Saddam Hussein: Deluded and defiant, a dictator awaits his nemesis

The next few weeks may witness the end of Saddam Hussein's rule, and perhaps his life. Every morning, in his office in Baghdad, he reads summaries of the foreign press telling of US and British forces mustering against him. But he has always been an optimist even when defeat and disaster stare him in the face.

President Saddam once told King Hussein of Jordan he considered every extra day of life a gift from God since he narrowly escaped with his life in 1959, after trying to assassinate the Iraqi President, Abd al-Karim Qassim. "I consider myself to have died that day," he said.

For months he has tried to delay the American onslaught in the hope that something would turn up. Soon after the al-Qa'ida attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, long before President George Bush made his "axis of evil" speech, Iraqi officials were speaking of the likelihood of a US assault.

The Iraqi President has always had a strong sense of the uncertainty of political life. "What is politics?" he asked a high-level meeting in Baghdad in his slightly shrill voice, soon after he had assumed absolute control of the country in 1979. He supplied his own answer. "Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said nor what you intended."

What does President Saddam intend to do now? He has few options. He regards allegations by President Bush and Tony Blair that Iraq has a significant stockpile of weapons of mass destruction capable of threatening other countries, simply as an excuse for overthrowing him.

He may have few to destroy. General Hussein Kamel, his son-in-law in charge of military industries, who defected to Jordan in 1995, made a significant admission to American, British and United Nations interrogators. General Hussein, who had no reason to lie after fleeing Baghdad, confirmed that all Iraqi WMD were destroyed after the Gulf War, though designs and technical information were secretly stored for possible later use.

In President Saddam's rare appearances on television, he looks gaunt and a little strained. But he still gives the impression of a man in control of the situation, often underlining a point by waving a large cigar.

For years, he smoked a pipe and the cigar-smoking is a habit to which he was introduced by the late Algerian President Houari Boumédienne. At one time, he drank Portuguese Mateus Rosé wine, a surprising choice in Iraq where the rich, if they drink at all, normally prefer whisky. Despite his smoking and drinking, President Saddam has always made a fetish of physical health. In the past few days, he has even ordered army officers and officials who are overweight to forfeit half their salaries if they fail an annual fitness test. With his typical proneness to excessive punishments, the Iraqi leader also ordered officials of the ruling Baath party caught gambling to be jailed for three years. Iraq's President has long had a strong sense of his own mission. He sees himself as the latest in a long line of Iraqi and Arab rulers from Nebuchadnezzar to Saladin. At the height of the Iran-Iraq war in the Eighties, when resources were short, he even started to rebuild the ruins of ancient Babylon using unpleasant, mustard-coloured bricks, each with his name imprinted on it.

One of the most extraordinary architectural excesses of the Iraqi leader is the monument in Baghdad celebrating "victory" over Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. It is the Iraqi Arc de Triomphe. Two metal forearms, modelled on those of the Iraqi leader himself, each 40ft long, reach out of the ground clutching steel sabers, whose tips cross, forming an arch under which the Iraqi army often marches.

These symbols of President Saddam's personality cult have led to doubts about his ability to reach rational decisions. The Iraqi leader has committed two catastrophic political errors by overplaying his hand. The first was in 1980 when he attacked Iran, believing it would prove an easy victim because of the chaos of the Iranian revolution. By the time it ended eight years later, 670,000 Iraqis were dead, wounded or prisoners.

It was a costly war, but Iraq, thanks to help from the US, Soviet Union and most of the rest of the world, came out marginally ahead. Briefly, Iraq was the main power of the Gulf. Two years later he invaded Kuwait, leading to a confrontation with the US and its allies which he could not possibly win.

In starting both wars, President Saddam showed he was far less astute in international politics than in judging political developments in Iraq. He made concessions too late, on the eve of war, when they were ineffectual.

But the dictator has also been at his most effective when staring defeat in the face, in 1982 against Iran and in 1991 against the US. He showed he has good nerves and is utterly ruthless towards those who showed sign of wavering. Queried in an interview about a purge of the Iraqi military during the Iran-Iraq war he gave the less than reassuring reply: "Only two divisional commanders and the head of a mechanised unit have been executed. That's quite normal in war."

In recent months he has carefully taken precautions to guard against another rebellion among Iraq's Shia Muslims, such as that which almost unseated him in 1991. Iraqi security forces have maps of every city district and village where loyalties are dubious. Houses thought to harbour families hostile to the regime are marked in red, those whose allegiance is doubtful in black.

It is unlikely, going by precedent and President Saddam's heroic image of himself, that he would consider voluntary exile even with guarantees for his security. Some reports are wishful thinking by Arab governments; others are propaganda. In 1991, for instance, the Foreign Office disseminated a report that his wife, Sajida, was seeking refuge in Mauritania, but was swiftly forced to admit the story was untrue.

Voluntary exile would also go against President Saddam's sense of tribal honour, a horror of anything which could be portrayed as cowardice and retreat in the face of the enemy. He comes from a tribal society and has always prided himself on his generosity to those who helped him and pitiless retribution against those who crossed him.

This has made the President a difficult man to advise. He has said he prided himself on his ability to sniff out treachery. Even his closest associates are careful about contradicting him. "In that circle, the safest course is always to be 10 per cent more hawkish than the chief," a veteran Russian diplomat long stationed in Baghdad said. "You stay out of trouble that way."

Power in Iraq is almost entirely focused on the President. His chief lieutenants are either related to him or old associates. But he has always tried to balance loyalty with expertise so it is common to find a Baathist thug as minister and a sophisticated deputy who does all the real work. Even so, some critical decisions – such as the invasion of Kuwait – seem to have been taken by President Saddam alone.

In the life of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to distinguish myth from reality. For instance, he has always wanted to portray himself as rising from obscurity solely by his own efforts after a deprived childhood. By the early Eighties, Iraqi poets were winning prizes by drawing parallels between Saddam Hussein and the Prophet Mohammed, both of whom were orphaned at an early age. His enemies have their own mythology. They portray him as coming from a dysfunctional family, though this is contradicted by his exceptional reliance on family members in key positions in his regime.

In reality, President Saddam is from a Sunni Arab family (the Sunni have traditionally ruled Iraq) with just the right connections to propel him to the front of Iraqi politics. He was born in Ouija, a typical Iraqi village of mud-brick houses outside the city of Tikrit, in the plains of northern Iraq on 28 April 1937. His father, Hussein al-Majid, was a peasant farmer who died just before his son was born or a few months afterwards. He was brought up by his mother Subha al-Tulfah, a strong woman, and two uncles.

The strength of President Saddam's family and clan connections matter, because he was born into a tribal society. He has maintained many of its characteristics. It is a world of intense loyalties within the clan, but cruel and hostile to outsiders. Tikrit, a decayed textile town once known for building rafts to carry melons down the Tigris to Baghdad, was becoming politically important during his youth. Its young men, all Sunni Arabs, increasingly took the road to the capital to become officials or join the army.

One of President Saddam's uncles was a nationalist army officer who spent five years in prison. Another was Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a reserved, quietly spoken but very ambitious officer who had a critical influence in the young Saddam's career. Bakr was a leading player in the coup which overthrew the monarchy in 1958 and by 1963 was briefly prime minister.

By then President Saddam had begun to make his own mark. In 1959 he had killed a Communist leader in Tikrit. (True to tribal tradition, 20 years later he gave the family of the murdered man blood money and a Browning pistol.)

Later that year, as a member of the Baath party, President Saddam was shot in the leg during the assassination attempt against President Qassim. His escape became part of official Iraqi mythology. He swam the Tigris river after riding through the night. He found refuge with family members and finally made his way to Egypt. This was the only period of his life when he lived abroad. He was able to return only after the coup of 1963 in which Baathists played a prominent role.

The Baath party was evicted from government shortly afterwards. But President Saddam helped plot their return five years later. It was still a military regime headed by Bakr, but he was increasingly known as the strongman of the regime and the controller of its ferocious security services. He became President in 1979 after a bloodbath in which he executed a third of his party's ruling Revolution Command Council.

It was always a minority regime, dominated by Sunni Arabs who were only a fifth of the population. Most Iraqis are Shia and Kurds who have always been marginalised. President Saddam relied on his security services, his family, his tribal connections, the Baath party and the army. He successfully ensured nobody else could rise to power as he had and stage a military coup.

"It was really impossible to have an internal resistance after they started to arrest, torture and execute the families of anybody involved," said one army officer who fled into exile. No army unit can move in Iraq without an order countersigned by at least five authorities. Regular armoured divisions around Baghdad have only half a dozen rounds of ammunition for each tank to make sure they cannot stage a coup.

And the Iraqi dictator also has a coldly realistic view of the motives of foreign powers. In the Eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, the CIA station in Baghdad was giving Iraqi military intelligence satellite photographs of Iranian positions. President Saddam told General Wafiq al-Samarrai, his battle commander, not to tell the Americans anything they might pass on to Iran. As the Irangate scandal was to reveal, the US was doing just that.

President Saddam survived the Nineties because the US wanted him overthrown, but not his regime. It did not want revolutionary change in the Middle East, particularly one which might benefit Iran. UN sanctions kept Iraq weak, though they hit mainly ordinary Iraqis, not the establishment.

Now there is a growing belief in Iraq that a war is coming and he will be overthrown. But there is also caution because Iraqis have vivid memories of how the US suddenly called a ceasefire in 1991. Many fear it might happen again. "Nobody will do anything until the first American tank is on Iraqi soil," one Shia dissident said.

President Saddam will also try to persuade Iraqis that they are about to become the victims of a neo- colonial adventure, the objective of which will be to subjugate them and steal their oil. This may not work because Iraqis are tired, poor and want to see the President gone almost regardless of the motives of those who eject him.

In the past few weeks, the four million Kurds of northern Iraq, who have suffered more than anybody from Saddam Hussein, discovered that part of the US strategy was to allow the Turkish army to invade their homeland. Suddenly, the only topic on the streets of Kurdistan is no longer Saddam or chemical weapons but the Turkish threat. The Kurds threaten to fight the Turks even if they are part of a US-led army.

Divisions like this are what President Saddam has been hoping for. Probably they are too little, too late. It is unlikely that Washington will want the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator, planned as the great demonstration of US strength in the world, to become a demonstration of weakness, as it would do if he survived.

Yet President Saddam has succeeded in one respect. His rule has been a disaster for Iraqis, but he has the international fame for which he always yearned. He must also know not all Iraq's problems were caused by him. Even if Baghdad is captured and he is killed, the US will have to deal with one of the most complex and dangerous societies on earth.

Patrick Cockburn is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and co-author, with Andrew Cockburn, of 'Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession'.