In the world of American political specialty areas–education, healthcare, immigration, housing, transportation, and so on–foreign policy tends to draw the attention of some of the more historically informed and sober analysts. A conference filled with education specialists just doesn’t have the same gravitas or substance as a meeting of foreign policy experts, where you often have military officers, former CIA analysts, diplomats, representatives from consequential foreign countries, witnesses to atrocities and revolutions, and so on. Within the diverse but largely sober world of foreign policy experts, the decision to invade Iraq, as far as I can tell, was a lot less controversial than it was elsewhere.
Still, there are different camps among foreign policy specialists, and plenty have strong views about the Iraq war and its “prosecution.” I used to read Adam Garfinkle at the American Interest, for instance. He had strong views on the subject of the war, but he lived squarely within the establishment consensus that, after 9/11, a war to change the government of Iraq was not out of the question. Steve Coll, center-left Establishment journalist at The New Yorker and professor at Columbia, lives in this same world, and he takes a position in his recent book that the war was avoidable and based on bad information.
When I decided to buy the book, I was interested in the thousands of hours of taped conversation between Saddam Hussein and his advisors that Coll had access to. Now that I’ve listened to it on audible, I want to describe some of the facts that helped me evolve my own loosely held position on the war: it was a largely neoconservative affair (a.) to wipe out “enemies” of “the West” and (b.) to strut around the stage of history. My view is now somewhat more sympathetic to at least the neoconservative case, if not the people themselves, because of how reckless and dumb Saddam Hussein now appears to me.
I
The first thing I learned is that Saddam Hussein is a literal tribesman; that is, he has three dots tattooed on one hand, indicating that he is a member of the Al-Bu Nasir tribe. He was born into pre-modern conditions in rural Tikrit Iraq. His father died when he was very young, and his uncle married his mother, which is literally an Old Testament practice. He went to school–apparently rather late–and became involved with the Ba’ath party, which is a secular, socialist revolutionary party, anti-imperial, Arab nationalist, anti-semitic: one doesn’t have to squint too hard to see Nazism in it. Its members eschewed religious dress for more cosmopolitan suits and ties, but they were especially attracted to the green military fatigues of other socialist revolutionaries, like Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. He smoked Cuban cigars, admitting once that, Yes, Cohibas are a bourgeois luxury, but they are from a socialist country. He had the appealing characteristic of maintaining his toughness even when he was president: according to Coll, while Hussein lived amid decidedly non-socialist splendor, he also wasn’t averse to “sleeping rough” for fun or nostalgia. He loved the countryside and fishing.
This profile might seem romantic, especially in contrast to the suburban meritocrats that run the West. Instead, it made me think of him as a kind of dumbass. Coming to power through a revolutionary national-socialist party in the second half of the 20th century is not so simple, but dressing up in green fatigues, smoking cuban cigars, and presiding over your own little sunbaked banana republic is a frankly dumb way to fritter away this position and energy. If you have almost unlimited wealth and the fifth largest army in the world, you need to accomplish something more than just pissing off America and Israel, à la Hugo Chavez, Fidel Casto, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Noriega, and on and on. One good question is, What could another dictator have done? The obvious answer is to look elsewhere. What are the Arabian and Middle Eastern success stories? Right now, it appears that Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are two models for how to take the non-Israeli Middle East into the 21st century. It’s also smart to look towards Asia, especially China, Vietnam, and Singapore. Create incentives for outsourced manufacturing for your rural people while attracting knowledge workers to your cities. Use your country’s high tolerance for authoritarianism as a means of suppressing crime and Western political ideas, and for all of the imported Euro and American knowledge workers who are incapable of living amongst conservative Arabs, you can quarantine foreigners in hedonistic resort-compounds, like they do in Saudi Arabia. In that way, you also keep crime and bad ideas away from your people: two birds, one stone.
II
The second important thing I learned is that he really did have a nebulous nuclear program–in the 1970s. But, there is no consensus on if Iraqi scientists would have been able to bring a bomb to fruition, and an Israeli bomb destroyed the reactor in 1981. After that, Hussein’s main WMD project was biological and chemical weapons, which he used against both Kurdish civilians and in the Iran-Iraq war against Iranian “human wave” attacks, in which rows of Iranian soldiers apparently marched toward the enemy to clear minefields or draw enemy fire. These facts are important for a few reasons: first, we know that Hussein was willing to use chemical and biological weapons, even on civilians, and second, while developing nuclear weapons requires a large facility that CIA could likely find via satellite imaging, biological and chemical weapons do not.
In general, I have sympathy for the Iraqi or Iranian case for nuclear weapons. Israel has these weapons, which creates the impression that Israel receives special treatment from the US and the UN; it seems like the Non-Proliferation Treaty is being used as a weapon against countries who dissent to US/UN global leadership. Why shouldn’t other countries have the same nuclear deterrence? For instance, if Saddam Hussein’s military actually did have nuclear weapons, it’s possible that the US would have never invaded out of fear of nuclear retaliation. At the same time, why did this dumbass thug use chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians? By deploying these weapons, he made himself a pariah and created a credible case against himself: he was willing to use WMDs on civilians; therefore, responsible powers need to aggressively contain this behavior to a single country at bare minimum. But, really, it’s sane to consider more than containment because of the third thing I learned.
III
The same month the US began an aerial bombardment of Iraqi military outposts in Kuwait, the Iraqi military also fired SCUD missiles into Tel Aviv and Haifa. Somehow, Israel was persuaded to stand down at the behest of King Hussein and the Bush administration.
The reason I bring this up is because I realized that it doesn’t take an Israel-obsessed neoconservative to object to this behavior, and I don’t think it’s right to simply reason: yes, this is bad, but it happened far away; it’s not our problem. The reality was (a.) Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons that he has used against military and (later) civilian targets and (b.) he was willing to recklessly attack Israeli cities–not strategic military or research facilities, but Tel Aviv, which in person seemed to me to be basically Miami–because the United States bombed Iraqi military staging areas in Kuwait. This is the behavior not of a small, mighty country playing its cards shrewdly, making strategic movements in secret to build its capability in order to confront the United States; it’s the behavior of a dumbass who is practically crying out to be removed from power. If you think the ideology of the United States is problematic, you need to show the world a better model. It’s hard to figure out how to live in the future, which is oncoming every second; it’s very hard to figure out the best ways to translate healthy, sane values into techno-modernity. Maybe focus your resources on that task, like the Saudis seem to be or like the Chinese. Instead, Saddam Hussein ordered a massacre of Kuwaitis and a launch of SCUDS at Tel Aviv at the same time.
IV
The fourth thing I learned is that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the realization that American Liberal “democracy” was hegemonic, Hussein sought to grow Iraq into a global power capable of balancing against America. Absorbing Kuwaiti oil fields and money was a part of this plan.
As you might be able to tell, I am also somewhat sympathetic to this idea–challenging the United States for global dominance is allowed. That said, Iraq was, of course, a disreputable aggressor in this case: Iraq owed Kuwait an apparently huge debt, and Saddam decided to invade rather than pay. Again, there is–in theory–a degree of romance in this kind of bold action; there is a kind of nostalgia for a less ordered, more daring, Napoleonic past here, but in reality this is, as mentioned above, the behavior of a dumbass. In my view, bold, assertive action can be justified for a number of reasons that would probably scare “rules-based” internationalist liberals, but avoiding debt that was likely fairly transacted is not one of them. If you truly want to challenge the US, you will likely need loans in the future. Who lends to Iraq after this?
Interestingly, Coll notes that King Hussein advised HW Bush that the Kuwaitis deserved the invasion because they are arrogant. I’ll note here that I have a small amount of experience with Kuwait and Kuwatiis because I spent nine months deployed there. I found their soldiers to be fairly unimpressive: unbuttoned uniforms, soldiers on duty wearing Adidas slides instead of combat boots, machine guns swaying in unmanned turrets as their humvees passed through our checkpoints. There is also apparently a generational divide on how Kuwaitis view America: the youth, naturally, hate Americans; the older Kuwaitis, though, are very pro-America because of our role in kicking out Iraq. Part of this hostility among the young might have something to do with the fact that, based on my two trips to the Kuwaiti Cultural Museum1, Kuwaitis appeared to represent themselves as the routing force during the Iraq invasion. As in, I saw no evidence of the American military in the Kuwaiti telling of the events of the war. Elsewhere, however, I did see evidence of the slaughter of Kuwaiti military men. On our base, there were still brick walls covered in bullet holes, and it was apparently in front of these walls that the Iraqi soldiers machine gunned Kuwaiti soldiers and seamen to death. There were marks in the concrete sidewalks from Iraqi shells where we ran, and there was a field where no (enlisted, I don’t know about officers) Americans were allowed to go. Apparently, that was where the Kuwaiti officers were knelt down and executed.
V
The fifth important thing I learned is that Uday Hussein was worse than I thought he was. According to Coll, everywhere Uday went, people were tortured and killed and women were branded like cattle and raped. He traveled in absurd convoys of ultra high end vehicles, drank heavily and abused drugs, opened fire on crowds, and at one point was stomping around openly about assassinating his father, possibly the most dangerous man in the world. Once, he was ambushed and badly injured as he and his posse were prowling around an ice cream shop known to attract young girls.
If you’ve ever read Hannibal by Thomas Harris–the third Hannibal Lecter book–you’ll remember the antagonist, Mason Verger. You can look at the wiki if you don’t know or remember who this character is. I used to believe that, in fiction, bad guys need to do bad things for readers to hate them, and the bolder the author is in describing those bad things, the more the reader will understand that this is the bad guy. Mason Verger, as described in Hannibal, is an example of a bad guy who is, in my view, too bad. As a reader, I didn’t simply root for him to die, I questioned if I could continue reading the book, and I had a darkened view of the world when I wasn’t reading. Uday Hussein has this effect on me, and I blame Saddam Hussein for allowing this character to exist. Uday Hussein might not be a reason for the United States to invade Iraq, but he badly discredited his father in the eyes of someone like me, who is looking for a credible alternative to the kind of hedonistic liberalism at the heart of the United States’s appeal to the world and to history.
My final thoughts on this book are that Saddam Hussein was ultimately a dumbass, who squandered enormous resources. That his enemies in the United States had to essentially fabricate evidence to invade his country is bad, but I don’t think it really says a hell of a lot about the United States, which looks nearly heroic in comparison. Those who are trying to imagine a postliberal future should take note that apparently organic populist leaders like Saddam Hussein need, firstly, to be psychologically well-adjusted to modernity, and then secondly, they must have their own hearts and minds, the minds of their trusted advisors and team members focused on what is actually possible in the future and to take bold risks on the frontier of technological development, like American tech moguls.
Or whatever it was called–I am having trouble finding a record of this museum on the internet. It was very shabby, with models of Gulf War battles depicted with action figures and other toys.