Patrick Cockburn: A man of brutality and arrogance who knew how to play to American suspicions
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Independent Minds
The Saddam Hussein interviews are interesting for what they reveal and what they conceal. Probably right up to the end, Saddam was talking up the Iranian threat to Iraq, knowing that this would confirm American suspicions of Iran. The Iraqi leader would recall that a joint front against Iran had been the basis of Iraqi-American co-operation in the 1980s.
"Hussein explained that Iraq could not appear weak to its enemies, especially Iran," records FBI special agent George Piro who interviewed him. This is the explanation the Iraqi leader presents for keeping the world guessing if he had weapons of mass destruction. In reality, the Iraqi leader made every effort to prove that he had no WMD.
The anti-Iranian theme is constant throughout, and no doubt Saddam believed it as well as saying it out of political calculation. Of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, he says: "Khomeini and Iran would have occupied all of the Arab world if it had not been for Iraq."
But US intelligence documents about Iraqi intentions in 1980 show Saddam Hussein and other leaders launching a surprise attack on Iran because they thought it was militarily weak following the Iranian revolution of 1979. In a disastrous miscalculation they believed the war would be over soon and they would win back territorial concessions they had made to the Shah in 1975.
Saddam was astute in his assessment of internal Iraqi politics, but was catastrophically wrong in his calculations of how foreign powers would respond to his actions. This is not surprising for a man who only briefly left Iraq during his whole life. Most importantly, he wrecked his country by his two invasions: Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990.
He denies that the Baath party was Sunni-dominated when it first became a force in 1958-63, though this was true by 1968. He makes the unlikely claim that he was unaware for years that his long-time lieutenant Tariq Aziz was a Christian. Asked about the Shia uprising of 1991 in southern Iraq, in which as many 150,000 people may have been killed, he says the insurgents were "thieves, rebels" and came "from Iran". Yet thousands of bodies of Shia men, women and children have been unearthed from mass graves south of Baghdad and the few survivors leave no doubt they were killed in a mass punishment because they were Shia.
It is interesting to see Saddam deny that he was ever at the Dora farm in south Baghdad at which the US launched a missile attack at the start of the war in 2003 because of intelligence he was there. It would be interesting to know how many Iraqi civilians died because of such attacks based on dubious tips to the CIA.
Saddam Hussein's failing was not stupidity, but arrogance and brutality and this impression is confirmed by these interviews. He was a man of intelligence who came to believe that he had semi-divine attributes.
Patrick Cockburn is the co-author with Andrew Cockburn of Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession
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Comments
Sadaam was the darling of the British and the Americans for so many years, just like Osama bin Laden and Robert Mugabe. The West loves these corrupt dictators who ruin their economies and their countries but who do sweet deals with Western Resource Companies.
Time for these charades to end - the West and China must cast off their wish to dominate and control. Allow fraud-proof voting systems to change the face of the Third World and Make Poverty History.
Freedom, justice, peace, development, global prosperity.
Mr Alex Weir, Harare and Gaborone
what " sweet deals with Western Resource Companies" did Saddam do?
Errr..... well Total Fina Elf had a large Prosuction Sharing Agreement on odious terms (massive profit for Total)
So did Lukoil
But the USA, UK and others had... errrr..... NOTHING
In an unrelated observation the two key vetoes to UN sanctioned action against Iraq were.... errr.... France and Russia
Meanwhile in Iraq we have had fraud free open and fair elections for a constitution, twice for local govt and once for the national govt which will facr re-election in free and fair and fraud free elections again in Jan 2010
What are you on aboutr Alex Weir? What "sweet resource deals"? There were none were there Alex. So, without this foundation, what is your argument?
In fact its clear that the US and UK were not knowingly lying about WMD. Saddam had actually deliberately created confusion over whether he had WMD. Add this to the lies about stealing Iraq's oil (worth each year less than 01.% of US GDP and only 6% or so of the money the USA has spent in Iraq so far), installing puppet govts and you get a clear picture of where the blame lies for the insurgency and the thousands killed as a result.
It was the shallow lies that killed people. And people are still lying. What are you on about Alex Weir?
p.s. IN Afghanistan there is only one big resource and that is copper. The CHinese are contracted to developed Afghans copper. Another non US resource grab that exists only in minds that reqwuire some lies to justify their bigotry
The reason for Hussein's bluff about his WMDs was also known to the west and suited with what was to be proposed.
It is naive to try to rewrite this phase of history, when so much focus was on Iraq--the WMD excuse was a pre-meditated and calculated LIE to obtain oil deals for western corporations, when this country and Hussein was destroyed.
Hans Blix was also, strongly against the idea that, any weapons remained--he was pulled out before it became known in the public domain, which would have destroyed the LIE of WMDs.
So please no "errrs" and graces to indicate that, you are considering what you say--it's still basically distorted.
Afghanistan is currently carrying an important gas pipeline from Uzbekistan to The Gulf--it would be also naive, to think that western forces were deployed, without an important connection with this valuable commodity. They are not giving their lives for building schools or spreading western democracy--if they were, the task would be as futile as it would be endless.
what oil deals for western multi-nationals?
You seem to be... errr..... LYING
And why would the USA go to war to get oil deals for the Chinese National Oil company?
Get a grip and step back to see if, in the big picture, what you are saying has any basis in reality. I think you will find it doesnt.
Why did you ever think that Iraqs $70 billion a year worth of oil was worth the USA considering risking a single US soldiers life for? Its a crazy idea, Iraqs annual oil worth is 0.1% of US GDP and the US can buy all the oil it wnats on the global fungible oil market and in reality sources 80% of its needs from North and South America.
Afghanistan is not CURRENTLLY carrying a gas pipeline to the Gulf. There was a plan once with UNOCAL leading a bid to do it, for such a pipeline. UNOCAL pulled out in the early part of this decade. This proposed Afghan pipeline is worth what and to who? rhinocircus, its perhaps 100 million a year in transit revenues after paying for the billions to construct the pipeline and would have supplied Caspian gas to India/Pakistan. Whats in that for the USA then?
As it happens this project is now looking very unlikely to go ahead. Four weeks ago the presidents of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan had a historic meeting. You may (not) have reade about it. They agreed a new gas pipeline project from Iran to Pakistan direct.
so, errrrr, you seem to be forming your views from an uinderstanding of the world that is well, errr, rubbish. Why not spend the next few hours when you might have been opining and do some reading?
p.s. If I have any of my facts wrong please point them out, and be specific!!!
As for WMD- the evidence pre war from all the intelligence sources- and in particular the UN team on the ground, was that it was at most highly unlikely that Saddam had a WMD program. Let's put it this way, if you were a betting man you would have got very long odds on Saddam having a WMD program. I knew it was nonsense at the time, Hans Blix, the man on the ground, also knew it was nonsense. It was simply a pretext used by the Bush/Blair administrations for war. A pretext that quickly evaporated to be replaced by "freedom" even as the US was killing and maiming tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. So errrr how about errrr reading up a bit more. errrr.
first, thanks for being specific. If the "lucrative resource contracts" that were offered up for the reason that the USA decided in 2003 to remove Saddam are to be believed then the propostion is this.
These contracts you mention were one or two year service contracts to carry out emergency work to keep Iraqs oil flowing so that the country could be supplied and exports made through the UN administered fund that was run for the sole benefit of Iraqis.
Given that the entire value of Iraq's annual oil output is about 70 billion these service contracts are clearly, just on a big scale rule of thumb, some smallish percentage of this.
So, the argument is that in 2003 the USA planned to spend 200 billion (actually spent over 1,000 billion) to get a contract value (profits will be a percentage of these of course) of maybe 10 billion tops.
Do you think thats a credible argument?
I think it is even more ridiculous than the argument that says they did it for a percentage of 70 billion over 20 years!!
Do you think you are thinking backwards and contentinmg yourself with something that seems to fit without checking if at actually does?
On WMD I didnt say it was true or not, I merely pointed out what Saddam is alleged to have said in his recently published FBI interrogation notes. He said he deliberately maintained the doubt he had WMD for his fear of Iran and their nuclear bomb programme. Thus the proposition that Bush and Blair may have been misled by this deliberate misinformation by Saddam is at least one should entertain before declaring them liars in the sense that they deliberately made the whole thing up. Why would they anyway? Oh yes, to steal the (in realation to the US and UK wealth) paltry amounts of oil that errr...... they didnt. They stole NOTHING, spent BILLIONS and are now leaving a free sovereign democratic Iraq behind.
Anything there I have read up wrong about then?
I wonder, is challenging the proposition that the USA was motivated not free Iraq but to steal its oil the modern incarnation of heresy? The reactions from you lot when I make it seem to be very similar in all respects dont you think?
I gave loads of details that form a coherent argument. Surely you can challenge one or two of them? No?
I suggest you check your figures on the Iraqi oil industry. Current know reserves run to at least 122bn, and is relatively cheap to extract. Do the maths. The most conservative estimates from within the oil industry put the minumum value of total known reserves in Iraq at over $3trillion. The type of light sweet oil extracted in Iraq is very sought after. Remember also, Bush and the Neo Cons may have believed their own publicity about being welcomed with garlands of flowers. They fully expected a swift and relatively cheap regime change and then the opening of the oil industry to them (4 of the 5 majors are from US/UK). They had their neocon man (Chalabi) in place ready to put everything in place for them.
The fact that it didn't happen like that just tells us about the incompetence and arrogance of the Bush Administration. What has suprised the oil industry is that in the 2nd round of tenders the Iraqi government actually has been playing hardball with the oil majors. The Iraqi government knows the world is watching the process carefully and it has leverage to do this. However, everyone knows the Irqi oil industry will end up locked into the big 4 oil majors from US.UK. However at this stage it is not without irony that the big winners from the war were companies like Haliburton and Blackwater - making money from the US taxpayers.
I don't buy for one second about Bush Blair being misled. There is far too much evidence of them manipulating, over egging and pushing beyond credibility the whole WMD argument - like Powells embarrasing UN presentation or Blairs "certainty" in assuring MPs wmd would be found, not to mention the UK dossier on wmd, taken from an outdated PhD.
i think you need to do soome maths. at 70 billion a year over 20 year contracts you get 1.4 trillion. Iraqs oil will take well over 20 years to produce, probably 40+ so your 3 trillion seems reasonable to me and entirely consistent with what I wrote, indeed, perhaps identical !!!
Of course this is the total sale value. You have to deduct costs and taxes. Most oil contracts give about 10% to the producing company and 90% to the reserve owning country.
As for your second argumetn that seems to be that the USA would have nicked all the oil if only the Iraqis had welcomed them with flowers and said "we are so grateful we will stand by for 20 years while you nick our oil, I am at a loss for suitably derisory language. Are you serious?
If the USa had wanted to take the oil irt could have. It would however not have fought to defned a process of negotiating and voting a constitution and then a sovereign govt. Thye would have put in a puppet.
As for "playing hardball" the tender shows that the state oil company who set the palteau rates and maximum $ per bbl fee either have no idea of what costs or production potential is and/or a desire to stop any outside companmy coming and exposing whatv a totally useless and clueless bunch they are.
It isnt "hardball" if you set fees so low that noone thinks they can make a profit, stae oil companies and private oil comapnies alike. That way the oil stays in the ground and the Iraqis get nothing, which is probably what you would prefer.
The state oil company has had 30 years to raise production from the 1979 level of 2.9 mb/d. It has utterly failed to do so and barely managed to keep the fields that it got free from the evil international oil comps who found and developed them all.
Its highly uinlikely that US oil companies will make the best bids. They didnt in the majority of the 8 fields put up for tender last week and are unlikely to in future tenders.
As for Blair, why would express his certainty that WMD would be found if he knew they were not there? Its telling a lie that he would KNOW would be discovered. Doesnt make sense really does it? Why do youi think Blair told this alleged lie of ""certainty" in assuring MPs wmd would be found"? he told it after the war had been waged and Saddam removed didnt he?
So no john, adding up the total balue of the next 40 years is not advanced maths. Its advanced spin. (well not really advanced, I am just feeling generous after Sunday dinner)
At 6 mb/d (double the maximum ever Iraqi production, last seen 1979) you get 2.2 bn bbls a year
115 bn bbls would thus take just over 52 years to produce
6 mb/d total sale value (if all exported, no costs, no taxes) at $100 bbl is $219 billion. At an extortionate 30% to the oil comps thats 73 billion a year
73 billion a year is 1/3 of the planned cost of the Iraq action and 1/12 of actual expenditure so far
73 billion a year is 0.5% of the 13 rillion a year US GDP
BP's recent service contract deal gave 0.1% of the sales revenue from that field to BP and CNOC
Maths. Good stuff and a fine place to start thinking about a subject rather than as an afterthought to "check" your suspicions of witchcraft
Heres a new one to leave you with. If oil companies and their dasterdly contracts are ripping off the resource owners then why do medium and long term share prices and returns on capital of oil companies turn out to be bang in line with other industries?
If there is a ripp-off where has trhe money gone? Not to shareholders. Has it been secretly siphoned off somewhere?
If oil companies are such a profit machine I am sure with your deep understanding you will have made a packet buying their shares. Have you?
Interesting; reads like a familiar pattern subsequently followed by powers that occupied Iraq, as well as Saddam's claims that those rising up in 1991 "came from Iran"....so none of this stuff was that original!
In the last few days it has been revealed that Saddam admitted that he pumped up Iraq's WMD suspicions to intimidate and deter Iran. We also know that he had an active nuclear weapons program in the 80's and that up to the `91 Gulf war he possessed, and used, WMDs- namely chemical weapons. In the Gulf war itself he threatened to use chemical weapons on members of the coalition, and Iraq was later monitored up to the early 2000's for WMDs by the U.N.
And yet all this is ignored when members and groups in the Left blame George W. Bush and Tony Blair for deliberately lying and inventing the WMD claims.
a) knew there were no longer any such programmes (if you can get over John Pilger's voice, here is that famous clip of Powell and Rice making this abundantly clear shortly before the Bush administration asked his staff, (according to his former Treasury Secreteary Paul O'Neil), to provide reasons for invading Iraq: http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/po
b) manufactured "evidence" to the contrary: the fake documents raised as 'proving' Saddam attempted to buy Uranium from Niger; claims of an ongoing nuclear programme by Dick Cheney, immediately proved as rubbish by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter (who is entirely consistent with Powell and Rice when they were apparently not dishing out propaganda):
"The vice-president has been saying that Iraq might be two years away from building a nuclear bomb. Unless he knows something we don't, that's nonsense. And it doesn't appear that he does, because whenever you press the vice-president or other Bush administration officials on these claims, they fall back on testimony by Richard Butler, my former boss, an Australian diplomat, and Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi defector who claims to be Saddam's bomb-maker. And of course, that's not good enough, especially when we have the UN record of Iraqi disarmament from 1991 to 1998. That record is without dispute. It is well documented. We eliminated the nuclear programme, and for Iraq to have reconstituted it would require undertaking activities EMINENTLY DETECTABLE BY INTELLIGENCE SOURCES." (My emphasis)
;the email exchange revealed by the Kelly inquiry in which Blair staff discuss how they want the Standard's headline to run, threatening an attack from Saddam in 24 hours, which they knew was not backed by any evidence of anything.
Is "all this " and so much more (without even going into the well known claims of Saddam working with Al Qaeda repeatedly made by the Bush adm. "only sixteen words" in a given speech was how C. Rice justified this "little mistake" later on) "ignored" when you choose to suggest that maybe those in charge of the invasion were misled like innocent lambs?
I thank you,
Father Christmas does not really bring your presents.
Iraqis are tendering for developers for their own oil and are signing up European and Asian oil companies to do it. The deals confer no rights to oil at all offering instead very low service fee's in what are, so far, perhaps the most favourable oil deals ever entered into by an oil producer
So Joe Peter, what are you on about? Describe if you can (I think you do not have the first idea) how in Iraq (or indeed Afghanistan) the US has secured any control over oil or resources at all.
They haven't
You are lying
Your lie is the very basis of insurgency against emancipation and the democratic rule of the majority and the deaths it results in
If you have a real reason to spout this drivel then I may apologise. Barf it up so we can have a good laugh (or cry) at what I suspect is your near total ignorance of reality.
[A source close to the Sadrist movement in Baghdad said that anger fuelled by a report that one of their men had died under torture, as well as the non-release of Asa'ib al-Haq members, had prompted their killings.]
Yes, a media report that led to death. Like say, reports that insisted that the US was out to steal Iraq's oil (a lie) or install a puppet govt (a lie)
Also like the demonisation of Social Workers that results in 30% of places unfilled leading to child suffering and deaths
Also like the MMR scare where one rubbish report by a rubbish "scientist" is sensationalised by the media leading to what we have today, British children dying from measles
I could go on but it wont be welcomed. After all dear reader, you really "enjoyed" each of these witch hunts didn't you.
The problem is shallow ignorant and sensationalist media. The reason the media does it is YOU and ME.
Black Swan events are high impact low probability events. This increasing disconnect between reality and our fantasy hysterical world of hate figures (Bush and Blair spring to mind) has killed many and will kill many more. Its a f'ing disgrace IMHO. Like a fish, our society is rotting from the head.