Iraq crisis: Why the great dictator thinks he can still win

To the outside world it seems astounding that Saddam Hussein has not taken the opportunity to survive. The closer war looms, the more it is a racing certainty that the Iraqi leader will die, buried in the rubble of his bunker, shot through the head with the one bullet he says he keeps for himself, or hanged by a vengeful mob while trying to flee.

Why won’t he just cough up his weapons of mass destruction, add the documentation the United Nations wants, and in one swoop defuse the American-led campaign to oust him? Or, if he can’t bring himself to do that, why not step down, hand over to an ally, and leave a disappointed Washington pretty much forced to call the war off? Why commit suicide? Because that’s not how he sees it. Looking out at the world through Saddam’s eyes, the perspective is fairly distorted. Some of that view even Tony Blair might envy. No one disagrees in cabinet, for example; the last time a minister begged to differ, the Iraqi leader took him next door and shot him. So no one tells him uncomfortable truths.

There appears no shortage of love and loyalty. When Saddam met a group of civil administrators last week, they chanted with joy and pledged to be a “sword in his hand”. And these were the men who deal with things such as pensions, not sarin gas.

But in a country ruled by fear the reality is very different. Saddam is a master of manipulation and self-delusion. In a rambling three-hour television interview with the American television star Dan Rather last week, he spoke in lofty terms of Iraq as a beacon of freedom, peace and humanity; this from a man who has invaded two of his neighbours and driven 4m of his countrymen into exile.

He also explained why Iraq had really won the war in 1991 (it was George Bush Sr who asked for a ceasefire, not him), and that he could never go into exile because that would mean betraying the Iraqi people.

If Saddam’s view of home is distorted, the perspective gets even further from the truth when he looks beyond his borders. It should be no surprise that international politics are not his forte. This is a man to whom no one speaks anything he doesn’t want to hear and who has travelled out of Iraq only once since taking power in 1979.

That trip would not have given him much insight into world diplomacy — it was to Cuba, where he and Fidel Castro spent most of their meeting discussing their bad backs. Castro sent Saddam to his favourite osteopath.

Those who know him say this lack of understanding of international intricacies is the key to his belief that he can survive a confrontation with America. So far, they say, Saddam believes he is winning on the diplomatic front.

From his perspective, just by sitting in Baghdad he has wreaked havoc among his enemies. He looks out and sees an increasingly divided Europe, with Britain taking the lead in supporting an American-led military strike, backed by Spain and Italy, while France and Germany remain opposed to any war, and the smaller countries are torn between.

He can then see Nato facing one of the greatest tests of its unity since it was founded 54 years ago. It has been riven by a dispute in which France, Belgium and Germany blocked the alliance from making preparations to defend Turkey in case it was attacked by Iraq.

Saddam may also smile with satisfaction at the bitter rows between the US and France and Germany. He will have noted the mutiny of Labour MPs against Blair last week, the most serious since Labour took power.

All that before he even looks to the United Nations Security Council, where Britain and America are pushing for a second resolution, against virulent opposition from France, Russia and China, which say weapons inspections in Iraq should continue.

“Saddam is encouraged, he feels he is on stronger ground,” said Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, an independent Arabic newspaper based in London. “He is loving creating divisions in the western world. He feels he is definitely in a better position now.”

Saddam still thinks he can make a deal. He is like a grudging trader in the souk, conceding inch by inch, unembarrassed about reversing himself.

In the interview with Rather, he insisted he would not destroy the Al-Samoud missile system, as ordered by Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, because it has a range of more than the 150km limit set by the United Nations. It seemed a showdown was in the making.

A day after the interview was aired, Iraq had announced it would start destroying the missile system by yesterday’s deadline. Crisis averted, as ever at the last moment.

That is the other key to Saddam’s belief that he can survive as leader of Iraq. He will spin out every deadline, play for time. He believes if he can hold off the American-British invasion long enough, it will be the heat of summer and all will be put off until next year. By then, something else will come up.

It’s not a very graceful strategy, but nor is it, yet, a failure. With 200,000 American troops in the Gulf backed by 40,000 British forces, the ultimate outcome should not be in doubt — but Saddam doesn’t seem to have learnt from his earlier miscalculations.

Ghassan Charbel, the assistant editor of the newspaper Al Hayat, last week recalled the countdown to war in 1991 after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. The Yemeni foreign minister was in Baghdad on January 16, trying to persuade Saddam to pull out of Kuwait and avert conflict. “Saddam told him, ‘We will eat the Americans’, and sent him home,” Charbel recalled. The next day, the American bombing campaign began.

Saddam did finally agree to withdraw, giving his offer to Yevgeny Primakov, the Arabic-speaking former Russian foreign minister who is an old friend from his stint as ambassador to Iraq. Almost at the same time that Primakov conveyed the last-minute offer, allied troops invaded Kuwait from Saudi Arabia.

Beyond misreading international politics, another thing that makes Saddam unlikely to surrender power is his megalomania. He really believes he is heir to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon who captured Jerusalem in 586BC, and Saladin, who evicted the crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187. “He has a deep, mystical relation with Iraq,” said Charbel, who has researched the Iraqi leader for years.

Saddam is not completely relying on his gamble that the Americans will not invade, however. Sources in Baghdad said that in the past month, however confident he may appear, Saddam has started preparing for a possible war.

He has already given orders to his generals on what to do in case of invasion, so that he cannot be found by monitoring his communications. Trenches are being dug around Baghdad and the speculation in the intelligence community is that they will be filled with oil and ignited to obscure the view of troops and from planes, although they will not affect smart bombs.

Like Saddam’s other hero, Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator (Saddam has read all his biographies and can recite long passages from Stalin’s speeches), he seems to be planning for a siege. Iraqi sources said he knew he could not win outright, but if he could hold out long enough — and enough civilian casualties appeared on television screens around the world — the United Nations might step in to halt the war.

There is one last scenario. He told a friend, now in exile, he would never be taken alive. “In my pistol, I will guard one bullet,” the friend quoted Saddam as saying. “It is for me. I will never be in the hands of the Americans.”

Barbarossa began June 22, 1941.

Hitler wiped out three million Russian troops and half their air force.

Stalin was in shock and isolation at its outset.

But Hitler's force foundered on the Russian expanse, the Russian winter, and the Russian depth in population and manufacturing.

Saddam Hussein has seen the Osama-Atta squad cost the U.S. one trillion.

He has seen a world-wide alliance supporting him: France, Germany, Russia, China, Daschle, Pelosi, Hitlery, Hollywood.

He has seen the U.S. Gulliver slowed by the Lilliputians and their U.N. squabbling, U.S. Senate bickering, Anacephalics for "Peace" street theater.

He has sixty "palaces" [read: German-engineered/Russian-engineered bunkers with elaborate tunnel systems].

He is in no danger--not with eight or eighteen or eighty doubles--of personal harm.

He weathered Gulf War One--the mother of all combined arms strikes.

He takes another Cuban cigar, another viagra, another harem volunteer and retires to his Babylonian boudoir.

Have Boots & Coots and Red Adair on stand-by; let's kick the tires and light the fires.

I knew Josef Stalin, Mr. Hussein, and you sir are no Josef Stalin.*

*He warranted a glass box in the Kremlin--for you, a Hefty bag, if that.

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