Iran. The meeting between Rumsfeld and Saddam was consequential: for the next five years, until Iran finally capitulated, the United States backed Saddam's armies with military intelligence, economic aid and covert supplies of munitions.

Rumsfeld is not the first American diplomat to wish for the demise of a former ally. After all, before the cold war, the Soviet Union was America's partner against Hitler in World War II. In the real world, as the saying goes, nations have no permanent friends, just permanent interests. Nonetheless, Rumsfeld's long-ago interlude with Saddam is a reminder that today's friend can be tomorrow's mortal threat. As President George W. Bush and his war cabinet ponder Saddam's successor's regime, they would do well to contemplate how and why the last three presidents allowed the Butcher of Baghdad to stay in power so long.

The history of America's relations with Saddam is one of the sorrier tales in American foreign policy. Time and again, America turned a blind eye to Saddam's predations, saw him as the lesser evil or flinched at the chance to unseat him. No single policymaker or administration deserves blame for creating, or at least tolerating, a monster; many of their decisions seemed reasonable at the time. Even so, there are moments in this clumsy dance with the Devil that make one cringe. It is hard to believe that, during most of the 1980s, America knowingly permitted the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission to import bacterial cultures that might be used to build biological weapons. But it happened.

America's past stumbles, while embarrassing, are not an argument for inaction in the future. Saddam probably is the "grave and gathering danger" described by President Bush in his speech to the United Nations last week. It may also be true that "whoever replaces Saddam is not going to be worse," as a senior administration official put it to NEWSWEEK. But the story of how America helped create a Frankenstein monster it now wishes to strangle is sobering. It illustrates the power of wishful thinking, as well as the iron law of unintended consequences.

America did not put Saddam in power. He emerged after two decades of turmoil in the '60s and '70s, as various strongmen tried to gain control of a nation that had been concocted by British imperialists in the 1920s out of three distinct and rival factions, the Sunnis, Shiites and the Kurds. But during the cold war, America competed with the Soviets for Saddam's attention and welcomed his war with the religious fanatics of Iran. Having cozied up to Saddam, Washington found it hard to break away--even after going to war with him in 1991. Through years of both tacit and overt support, the West helped create the Saddam of today, giving him time to build deadly arsenals and dominate his people. Successive administrations always worried that if Saddam fell, chaos would follow, rippling through the region and possibly igniting another Middle East war. At times it seemed that Washington was transfixed by Saddam.

The Bush administration wants to finally break the spell. If the administration's true believers are right, Baghdad after Saddam falls will look something like Paris after the Germans fled in August 1944. American troops will be cheered as liberators, and democracy will spread forth and push Middle Eastern despotism back into the shadows. Yet if the gloomy predictions of the administration's many critics come true, the Arab street, inflamed by Yankee imperialism, will rise up and replace the shaky but friendly autocrats in the region with Islamic fanatics.

While the Middle East is unlikely to become a democratic nirvana, the worst-case scenarios, always a staple of the press, are probably also wrong or exaggerated. Assuming that a cornered and doomed Saddam does not kill thousands of Americans in some kind of horrific Gotterdmmerung--a scary possibility, one that deeply worries administration officials--the greatest risk of his fall is that one strongman may simply be replaced by another. Saddam's successor may not be a paranoid sadist. But there is no assurance that he will be America's friend or forswear the development of weapons of mass destruction.

American officials have known that Saddam was a psychopath ever since he became the country's de facto ruler in the early 1970s. One of Saddam's early acts after he took the title of president in 1979 was to videotape a session of his party's congress, during which he personally ordered several members executed on the spot. The message, carefully conveyed to the Arab press, was not that these men were executed for plotting against Saddam, but rather for thinking about plotting against him. From the beginning, U.S. officials worried about Saddam's taste for nasty weaponry; indeed, at their meeting in 1983, Rumsfeld warned that Saddam's use of chemical weapons might "inhibit" American assistance. But top officials in the Reagan administration saw Saddam as a useful surrogate. By going to war with Iran, he could bleed the radical mullahs who had seized control of Iran from the pro-American shah. Some Reagan officials even saw Saddam as another Anwar Sadat, capable of making Iraq into a modern secular state, just as Sadat had tried to lift up Egypt before his assassination in 1981.

But Saddam had to be rescued first. The war against Iran was going badly by 1982. Iran's "human wave attacks" threatened to overrun Saddam's armies. Washington decided to give Iraq a helping hand. After Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad in 1983, U.S. intelligence began supplying the Iraqi dictator with satellite photos showing Iranian deployments. Official documents suggest that America may also have secretly arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to Iraq in a swap deal--American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to Iraq. Over the protest of some Pentagon skeptics, the Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of "dual use" equipment and materials from American suppliers. According to confidential Commerce Department export-control documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the shopping list included a computerized database for Saddam's Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of political opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials; television cameras for "video surveillance applications"; chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" to the IAEC. According to former officials, the bacteria cultures could be used to make biological weapons, including anthrax. The State Department also approved the shipment of 1.5 million atropine injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons, but the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some American officials later surmised, were used to spray poison gas on the Kurds.

The United States almost certainly knew from its own satellite imagery that Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iranian troops. When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration first blamed Iran, before acknowledging, under pressure from congressional Democrats, that the culprits were Saddam's own forces. There was only token official protest at the time. Saddam's men were unfazed. An Iraqi audiotape, later captured by the Kurds, records Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid (known as Ali Chemical) talking to his fellow officers about gassing the Kurds. "Who is going to say anything?" he asks. "The international community? F-- them!"

The United States was much more concerned with protecting Iraqi oil from attacks by Iran as it was shipped through the Persian Gulf. In 1987, an Iraqi Exocet missile hit an American destroyer, the USS Stark, in the Persian Gulf, killing 37 crewmen. Incredibly, the United States excused Iraq for making an unintentional mistake and instead used the incident to accuse Iran of escalating the war in the gulf. The American tilt to Iraq became more pronounced. U.S. commandos began blowing up Iranian oil platforms and attacking Iranian patrol boats. In 1988, an American warship in the gulf accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus, killing 290 civilians. Within a few weeks, Iran, exhausted and fearing American intervention, gave up its war with Iraq.

Saddam was feeling cocky. With the support of the West, he had defeated the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran. America favored him as a regional pillar; European and American corporations were vying for contracts with Iraq. He was visited by congressional delegations led by Sens. Bob Dole of Kansas and Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who were eager to promote American farm and business interests. But Saddam's megalomania was on the rise, and he overplayed his hand. In 1990, a U.S. Customs sting operation snared several Iraqi agents who were trying to buy electronic equipment used to make triggers for nuclear bombs. Not long after, Saddam gained the world's attention by threatening "to burn Israel to the ground." At the Pentagon, analysts began to warn that Saddam was a growing menace, especially after he tried to buy some American-made high-tech furnaces useful for making nuclear-bomb parts. Yet other officials in Congress and in the Bush administration continued to see him as a useful, if distasteful, regional strongman. The State Department was equivocating with Saddam right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

Some American diplomats suggest that Saddam might have gotten away with invading Kuwait if he had not been quite so greedy. "If he had pulled back to the Mutla Ridge [overlooking Kuwait City], he'd still be there today," one ex-ambassador told NEWSWEEK. And even though President George H.W. Bush compared Saddam to Hitler and sent a half-million-man Army to drive him from Kuwait, Washington remained ambivalent about Saddam's fate. It was widely assumed by policymakers that Saddam would collapse after his defeat in Desert Storm, done in by his humiliated officer corps or overthrown by the revolt of a restive minority population. But Washington did not want to push very hard to topple Saddam. The gulf war, Bush I administration officials pointed out, had been fought to liberate Kuwait, not oust Saddam. "I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit--we would still be there," wrote the American commander in Desert Storm, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, in his memoirs. America's allies in the region, most prominently Saudi Arabia, feared that a post-Saddam Iraq would splinter and destabilize the region. The Shiites in the south might bond with their fellow religionists in Iran, strengthening the Shiite mullahs, and threatening the Saudi border. In the north, the Kurds were agitating to break off parts of Iraq and Turkey to create a Kurdistan. So Saddam was allowed to keep his tanks and helicopters--which he used to crush both Shiite and Kurdish rebellions.

The Bush administration played down Saddam's darkness after the gulf war. Pentagon bureaucrats compiled dossiers to support a war-crimes prosecution of Saddam, especially for his sordid treatment of POWs. They documented police stations and "sports facilities" where Saddam's henchmen used acid baths and electric drills on their victims. One document suggested that torture should be "artistic." But top Defense Department officials stamped the report secret. One Bush administration official subsequently told The Washington Post, "Some people were concerned that if we released it during the [1992 presidential] campaign, people would say, 'Why don't you bring this guy to justice?' " (Defense Department aides say politics played no part in the report.)

The Clinton administration was no more aggressive toward Saddam. In 1993, Saddam apparently hired some Kuwaiti liquor smugglers to try to assassinate former president Bush as he took a victory lap through the region. According to one former U.S. ambassador, the new administration was less than eager to see an open-and-shut case against Saddam, for fear that it would demand aggressive retaliation. When American intelligence continued to point to Saddam's role, the Clintonites lobbed a few cruise missiles into Baghdad. The attack reportedly killed one of Saddam's mistresses, but left the dictator defiant.

The American intelligence community, under orders from President Bill Clinton, did mount covert actions aimed at toppling Saddam in the 1990s, but by most accounts they were badly organized and halfhearted. In the north, CIA operatives supported a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam in 1995. According to the CIA's man on the scene, former case officer Robert Baer, Clinton administration officials back in Washington "pulled the plug" on the operation just as it was gathering momentum. The reasons have long remained murky, but according to Baer, Washington was never sure that Saddam's successor would be an improvement, or that Iraq wouldn't simply collapse into chaos. "The question we could never answer," Baer told NEWSWEEK, "was, 'After Saddam goes, then what?' " A coup attempt by Iraqi Army officers fizzled the next year. Saddam brutally rolled up the plotters. The CIA operatives pulled out, rescuing everyone they could, and sending them to Guam.

Meanwhile, Saddam was playing cat-and-mouse with weapons of --mass destruction. As part of the settlement imposed by America and its allies at the end of the gulf war, Saddam was supposed to get rid of his existing stockpiles of chem-bio weapons, and to allow in inspectors to make sure none were being hidden or secretly manufactured. The U.N. inspectors did shut down his efforts to build a nuclear weapon. But Saddam continued to secretly work on his germ- and chemical-warfare program. When the inspectors first suspected what Saddam was trying to hide in 1995, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, suddenly fled Iraq to Jordan. Kamel had overseen Saddam's chem-bio program, and his defection forced the revelation of some of the secret locations of Saddam's deadly labs. That evidence is the heart of the "white paper" used last week by President Bush to support his argument that Iraq has been defying U.N. resolutions for the past decade. (Kamel had the bad judgment to return to Iraq, where he was promptly executed, along with various family members.)

By now aware of the scale of Saddam's efforts to deceive, the U.N. arms inspectors were unable to certify that Saddam was no longer making weapons of mass destruction. Without this guarantee, the United Nations was unwilling to lift the economic sanctions imposed after the gulf war. Saddam continued to play "cheat and retreat" with --the inspectors, forcing a showdown in December 1998. The United Nations pulled out its inspectors, and the United States and Britain launched Operation Desert Fox, four days of bombing that was supposed to teach Saddam a lesson and force his compliance.

Saddam thumbed his nose. The United States and its allies, in effect, shrugged and walked away. While the U.N. sanctions regime gradually eroded, allowing Saddam to trade easily on the black market, he was free to brew all the chem-bio weapons he wanted. Making a nuclear weapon is harder, and intelligence officials still believe he is a few years away from even regaining the capacity to manufacture enriched uranium to build his own bomb. If he can steal or buy ready-made fissile material, say from the Russian mafia, he could probably make a nuclear weapon in a matter of months, though it would be so large that delivery would pose a challenge.

As the Bush administration prepares to oust Saddam, one way or another, senior administration officials are very worried that Saddam will try to use his WMD arsenal. Intelligence experts have warned that Saddam may be "flushing" his small, easy-to-conceal biological agents, trying to get them out of the country before an American invasion. A vial of bugs or toxins that could kill thousands could fit in a suitcase--or a diplomatic pouch. There are any number of grim end-game scenarios. Saddam could try blackmail, threatening to unleash smallpox or some other grotesque virus in an American city if U.S. forces invaded. Or, like a cornered dog, he could lash out in a final spasm of violence, raining chemical weapons down on U.S. troops, handing out his bioweapons to terrorists. "That's the single biggest worry in all this," says a senior administration official. "We are spending a lot of time on this," said another top official.

Some administration critics have said, in effect, let sleeping dogs lie. Don't provoke Saddam by threatening his life; there is no evidence that he has the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction. Countered White House national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, "Do we wait until he's better at it?" Several administration officials indicated that an intense effort is underway, covert as well as overt, to warn Saddam's lieutenants to save themselves by breaking from the dictator before it's too late. "Don't be the fool who follows the last order" is the way one senior administration official puts it.

The risk is that some will choose to go down with Saddam, knowing that they stand to be hanged by an angry mob after the dictator falls. It is unclear what kind of justice would follow his fall, aside from summary hangings from the nearest lamppost.

The Bush administration is determined not to "overthrow one strongman only to install another," a senior administration official told NEWSWEEK. This official said that the president has made clear that he wants to press for democratic institutions, government accountability and the rule of law in post-Saddam Iraq. But no one really knows how that can be achieved. Bush's advisers are counting on the Iraqis themselves to resist a return to despotism. "People subject to horrible tyranny have strong antibodies to anyone who wants to put them back under tyranny," says a senior administration official. But as another official acknowledged, "a substantial American commitment" to Iraq is inevitable.

At what cost? And who pays? Will other nations chip in money and men? It is not clear how many occupation troops will be required to maintain order, or for how long. Much depends on the manner of Saddam's exit: whether the Iraqis drive him out themselves, or rely heavily on U.S. power. Administration officials shy away from timetables and specifics but say they have to be prepared for all contingencies. "As General Eisenhower said, 'Every plan gets thrown out on the first day of battle. Plans are useless. Planning is everything'," said Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

It is far from clear that America will be able to control the next leader of Iraq, even if he is not as diabolical as Saddam. Any leader of Iraq will look around him and see that Israel and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and that Iran may soon. Just as England and France opted to build their own bombs in the cold war, and not depend on the U.S. nuclear umbrella, the next president of Iraq may want to have his own bomb. "He may want to, but he can't be allowed to," says a Bush official. But what is to guarantee that a newly rich Iraqi strongman won't buy one with his nation's vast oil wealth? In some ways, Iraq is to the Middle East as Germany was to Europe in the 20th century, too large, too militaristic and too competent to coexist peaceably with neighbors. It took two world wars and millions of lives to solve "the German problem." Getting rid of Saddam may be essential to creating a stable, democratic Iraq. But it may be only a first step on a long and dangerous march.

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