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Why Saddam's arrest did
matter
By Marc Erikson
There
is a body of considered opinion, my esteemed Asia Times
Online colleagues Pepe Escobar and Spengler included,
that says the ignominious extraction of Saddam Hussein
from a reconditioned septic tank near his home village
south of Tikrit mattered little and that things in Iraq
will only get worse - at any rate, for the Americans.
Pepe believes there exists a loosely coordinated
resistance of ex-military types (Republican Guards etc),
tribal leaders, Fedayeen Saddam, and motley foreign
jihadis bound together by a common nationalist/religious
purpose to resist foreign occupation (Twin Towers and the Tower of Babel, Part
1, September 9, 2003; The Rat Trap Part 2, December 20).
Spengler, in part drawing on an article by former US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative Angelo M
Codevilla, similarly believes that nationalist and
cultural-survivalist purposes and instincts among
ex-soldiers and government officials never enamored of
Saddam could forge a powerful resistance movement (Will Iraq survive the Iraqi
resistance? December 23). Other commentators have
simply concluded that the disheveled fellow pulled from
a hole in the ground and "protected" only by his driver
and his cook could not have been directing the fight
against the foreign occupiers and thus his capture won't
make a difference.
Six weeks, hundreds of
attacks, and dozens of casualties later, I would still
beg to differ. The Saddam arrest could very well prove a
turning point - for the worse only if collective US
foreign and intelligence services' memory utterly fails.
That - given customary State Department and CIA
institutional lack of attention span - cannot, of
course, be ruled out. The crucial issue is what policy
the United States adopts toward elements of the Iraqi
resistance cast loose by the capture of their nominal
leader.
The Saddam loyalists are largely drawn
from Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority (22 percent)
concentrated in and around Baghdad and to the north and
west of the capital. Their religious and regional
affiliation matters, but not as such. It's in
combination with and as a backdrop to their Ba'ath Party
and tribal loyalties that it defines their political
identity and responses. US intelligence - for reasons
detailed below - knows (or should know) their leanings
and orientation and that at this stage, as Shi'ite
majority religious rule threatens, they have little
choice but to make peace (if not common cause) with the
occupying force.
Who/what are the Saddam
loyalists?
James Chritchfield, head of Middle
East CIA operations from 1959-69, told the Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 2000, "We should probably
not be actively attempting to overthrow Saddam Hussein
at this point. We should be pursuing an almost equal
dialogue with [Iraq and] Iran, which is showing signs of
change ... The United States using force in the world
today, including in Iraq, is not a very good answer. We
should be very laid-back ... We should have a growing
dialogue with Saddam Hussein, and with the moderates in
Iran, and coordinate these very carefully with all of
the other Arab leaders. We should see if we can
gradually move them together to end the current sharp
division and hostility that is present in Iran and
Iraq."
The Chritchfield interview didn't come to
my attention at the time. If it had, I would have agreed
with its policy precepts - even after September 11,
2001. But that's history. Force was used. Saddam was
overthrown and now captured. What Chritchfield's comment
reflects is the long-held opinion of numerous senior and
Middle East-seasoned State and CIA officials that Arab
nationalists like Saddam, religion-tinged but enemies of
fundamentalism (and, at a time when it still mattered,
anti-communist), were the lesser evil and the ones the
West could and should work with.
And work with
them they did. Some time shortly after Ramadan 1960,
America's longtime top Middle East spook, Miles
Copeland, close to Egypt's then president Gamal Abdel
Nasser and his intelligence service, met with Saddam at
the US Embassy in Cairo and pegged him as a key future
leader - and the relationship lasted. A year earlier
(October 1959), the 22-year-old Saddam, with apparently
incompetent CIA help, had been involved in a botched
Ba'ath Party assassination attempt on Iraqi prime
minister Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim. (After
overthrowing the corrupt British-installed Hashemite
monarchy in 1958, Qasim had become a CIA target for,
inter alia, pulling Iraq out of the anti-Soviet
Baghdad Pact [Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Britain],
decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party, and
initiating the nationalization of foreign oil
companies.) After holing up for a while in the same
neighborhood in which he was caught by the Americans
last month (the leopard can't change his stripes),
Saddam escaped to Syria and from there via Beirut to
Egypt. In Cairo he joined other exiled Ba'athists and
lived high on the hog for four years in the posh
al-Dukki district - with the CIA paying his bills at the
Indiana Cafe.
During this period, the CIA
continued to pursue the overthrow of Qasim, with the
Ba'ath Party and Qasim's former No 2, Colonel Abdul
Salam Arif (they had a falling-out over Nasserite
pan-Arabism, which Qasim shunned) as its chosen
vehicles. The coup went off February 8, 1963, and
according to Chritchfield, "We [the CIA] really had the
t's crossed on what was happening." Crossing of the t's
in this case meant not only that Qasim was arrested,
tortured and murdered, but also that in subsequent days
thousands of Iraqi communists (or communist "suspects")
were hunted down and executed. Saddam was one of the key
informers helping to draw up the hit list. Soon after
the coup, he returned to Baghdad and assisted a distant
relative, the Ba'ath Party leader and new prime minister
under president Arif, Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr, in "restoring
order". Not all went quite as well for Saddam in the
following few years. Arif booted the Ba'athists out of
government in November 1963; an ill-fated 1964 comeback
attempt landed many of them in jail - Saddam included.
His fortunes decisively turned for the better only after
another 1968 coup gave al-Bakr the presidency and Saddam
the position of deputy chairman of the Revolutionary
Command Council as head of internal security.
Who is Saddam? On the face of it, a poor boy
born in a mud hut turned thug, street fighter, assassin,
opportunist, informer, torturer, party enforcer. But
that overlooks an important part of his pedigree. In
1947, aged 10, Saddam was sent to live with his mother's
brother, Khayrallah Tulfah, in Baghdad. And Khayrallah
was an interesting fellow. In 1941, he was cashiered
from the Iraqi army and jailed for four years for
participating in a pro-Nazi, anti-British coup attempt
organized by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin
al-Husseini - an admirer of Adolf Hitler to the end (he
lived in Berlin until 1945) and beyond, organizer of
Bosnian Muslim SS brigades, anti-imperialist protagonist
of Arab nationalism, and after his postwar return to
Jerusalem, mentor ("uncle") of Yasser Arafat.
While in exile in Cairo, Saddam married
Khayrallah's daughter, his cousin Sajida Tulfah, a
Baghdad high-school teacher. But family ties were not
the most important bond. In 1956, Khayrallah (later made
governor of Baghdad) persuaded the 19-year-old Saddam to
join the small Ba'ath ("Renaissance") Party founded in
Syria in 1947 by Greek Orthodox Christian,
Sorbonne-educated, Lenin and Hitler aficionado Michel
Aflaq. Khayrallah imbued Saddam with Aflaq's "visionary"
Arab (supremacist) nationalism, the principles of
permanent revolutionary struggle, and the Leninist
organizational model of militant revolutionary cells. In
1963, Aflaq (who later resided in Iraq after the 1968
Ba'ath coup) appointed Saddam a member of the Ba'ath
Regional Command.
Ba'athism is an odd political
movement and ideological concoction, closely resembling
fascism in its most important aspects. Examine the
operational meaning of its slogan, "Unity, Freedom,
Socialism", and this becomes immediately obvious.
"Unity" stands for Arab unity, with strong ethnic and
cultural supremacist overtones. "Freedom" means freedom
from imperialist (first British and French, then US)
oppression. "Socialism" means command economy, with the
aims of economic policy subordinated to party political
goals (and individual leaders' material needs and
whims). The close similarities to Hitler's National
Socialism - its Aryan supremacism, fight to restore
Germany to national preeminence against the victors of
World War I, and instrumentalization of the economy for
the greater glory of the nation and its leaders - can
hardly be missed. Similar as well, of course, to the
Nazi Party's modes of organization and operation are the
Ba'ath Party's revolutionary cells, elite party military
units outside the purview of the regular military,
all-powerful internal-security apparatus, insistence on
a one-party model, and brutal oppression and
extermination of political and ethnic enemies. Islam
plays a subordinate role in this scheme of things and
matters only insofar as it is regarded as an integral
part of Arab cultural history and identity. It was only
at the time of the Gulf War that Saddam had the words
Allahu Akbar (God is great) inscribed on the
Iraqi flag as an appeal to Islamic solidarity.
The next six months
Saddam is no
Hitler. For one, the latter shot himself when cornered.
Still, there are some useful comparisons to be drawn
between Hitler's demise and Saddam's capture. Hitler's
end spelled the end of World War II, and to the
amazement of the victorious invading Allies, they found
few if any avowed Nazis prepared to offer resistance or
obstruction when they entered German towns and cities.
Had they gone underground? Formed the vaunted "Werwolf"
resistance cells propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had
bragged about? Few such cells were uncovered. None
proved effective. The Werwolf largely remained Hermann
Loens fiction and Goebbels' final hoax. Had Hitler and
some of his top lieutenants survived and gone
underground, the initial period of the Allied occupation
of Germany might have been a different story.
There is a simple lesson: Religion is one thing,
politics another. While political ideologies often sound
like religious dogma, political leaders cannot put off
rewards until the next life. Their goals must be
realizable in the here and now. Defeats can be lived
down only if the means for realization of political aims
survive and the goals remain attainable, at least in
principle. In top-down hierarchical organizations, that
means survival of the leadership and its ability to
dispense patronage and future rewards. When the Nazi
leaders committed suicide, when Saddam was captured
under ignominious circumstances, privileged followers
once again became just ordinary folks left to fend for
themselves. Fight on for what, when the leaders couldn't
or wouldn't?
That was the condition of the Nazis
then; it's the condition of the Ba'athists now. Some
tribes might fight on. Tribes always do. But the
majority of Ba'ath Party members, religion never having
been their thing, now have every reason to be just
ordinary Iraqis ("good Germans") and make their peace
with the occupying powers - the more so as the occupiers
are the only ones who can protect their interests
against the majority Shi'ites, whom they once helped
suppress.
The Americans know this, but they have
to step carefully. They cannot simply reinstitute Ba'ath
Party members and officials in positions of power. There
has to be a show at "de-Ba'athification" much as in
Germany there had to be a credible effort at
de-Nazification. Of course, de-Nazification went only so
far. For example, US intelligence struck a deal with
Hitler's eastern-front military intelligence chief,
Major-General Reinhard Gehlen, under which intelligence
files and 350 intelligence officers came under US
control and the "Gehlen Org" was formed, which later
became the core group of the West German
foreign-intelligence service (BND) headed by Gehlen.
Moreover, tens of thousands of former Nazi officials,
after a quick rinse, got their Persilschein
(detergent certificate) and resumed leading functions in
the civil service.
I cannot point to any
concrete evidence that similar arrangements are
currently being made in Iraq. But I would be most
surprised if it weren't so. The old connections are
there, much as the compelling logic of political
alignments. Paul Bremer's US occupation authority has
made its deal with the Kurdish minority and guaranteed
it a substantial degree of autonomy. The ex-Ba'ath
Sunnis need protection against Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani's Shi'ites, who are bent on retribution and
exercising control in the new Iraqi state. The Americans
need leverage against al-Sistani and intelligence
information on unreconstructed Ba'athists and foreign
fighters.
When thousands of Shi'ites took to the
streets of Baghdad this week, they called for direct
elections and carried signs reading, "Saddam war
criminal, not prisoner of war". It will have sent a
chill down Saddam loyalists' spines. There are scores to
settle. If the Americans left, it would be civil war -
and the Sunnis wouldn't win it. The Americans won't
leave. Too much has been invested and can't be written
down. For better or worse, the Sunni Iraqis and
Ba'athists at their core and the American occupiers are
natural allies in the political wars ahead.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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