05 Apr What Was Saddam Thinking?
05.04.06
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Foreign Affairs will publish in May/June a report on the Pentagon’s secret study of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The study, Saddam’s Delusions: The View From the Inside, tries to address the 2003 war in Iraq from the perspective of Saddam Hussein. Here are some of the highlights of the report:
- Did Iraq have WMD? No — but Saddam wanted others, particular in the region, to think he did, so he maintained a calculated ambiguity on the question. In the last months before the war he realized that it was too dangerous to continue playing this double game and finally decided to cooperate fully with international inspectors. But at that point his track record of repeatedly lying meant that no one believed him.
- What made Saddam so complacent? His belief that the United States did not have the will to take casualties in a serious war and that if necessary France and Russia would keep him safe.
- What did Saddam care about? First and foremost, preventing a coup. His entire regime was set up to prevent the emergence of any alternate centers of power that could threaten his position. He created an astonishing array of different military and paramilitary forces to maintain domestic control, but made sure to stock them with lackeys and cronies, have them check and balance each other, and have everybody watched carefully at all times. This allowed him to stay in power, but it meant that his armed forces were almost completely ineffective at dealing with actual military operations against a competent foreign enemy.
- Did Saddam plan the current insurgency? No. He thought the United States would never attack, and was confident that even if it did, the resulting war would follow essentially the same script as the first Gulf War in 1991, without a full-scale invasion all the way to Baghdad. He did preposition a lot of military materiel around the country before the war started, but only to disperse it and keep it safe, so that it would be available either in the later stages of a long and drawn-out campaign against the coalition, or to reestablish control at home afterwards (as he did in 1991, when the Kurds and Shia revolted).
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