This is not a news article, but interesting. -- DoctorZin
Even landing planes is hard in the Middle East
Amir Taheri
August 31, 2003
It was a beautiful day caressed with a fresh breeze from the Mediterranean. And yet Houari Boumedienne was in a bad mood. He had a problem.
The Algerian dictator had spent hours at Algiers airport, named after him years later, receiving a procession of heads of state coming to attend the first summit of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
All had gone well until that afternoon. Now he was told that both the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein al-Takriti, Iraq's " strongman", were heading towards Algiers abroad their respective special jets and scheduled for touchdown at almost the same time. The question was which of the two should be allowed to land first.
This was not a mere technical problem. Boumedienne had succeeded in mediating between Iran and Iraq, which had fought a bloody but unpublicised border war between 1971 and 1974, and obtained an un-announced ceasefire. He had done even better: the Shah and al-Tarkiti had agreed to meet in Algiers to sign a memorandum of understanding that would open the way of negotiations for a final settlement of the border dispute.
So why did it matter which plane landed first?
Iranian protocol, having spent weeks negotiating with the Algerians about the Shah's presence, insisted that the Shah's plane should land first so that when he met Saddam Hussein at the airport it would be the latter that was coming to him. The idea was that the subsequent news story would say: His Imperial Majesty the Shahanshah (King of Kings) granted an audience to Iraq' Vice President at the Algiers Airport.
For similar reasons the Iraqis wanted Saddam's jet to land first so that it would be the Shah who came to him. The Algiers Memorandum was, in effect, an act of surrender by Saddam. In it Iraq had abandoned its claims against Iran and even swallowed the presence of Iranian troops in large chunks of Iraqi territory in the Zaynal-Kush salient that pointed like a geographical dagger towards Baghdad. Saddam, however, wished to present his surrender as a triumph, thus consolidating his position within the Ba'ath Party and government.
At the airport feverish diplomatic activity continued with frequent calls to the two approaching jetliners. In the end Boumedienne offered a compromise: Saddam would land first but then would accompany the Algerian President on the runway to welcome the Shah on arrival. All three would then proceed to the VIP lounge where the Shah and Saddam would formally meet for the first time. In that way no one went to anyone while Iranian propaganda could boast that The King of Kings had been welcomed by both Boumedienne and Saddam.
While waiting for the Shah to arrive, Saddam insisted on expressing his "sense of an historic occasion" and his hopes for the future of Irano-Iraqi relations.
"Today is a good day for Iraq and Iran, for OPEC and the Third World," he said. "It is also a bad day for those who wish to divide us and plunder our resources."
Using classical Ba'athist terminology, the dictator was trying to offer a version of events in which "the progressive camp", supposedly led by Iraq at the time, had persuaded the "reactionary camp", supposed to be led by Iran, had scored a victory.
The Shah and Saddam were less than an hour together, plus the time spent with other OPEC leaders during the summit. But it was enough for both to assess one another. One might even suggest that they developed a degree of mutual admiration.
On the journey back to Tehran the Shah was not prepared to comment on his assessment of Saddam beyond a laconic phrase: "He understands what it is all about"!
This was 1975 and a time that Iran under the Shah was at the peak of its power. The Shah's dream was to make Iran the only country in the Middle East with fully determined and internationally recognised borders. In the preceding decade Iran had signed border agreements, including continental shelf accord, with all its neighbours except Iraq. With the Algiers accord the Iraqi border would also be fixed forever, as the Shah hoped.
The problem had bedevilled Irano-Iraq relations ever since Iraq had been created as a state in 1920. But none of the successive Iraqi leaders had felt strong enough to negotiate a border settlement. The fact that Saddam had done the unthinkable was a reflection not only of Iran's military power at the time but also of Saddam's own strength within the Iraqi ruling elite. Although only a Vice-President, Saddam was clearly the first Iraqi leader to be in full charge.
With the Algiers accord in place, Iraq became the big story in our media. It meant the reopening of Najaf and Karbala, favourite destinations for millions of Iranian pilgrims.
I was, therefore, interested to go and have a look for myself. Between 1968, when I had just become a reporter on Iran's English-language daily Kayhan International, and 1975 I had met a number of visiting Iraqi leaders.
There was Taher Yahya, a retired general and a diminutive version of Oliver Hardy.
Although he bore the title of Prime Minister under President Abdulrahman Aref, it was clear that he had little authority. In an interview, he offered so many monosyllabic replies that I had to spend hours extracting a story from our meeting. There was also a certain Khairallah, the Foreign Minister, who looked more like a Mafia hit-man than a diplomat. Another Foreign Minister, Abdelkarim Abdel-Sattar al-Shaikhly looked and acted like a character out of Joseph Conrad's "Secret Agent". Even in his luxury suite at a Tehran hotel he looked like a man who feared being gunned down at any moment.
Of all the Iraqi leaders that I met before 1975, only Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar al-Takriti, an overweight air force general and number-two of the Ba'athist regime before Saddam kicked him out, acted like a man with a measure of self-assurance and authority. (He was subsequently murdered by Saddam's hit-men in Kuwait). But then he, too, belittled himself by revealing that one aim of his mission to Tehran in the autumn of 1968 was to ask the Shah to persuade the Emir of Kuwait to provide a bridge loan to Iraq to pay the salaries of Iraqi government employees.
The only Iraqi official that had appeared to me as normal was Saadoun Hammadi whom I had met as Oil Minister during a visit to Tehran. But Hammadi, a Shiite, was obviously destined to remain marginal in a regime dominated by the Takritis. I had also met the ever jovial Taleb Shabib, the bilious Murthadha Sabri al-Hadithi and Ismet Kittani, a philosophical bureaucrat.
By coincidence I had published an article about Saddam Hussein in August 1968 just weeks after the Ba'ath had seized power in a coup. In it I had reported that Saddam was "the strongman" behind the new regime. The news story's headline was: "The Mystery Man Who Runs Baghdad From Behind the Scene". The story had been taken up by news agencies and published throughout the world, giving me my first exposure in the international media. Much of the information on Saddam had come from two sources: Dr. Al Yassin who was Iraq's Ambassador to Tehran at the time and Fereydoun Zand-Fard, the young diplomat in charge of the Persian Gulf desk at the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Speaking on condition of anonymity, both told me that Saddam, who had no official position at the time, was the real "strongman" of the new regime.
Saddam had been known to the Iranian embassy in Baghdad and almost certainly to the intelligence services as well, since the mid-1960s.
In 1965 and 1966 his faction received financial support from Tehran because of its militant stance against the Nasserists. Long before the 1968 Ba'athist coup, the Iranian Ambassador to Baghdad Ezatallah Ameli had listed Saddam among "the rising stars of Iraqi politics" and claimed that he shared Iran's strategic aim of containing and ultimately defeating the Nasserist trend in the Arab world.
Later, of course, Iranian intelligence services backed other factions within Ba'ath and, on at least one occasion, became involved in a plot to assassinate Saddam. But the harebrained coup scheme quickly fell apart largely because its ultimate leader , an Iranian agent named Davoud Taher, overplayed a weak hand.
In 1975 I was anxious to meet and interview Saddam, the mystery man I had written so much about but had never had a chance to sit down with. The opportunity came when Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas-Ali Khalatbari led a delegation to Baghdad to negotiate the practical aspects of implementing the Algiers accord. The sessions were to be chaired by Algeria's Foreign Minister Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika. I accompanied our foreign minister and, thanks to his intervention, obtained an appointment with Saddam Hussein.
I was surprised that Saddam had agreed to see me in his private home for what was described as a "working lunch". This was a fairly modest villa with minimal security, at least as far as I could see. There was little protocol as I was shown into an L-shaped salon dominated by a huge table with a marble top. Before lunch, Saddam's wife Saijdah, then still a schoolteacher, popped in to say hello and see that all was well with the lunch arrangements. Later, Uday, Saddam's eldest son, then aged 11 or there about, came in to say hello before returning to school.
I asked him what he wished to do when he grew up. He said he would want to become a footballer.
Then he hesitated and, pointing to his father, he said: You must ask him what he wants me to become!
This was a Spartan lunch of boiled chicken and rice, designed to portray Saddam as a simple man of the people, living in a modest house, eating a frugal fare and acting like any family man. In other words my portrayal of a "mystery man" known for his brutality and arrogance had been wide of the mark!
One point struck me above all during the interview which lasted more than two hours: Saddam had an almost pathological fear that Iraq may one day disintegrate into several mini-states. He firmly believed that there were many " dark forces" inside and outside the country that were plotting to destroy it. When I asked why would anyone want to break up Iraq , he sneered like a man who is asked why the sun shines in the sky.
" Iraq is the only Arab country with the potential to claim a role in the world," he asserted. " The same forces that do not wish to see Iran grow , also do not tolerate the rise of Iraq as a significant player in regional and international politics."
Saddam sounded like a man with a strategy that consisted of four phases. The first was to impose his full and unquestioned control over the party and the state. The second was to " eliminate" the Kurdish problem once and for all with a mixture of force and political concessions. The third phase was to strengthen Iraq's " natural Arab character", partly by importing up to a million other Arabs to replace Iraqis of Kurdish and/or Iranian origins who had been expelled in the previous seven years. It also meant the dismantling of the traditional Shiite clerical structures that had always acted as an alternative to the authority of the state. Finally, the fourth phase would see Iraq established as the leader of the Arab world, first by dominating the oil-rich Gulf states and then by setting the agenda for other Arab countries. Ending the conflict with Iran, which Iraq could not win then, was a key to that strategy as a whole. For, as long as Iraq's resources were drained in a futile struggle with the Shah, Saddam would have little left to devote to building the powerful state he dreamed of.
During our meeting Saddam said that he was taking a BA course in history at a local university and asked whether I could recommend any books that he could read. I told him that I was a passionate amateur of ancient history and suggested that he reads Gibbon's " Decline Sand Fall Of the Roman Empire" in six volumes and almost 10,000 pages. I think he took this as a joke. " That will have to wait for my retirement," he quipped.
Meanwhile at the Palace of Peace, where the negotiations continued, there was frustration on both Iranian and Iraqi sides because of the Algerian foreign minister's working habits. Bouteflika was a night owl who could not go to bed before dawn. As a result he was unable to be in the chair at 8 a.m, and twice kept Khalatbari and Hammadi, the two ministers, waiting for up to two hours.
Someone must have reported the situation to Saddam because on the third day of "waiting for Bouteflika" comedy, the Iraqi leader turned up at the palace at 7:30.
Hew announced that he would spend just a few minutes at the conference to congratulate all on their good work. Needless to say the Algerian entourage of Bouteflika, swallowing their fear of the boss, managed to coax him out of bed and into the conference hall, hastily dressed and unshaved.
Waiting for the conference to begin it was clear that Saddam did not want to talk to the Iranian minister who was already in the lobby. The reason was that he did not wish Hammadi and other Iraqi negotiators to believe that they were being short-circuited. Saddam had come to teach Bouteflika a lesson, not to undermine the Iraqi delegation's position. Spotting me among the waiting crowd, Saddam came forwards, shook may hand and said he hoped I was pleased with our interview the day before.
Because he continued walking it was clear that he wanted to use me as cover to avoid more than a handshake with the Iranian minister and other dignitaries present.
While we were walking, Saddam stopped for a few seconds to watch a Tom and Jerry cartoon that was shown on a television set in the lobby. This provided him with the ideal non-subject to spend the time. He unleashed a tirade against how Hollywood and American culture in general propagated violence and inhumanity. He said American cartoons taught children from early age that life was about nothing but " to kill or to get killed." This was an interesting film review, coming from a man who had recently personally shot a number of his Ba'ath comrades. At the end of our walkabout in the lobby, Saddam had decided to order a ban on showing any American cartoons on Iraqi TV.
By pure coincidence, two of my closest personal friends, Hussein Shahid-Zadeh and Fereydoun Zand-Fard were to be successively named as Iran's ambassador to Baghdad after the 1975 accords. The foreign ministry desk that dealt with Iraq was headed by another friend, Sadeq Sadrieh. This must have given Saddam, always looking for conspiracies, the impression that the Shah had assigned a special task force on Iraq of which I was an unofficial member. This was, of course, not the case, and the fact that I gave news of Iraq prominence in Kayhan, Iran's largest daily newspaper of which I had become editor-in-chief in 1972, was due to the fact that the public was keen to read about a neighbour that was so close and yet so troublesome.
My next meeting with Saddam Hussein was a few months later, again while accompanying, Khalatbari, the foreign minister. One day, virtually the whole of the Iraqi top leadership, with the exceptions of Saddam Hussein and the ailing President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, had been invited to lunch at our ambassador's residence. After lunch we sat around the table listening to a live radio broadcast of a match between the youth football teams of Iran and Iraq being held in Kuwait. We were in the second half-time when it was announced that Saddam was dropping in for an unexpected visit. The Iraqi leaders, including Izzat Ibrahim al-Durri, Taha al-Jizrawi, Saadoun Hammadi and several other ministers and party leaders, immediately got up and stood to attention like schoolboys. It was not for another 10 minutes before Saddam arrived. But the Iraqi officials continued to stand up.
When Saddam arrived he shook a few hands, pushed a finger into Jizrawi's bulging stomach with a curt " we need to reduce weight", and walked into the salon where he sat in a chair that someone was carrying for him. ( Because of a back problem, Saddam always had his own special chair.) He then asked what the score of the match was. The Iranians were ahead two-nil, and this was bad news. None of the Iraqi leaders present wished to be bearers of bad news. The ambassador broke the silence by saying : " We are at half-time, nothing has been decided yet, but the Iranians are ahead with two goals to nil."
Saddam seemed to be in a jovial mood.
He broke into a long speech about how he believed that the signing of the Algiers accord had been his "greatest contribution to our history" and how he saw a rosy future in which Iraq and Iran will provide joint leadership for the Gulf region and turn it into a centre of gravity for the developing world as a whole. Having completed his rambling speech and swallowed several small glasses of sweet and extremely hot saffron tea, the dictator got up, shook hands all around and walked out, leaving all wondering what message he had meant to convey.
I met Saddam on four other occasions, in Baghdad and Tehran, each time finding him more disconnected from reality. He had imposed his absolute rule on Iraq through unprecedented violence. But, in the process, he had also turned himself into a prisoner in a golden jail where no one dared tell him the truth.
Amir Taheri is an Iranian journalist and author of 10 books on the Middle East and Islam. He is reachable through www.benadorassociates.com .
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Taheri20030831.shtml