Posted on 03/05/2003 6:37:08 AM PST by TADSLOS
WASHINGTON -- If Saddam Hussein chooses to run rather than fight, U.S. officials say, a Who's Who of Evil would run with him in a stampede out of Baghdad.
Even at this late date, voluntary exile remains an option for Iraq's president, officials say. But "all his henchmen" would have to follow the leader out of the country, said Ari Fleischer, President Bush's press secretary. "And that," Fleischer added, "is a fair number of people."
Leading the parade of pariahs, experts say, would be Saddam's sons, Qusai and Odai, plus a rogues gallery of other villains -- household names in Iraq but largely unknown to Americans.
Saddam's inner circle numbers at least two dozen, and the CIA has an even longer list including cabinet chiefs, presidential advisers, the heads of intelligence and security services, Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council and the elite Republican Guards.
In case of war, all will become hunted men.
"My guess is that you'll see a rolling process in which there's an attempt to decapitate the top layer, people who are known to be political leaders in the Baath party," said James Steinberg, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, who also served as deputy national security adviser to President Clinton. (Saddam's ruling Baath party, a socialist movement active in several Arab states, promotes pan-Arab unity and nationalism.)
Two special prizes on the target list, after Saddam himself, are Qusai Hussein and Abed Hameed Hmoud, because "they know where every warhead and bomb is -- they know everything," said Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert and professor of Middle East history at the University of Haifa in Israel.
Qusai, Saddam's second-oldest son, is Iraq's domestic security chief and is seen as the probable candidate to succeed his father in power since the elder son, Odai, was badly wounded in a 1996 assassination attempt. Hmoud is a cousin of Saddam's who serves as his personal secretary and bodyguard. He is regarded as the consummate insider.
Some of the others whom experts regard as the worst of the worst:
-- Ali Hassan Al-Majid, another "very brutal cousin" of Saddam's and an influential member of the Revolutionary Command Council, according to Laurie Mylroie, an independent researcher and author of a biography of the Iraqi president. Al-Majid allegedly led the Iraqi forces that carried out a chemical weapons attack on Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988.
-- Taha Yassin Ramadan, Iraq's vice president, a longtime Baath party leader and one of Saddam's most trusted enforcers.
-- Amir Al-Saadi, a three-star general and former oil minister, educated in England, now the full-time liaison between the Iraqi regime and U.N. weapons inspectors. "His job is to cover up -- he's a great cover-upper," said Baram, the Israeli Iraq expert.
-- Tariq Aziz, deputy prime minister, diplomat and former foreign minister, familiar as a more "civilized face of Saddam's regime," said Mylroie.
-- Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, deputy commander of Iraqi armed forces and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He was named in a war crimes warrant in Austria for his involvement in the torture and murder of Iraqis and his bloody role in the invasion of Kuwait.
-- Saadoun Hammadim, speaker of the National Assembly, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
-- Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, a close Saddam adviser.
-- Hani Abd al-Latif al-Tikriti, director of the Special Security Organization.
-- Kamal Mustafa Sultan al-Tikriti, a cousin of Saddam's who commands the elite Special Republican Guard.
None of these actors is likely to be invited to play any role in a post-Saddam Iraq, although some of his supporters may survive and even become a source of assistance to U.S. forces at some point.
"We demonize Saddam, but the great problem is that we are talking about an entire embedded power structure, 23 cabinet ministries, all loyalists, and reasonably broadly based, and getting rid of one or two is not going to solve the problem," said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Some with long memories recall that in the aftermath of World War II, numerous former Nazis wound up working for U.S. occupation forces who found it expedient to employ experienced German administrators. Could something like that happen in post-Saddam Iraq?
"It's a challenging question because there is going to be a tremendous need for people just to simply run the basics of making a society work -- public health, sanitation, utilities, policemen, all of that," said Steinberg, the Brookings expert.
Steinberg suggested that some midlevel bureaucrats of the Saddam regime might be useful. "There are going to have to be trade-offs," he said.
For example, invading U.S. forces could find it expedient to offer clemency or money to former Iraqi officials who may possess important information about the location of Saddam's hidden weapons.
"Would I pay to find out the location of a biological weapons facility? Certainly," said Daniel L. Byman, an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. "I think that buying someone off is a cheap price."
But relying heavily on Saddam's former followers to help run a post-Saddam Iraq is not smart policy, Byman said.
In general, "a thousand people selected at random from the Baghdad phone book would be a better alternative to the existing bureaucracy," he said. "You want new people who have new ideas, who are open to new ways, rather than keeping the old people in, despite their supposed expertise, because you're just going to perpetuate the system and many of the old habits of behavior as a result."
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