Introduction

In March 2003, the United States led an international military coalition to disarm Iraq of suspected weapons of mass destruction (WMD). While Saddam Hussein largely ended Iraq’s WMD programs in 1991, Iraq’s resistance to certain UN inspections and other measures led many to believe that it maintained WMD stockpiles and was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program. Nine months after the invasion of Iraq, Libya’s leadership announced that it was “of its own free will” dismantling all of its WMD programs and would abide by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. After thirty years of trying to acquire nuclear weapons, Muammar Qaddafi changed Libya’s course to one of “building a new world void of WMD and void of all types of terrorism.”

For decades, both Saddam’s Iraq and Qaddafi’s Libya had sought nuclear weapons and found their countries the targets of unilateral and multilateral inducements. US-led economic sanctions and military threats were often employed as a coercive policy tool aimed in part at rolling back the illicit weapons programs. The intention was to punish or deny benefits to these leaders, for instance, by weakening their ruling coalitions and undermining their political and economic hold on power. Potential benefits associated with political and economic reintegration with the Western-oriented global system and assurances of regime survival, of varying credibility, went hand-in-hand with the sanctions. The United States and other countries offered these positive inducements as rewards for the leaders and their constituents interested in normalizing relations with the West, on condition that they would verifiably forgo WMD.

The invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 by Saddam Hussein's Iraq set in motion a long conflict with the United States that ended only in 2003. For Saddam and the Baʾath regime he had controlled since 1979, the invasion would ultimately prove fatal. It ensured that most Iraqis, who were still cherishing the recent end of the Iran-Iraq War, would suffer the deprivations of yet another long war, one that would lead to a third: a destructive civil war. As Saddam later noted, “Being at peace is not easy.”

On 22 September 1980, after months of border skirmishes, Saddam's army streamed into Iran. Though hoping for a quick victory, Saddam soon found himself mired in an ill-conceived conflict against a powerful and motivated opponent. For eight long years, hundreds of thousands of soldiers fought in the marshes, mountains, and deserts dividing the two countries. As the conflict wore on, Saddam's desperate military employed chemical weapons, bombarded Iranian cities, and brutalized ethnic minorities. Iran responded by sending human waves of teenage zealots storming across Iraqi minefields and targeting neutral shipping in the Gulf. By the time both sides accepted a UN cease-fire in August 1988, the fighting had led to nearly a million casualties, thousands more sat in prison camps, and the region was poorer by billions of dollars. Saddam's glib conversations in this chapter belie the terrible suffering his words inflicted.

The U.S.-led coalition in 1991 demanded that Iraq verifiably divest itself of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and long-range rockets as the price of peace. Twelve years later, a different U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” justified its invasion of Iraq based primarily on allegations of Iraq's noncompliance with its disarmament obligations. To understand Saddam's views and behavior regarding the UN sanctions and inspections, one must comprehend why one war ended, why another began, and what happened in the intervening years, best characterized as neither war nor peace.

Sometime during the night of 7 August 1995, a line of cars slipped across the Iraq-Jordan border and drove to Amman. When Saddam Hussein awoke, he learned that his son-in-law Hussein Kamil had defected to Jordan along with Kamil's brother and the two men's wives, both of whom were Saddam's daughters. Raad Hamdani, the commander of the Republican Guard II Corps, recalled that when Saddam telephoned him around noon to inform him of the defection:

OVERVIEW

Sir Michael Howard, the great British military historian, once warned that “the past is a foreign country; there is very little we can say about it until we have learned the language and understood its assumptions.” A recurring insight when reviewing transcripts of discussions between Saddam and members of his inner circle is the extent to which the West’s failure to understand this opaque regime were as much a failure of Westerners to understand their own assumptions as they were a deficit of fact. Extrapolating from Howard’s quote, one could say that to Western policy makers, totalitarian regimes may be the most exotic of all foreign countries. The inglorious demise of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime might provide insights to the kind of thinking that emerges from the innermost regions of totalitarianism and a guidebook to improving assumptions of the “other”.

Saddam struggled to find a balance between the secular and religious aspects of political rule. In theory, Baʾathism was nonreligious and Iraq a secular state. During the 1970s, there were virtually no references to religion in the regime's public language. In fact, the regime emphasized language and symbols recalling the glories of pre-Islamic Mesopotamia. During this period, the state increasingly banned Shiʾa religious observances, which led to Shiʾa rioting in Najaf and Karbala in 1977. In his capacity as vice president, Saddam responded to this unrest by telling state officials that they should not use religious terms to have a “momentary encounter” (i.e., a temporary accommodation) with religious groups. Years later, he expressed continuing distrust of individuals who used religion as a political tool: “By God, I do not like them, I do not like those who work politics under the guise of religion. My trust in them is not good.”

The captured Iraqi recordings provide valuable insight into Saddam's views on the utility of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Scholars and policy makers have long debated the reasons Saddam used, and refrained from using, chemical and biological weapons. Whether Iraq (and states in general) sought weapons of mass destruction (WMD) for deterrence, compellence, prestige, or a combination of such factors has likewise been the subject of a great deal of analysis and speculation. Behind these questions resided, for many, concern that the acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead Saddam to believe that he could engage in conventional aggression with less risk of U.S. military intervention or U.S.-Israeli nuclear intimidation. Although Saddam and his advisers touched on some of these issues in public, analysts have received these public claims with healthy skepticism. This chapter presents transcripts of some of Saddam's private statements on the utility of WMD and the conditions for using them.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the world looked radically different to decision makers in Baghdad than to their counterparts in Washington, D.C. Saddam Hussein, trying to understand the baffling aspects of U.S. domestic politics, spent countless hours discussing America with his advisers. As he told visiting U.S. senators in April 1990, politicians in America and Iraq “need to know the history of the two countries as to the basic factors related to social, cultural, and political life, because this knowledge is indispensable if one wants to draw the proper conclusions.” For Saddam, America was a “complicated country” with confusing political processes. Despite his efforts to learn, Saddam's beliefs about the United States were frequently grossly inaccurate.