A Smarter Saddam...
Baghdad, 1983. The limousine convoy wound its way up through the streets of Baghdad. Saddam Hussein looked up in time to see the smiling face of Ronald Reagan beaming down from a billboard. He sighed. An American flag hung from every street along the broad avenue.
After the Presidential visit, of course, they’d all be taken down and burned in the trash. Some would end up as rags to clean sewers, or for beggars to wrap their feet in, of course.
How could a man so profoundly stupid find his way to the most powerful position in the world, he wondered, yet again. And yet there it was.
Perhaps it was his shadow coterie of advisors and associates. But he’d read the exacting dossiers on Baker, Sununu, Bush, the cabal of arrogant pompous men, blinded by their own self regard, trapped in their narrow ideologies.
Sometimes he toyed with the notion that Reagan was a man like himself, that the public appearance was a facade, and that there was another man, the real man, behind the genial mask, cunning and ruthless.
Reagan’s face passed into the distance. He sighed.
No, he was merely stupid. History was full of Roman and Chinese Emperors who had ben venal simpletons.
"The American’s have turned one of our intelligence officers," Uday, his son was saying.
Saddam brought his focus back. "Truly? Or is this an operation?"
"An operation," Uday said.
Saddam nodded. So the officer was still working for him. The CIA thought they had a man on a string, but really, they would be fed only the information or misinformation they wanted the Americans to believe.
That offered its risks and rewards. Sometimes they managed to genuinely turn someone, and then that became a matter of subverting the informant. Sometimes passively, simply feeding the informant information. Sometimes aggressively, which involved a carefully selected visit in the night, abductions of children, torture and very specific threats.
American spies had lacked subtlty. Like fish in a muddy river, they always lunged at the bait. They swallowed whatever was put in front of them. And they weren’t nearly as good at cover as they thought they were. Almost all American intelligence in Iraq had been compromised, and year by year, his agents were subverting American spy networks through the whole middle east. There would come a day eventually when the only thing that the Americans knew about the middle east was what he decided they should be told.
But the nuts and bolts of intelligence work were often boring.
"How are the preparations for the visit coming along," he interrupted.
A look flashed across Uday’s face. But his father was the one person in Iraq immune from his fury. It amused Saddam.
"Have we sorted out the Agendas yet?" He pushed further.
There was something wrong with Uday. An unalloyed sadism that was barely restrained by a mask of civility. All Sadam had been able to teach the boy was that a simple face made hunting easier. He had a dungeon in his mansion. There were stories of women abducted off of streets. Atrocities. It was Uday he turned loose when a dissident needed to be shown their true place, Uday turned loose on their families.
Sometimes, when he thought of Uday ruling Iraq after he was gone, it was a vision of endless bonfires of burning skulls, of hanged corpses clustered like bunches of grapes from straining lamppost, of skies darkened with the smoky fires of burning human flesh, of a keening as of millions of children screaming.
Which reminded him, he’d have to make some decisions about succession one of these days - either Qusay or Uday.
Uday coughed, and then smoothly shifted gears.
"Most of the arrangements have been made, security, motorcades the photo opportunities. It’s all being handled, " he replied.
"As for the Agenda... The Americans have agreed to leave Kuwait off the table. There will be no mention of it. But Baker has personally asked us to ensure that there will be no incidents during or for a reasonable time after the visit..."
By which, Saddam knew, that they were begging him not to embarrass their President. No mass executions, no arrests, no flagrant acts of brutality, to continue with the increasingly thin fiction that Kuwait still had an existence as a separate state, at least on a few pieces of paper.
He was content to grant that request. Integration was one thing, that was well under way. But the cleansing of the remains of old Kuwait that took time. The corrupt Emirs and Sheikhs still dreamed of return, even as picture circulated the world of their children dancing in Paris discotheques, as stories of ill gotten fortunes, of avarice and greed, blunder and stupidity, heroin addictions, sexual peccadillos, and always corruption.
In the end, they’d made it to easy. They’d sat there, swallowing their oil money, wallowing in it like pigs, treating the country like their own private estate. The Kuwaiti royals had never allowed anything like a national identity to form, in the end, Kuwait had been nothing but them. They had thought they could buy loyalty by doling out money.
But really, it only took a little secret money to make men ambitious men hungry, to make sullen men angry. There had been assassinations, and then represssion. There’d been riots. And suddenly, the Iraqi army was rushing in to restore peace, the Royals flying to safety, confident that they’d be back in a day... A week.... A month, surely, no more than that.
Almost a year now. Kuwait was more a part of Iraq every day. Sometime after they’d come to understand what he’d done, the Emirs had hired lawyers and public relations agents... And he’d simply hired better ones.
Of course the Americans would not embarrass him by mentioning Kuwait.
They would only embarrass themselves, showcasing their own impotence as they had in the Falklands and Lebanon. All they wanted on Kuwait is for the matter to pass in silence. ‘Do as you will, they were saying, just do not embarrass us.’
Fine with him.
"They are determined to confront us on our nuclear program."
"How much do they know?"
"Too much," Uday replied. "There’s a leak we haven’t found yet. They’ve had the stuff we’ve had slipped to them. But they have other things, enough to be suspicious."
"And Reagan will ask about it?"
"Almost certainly."
Saddam thought. "Our position is that we are being forced to research by Iran’s effort to procure a nuclear weapon. We believe that they are much more advanced than the Americans think. We will share that intelligence... See that it is manufactured... Also, we will tell them that we are not so advanced as they think. That we have let out misinformation for the Iranians that we are much more advanced than we are, to deter them. He will believe that."
Uday nodded. "I’ll see to it."
"Reagan," reflected Saddam, "is a sentimental fool. His man, Baker, is a practical fool. Here is how we will present it to them: Iran pursues a nuclear bomb, so we must too, for our own safety. Yes, America can protect us with its bombs. But then if the Americans come with their bombs, well that brings Russia in, and then it gets dangerous for everyone. If a bomb must fly, better it be a little Iraqi bomb... A better deterrent to the Iranians. Then the Americans can have clean hands, and the Russians have no reason to come in. They will like that."
"Israel...."
"Harder to fool," Saddam replied. "But they’re another problem. What else?
The Dubai Treaty Organization?"
"They support it," Uday replied. "But they wish to be a member."
Saddam rolled his eyes. He couldn’t say no, of course, not explicitly. The DTO was supposed to be a NATO style alliance against potential Iranian aggression. But the whole point of the Dubai Treaty organization was to place Iraqi troops in each nation, to find the levers of subversion. He had no interest in pulling another Kuwait... No, that would simply lead to disaster, war with Iran, or American hysteria, or something. But he’d own the gulf before he was finished. His plans did not include an American or even a Saudi military presence. He would obstruct them, all the while pretending to be their loyal agent.
"We don’t want to rush that," Saddam said, "backpedal it. We’ll all agree it’s a wonderful idea, and of course they must be in it as their partners, but there are many details to work out."
Uday made a note.
"The rest of it is the usual. Foreign aid, Arms sales, they don’t like us buying so much soviet equipment when they could be the ones selling it.."
Saddam grunted. The Soviets had taken their fall from grace with more dignity than he’d expected. Reagan had embraced Saddam’s turnabout with enthusiasm, a triumph for dignity, human rights, freedom and America. They’d needed a triumph, the years since Vietnam had not been good for them.
Still, Saddam had been careful not to shut the door completely on the Soviets. It would not do to let the Americans think that they could take Iraq for granted. It might give them ideas. A little nervousness was good for them.
"How are we in Syria," Saddam said suddenly.
"The Baghdad/Damascus pipeline trunk will reach Beirut in another month, the main line to Tyre shortly after. It should be ready to for shipping to Europe in a few more months. The Baghdad/Damascus highway is also proceeding well."
The pipeline was too close to Israel for his comfort, but that couldn’t be helped. The Syrians had no oil of their own. Mostly, they had poverty. The very thought of the pipeline project left them orgiastic, the road project, the construction, the jobs, the wealth it would bring... They would sell their mothers for it. Opportunity brought desire, and desire brought corruption.
"Are we still on schedule for the other matter?"
The last couple of years had not been kind to his old rival, Hafez Al-Assad. His friends in Egypt had abandoned him to make peace with the Jews, leaving Syria exposed as the paper tiger it was on its own. His disastrous air war with Israel had made him an international joke. Even his occupation of Lebanon had left him in bad odor. Only the ruin of the Lebanese civil war had left him any credibility there at all. In the end, the reverses of Egypt and Israel left him casting about in a friendless world for a new partner, and willing to bargain on poor terms, to grasp at straws.
Now look at him. Bedridden, invalid, his country run by a coterie of second raters while his own son, Rivad, plotted against him. And while this happened, Saddam was cultivating the right officers, his agents were buying the right me, lists were drawn up of men who would need to vanish suddenly, and people were being put in place to make them vanish.
It was ironic that Assad had allowed the construction of the very highway that Saddam would send his army down, the very pipeline he’d used to suborn Saddam’s men. In the end, Saddam reflected, men were always so eager to let you cut their throats. All you needed to do was let their selfishness do the work and select your moment.
Saddam had reserved for himself the privilege of strangling Hafez Al-Assad in his hospital bed. He did not consider himself sadistic, normally. But Assad had been too much of a rival, the canny old fox, he deserved to die properly. Normally, he’d leave it to Uday who derived altogether too much pleasure from that sort of thing. But this time...
"The Americans don’t like our cosy relationship with Syria..." Uday said.
"Yes," Saddam replied. "That will have to be handled delicatedly. We won’t discuss it with Reagan, he’s too sentimental to appreciate the complexities. We’ll go over it with Baker, tell him that we are luring the Syrians away from communism. He’ll approve of that."
"If we do it carefully, they will even cheer us on." He paused, thoughtfully.
"Let’s see if we can word some joint statements, so that it will appear after the fact, that they were approving all along. It will at least make things difficult for them."
Uday nodded.
"Anything further?"
"A cable from Said Barre in Somalia."
That was interesting, Saddam thought. Somalia. Said Barre was only in power a few years, but he’d succeeded in making himself unliked just about everywhere. He was in bed with the Soviets. He wanted to bite off big pieces of Ethiopia. Saddam wished him well on some level, but privately thought he was simply building up to disaster.
Still, you never knew where events took you. Perhaps Barre could be pushed in certain directions. Perhaps in going off his cliff, he would create opportunities.
Who knows, perhaps in ten years time, Somalia would be ruled by Iraqi troops. Let that buffoon Mubarak have his Suez Canal, Saddam could take the other end of the red sea.
In the end, really, there was no one else. The Shah had never been more than a vain thug, and now Khomeini was a devout Thug, and the Persians had never held much sway in Islam anyway. Al-Assad was a dying old man who would be gone in a year or two. Who was left? That clown Quaddaffi? That corrupt non-entity, Mubarak? The Sauds with their schemes and their money, a house of cards? The rest of the Arab world a collection of opportunists and nonentities, scrabbling for their piece of the earth?
A man could go far.
"We’re here," Uday said. The limousine had pulled up in front of the hospital.
Ah yes. Duty. Saddam and his entourage departed the limousines. They were met by a delegation of Doctors and nurses. Genially, he waived them away. He wasn’t here for a hospital inspection. He was here to see an old enemy.
He marched down the hospital corridor with his son. Where was the room. Yes, there. He’d taken steps to ensure that the best room in the hospital had been reserved. And that the recipient knew it.
Saddam stepped in. Tariq Al-Aziz lay dying in bed. Aziz had been a tall, robust man. A natural leader, with a booming voice and magnetic presence. Now, he was a shadow, skeletal and gaunt, cheeks sunken, eyes like marbles in loose sockets. The Doctors said it was cancer, as he’d ordered them to say.
Poison, of course. Slow poison. Saddam wanted to make sure that Aziz spent a long time dying.
His family was all around him, of course. His wife, his brothers some tortured into betrayal, some simply bought.
There was the daughter, already rail thin from some wasting disease, arms pockmarked with needle scars, who had been lured into sex and drugs and then degraded into prostitution and addiction. That daughter had consumed so much of Aziz time and energy, had distracted him at so many vital moments, had been provoked in the right ways and at the right time so critically to embarrass him, to undermine him, to degrade him among his peers.
There was the son, sitting quietly in handcuffs a policeman at his side. He had used that son to break his father’s heart. The famous arrest, the testimony of parents, of children, the stories of the horrific abuse. It had occupied headlines through Iraq for months. Saddam had even gone on public record, expressing his distaste, suggesting that perhaps journalists could find better things to write about and leave the Aziz family at home.
They hadn’t of course, they knew their real orders.
And through it, there had been Aziz, sitting in the courtroom, watching his son. Saddam knew the exact day that the old man had broken. That point he’d walked into the courtroom and at down in the audience gallery, his shoulders slumped, his head bowed. The point that he’d believed.
Aziz was a spent force, virtually a dead man, by the time Saddam had gotten around to ordering his poisoning. The only thing that had kept his faction going as a leader of the opposition was Saddam himself, who needed an opposition.... but needed it broken and bleeding and limping, and perhaps just credible enough to attract and defuse people who might actually cause trouble.
Aziz raised a hand, pointing at Saddam.
"Have you come to watch me die," he quavered.
Saddam blinked.
"Yes!!!" Saddam thought. "No!" he said. "I’ve come to pay my respects."
The dying man coughed. His lungs were filling up. Aziz wife rushed to support her husband’s head.
"Clear the room please," Saddam said, "we must speak."
The women were permitted to remain of course. All except the daughter.
That was good enough.
He took a seat beside the dying man, reached out, and took his hand.
"Why are you here?" Aziz wheezed.
"To say goodbye." Saddam calculated a pause, ten heartbeats, and then continued. "We have had our differences, you and I. But we have this in common. We both love our nation. I have always respected you. What you did, you did for the good of Iraq, as did I."
Aziz gave a bubbling cough that was half a laugh. Saddam wiped bubbles of drool from his lip. How easy to just snap his neck, he thought. But no, nothing so easy. Aziz had so much further to go before he would be allowed to die. Perhaps Uday was like his father after all.
"Bullshit," the dying man said.
Saddam shrugged. "It’s not the time for politics. There comes a time when we have to put that aside. You will go to Allah soon, and I know that he will welcome you as a good man. Let us leave these disputes aside."
"What’s left to talk about?"
"I hear you play a good game of pinochle?"
The dying man laughed, and then began coughing again. But eventually, they broke open a deck and began to play at the bedside. Their conversation as they played was full of snippets, reminisces of days gone by, talk of children, of sights seen and women loved, of people they’d both known and differing opinions. Occasionally there were small arguments over this and that, but without force to them.
Saddam found it absurdly easy to cheat. Drugs and poison had robbed him of his faculties. Slightly bored, Saddam began to throw the game in obvious ways.
"You’re letting me win," Aziz accused. Saddam nodded and tried to look shameface. "Give me the courtesy of letting me lose like an honest man."
Saddam nodded. Took the game. He deliberately made a critical mistake or two in the second game, watched as Aziz floundered to victory. And then trounced him efficiently in the third. He was slightly bored. He considered letting Aziz see him cheat. Considered telling Aziz he had cheated.
For a moment, he had an overwhelming urge to honesty, to say: "I have poisoned you, Aziz. I have made your daughter a drugged whore, and sent your son to prison as a child molester, I am the author of every calamity in your life, I ruined you and broke you because I needed my enemy to be a laughingstock, so that every sensible man, every good man would look at you and realize there was no choice but to follow me. I have corrupted your movement, and turned your followers into jokes. All your suffering is because of me, because it suited my purposes."
Instead, he said blandly, "good games."
Aziz nodded. "Good games indeed. And welcome. It’s tiring to lay there while your family watches you die. You have no idea how much effort it takes."
Saddam chuckled. He was careful to make it a polite noise, rather than the genuine laugh that bubbled within him.
"I know why you’ve come."
Saddam lifted an eyebrow.
"You want to know who I’ve chosen as my successor. You will not be pleased. It is Al-Rashid."
Also known as Rashid the hysterical. Rashid the high strung. Rashid whose hatred of Saddam bordered on the fanatical. Rashid who had once, famously, torn down a portrait of Saddam and urinated upon it, shocking every other man in the room. Rashid whose histrionic denunciations went beyond the reasonable, who alienated far more than he attracted. Rashid, the utterly uncompromising.
Saddam pretended to wince.
"He’s a good man," Saddam said diplomatically. "Not as good as you though."
"There isn’t as good a man as me to be found in Baghdad, not even you."
They shared a small chuckle.
"He’s hotheaded," Saddam said.
"I’ve counselled him on that. I can’t fault his passion, but he’s had trouble knowing when to be restrained. We’ve talked about it. You’ll find him a different man as leader."
"A worthy successor, I hope," Saddam said.
"He’ll keep you honest."
Saddam owned Rashid. He’d come up as a nondescript junior officer in the security agency, until Saddam had detected a flair for hysteria. Rashid had been invaluable, histrionic when necessary, perpetually informative.
There had been other possible candidates. Moqtadr, Maliki, Behruz. It didn’t matter. Some were owned, some where bought, some were broken. Even an honest man would have had no headway.
"I guess he will," Saddam replied. He bent forward a little. "Time to go, I suppose. It’s been an hour now."
"Thank you for coming," Aziz said, "we’ve had our differences. But it was good of you to come."
"It was nothing," Saddam said.
Abruptly, Aziz reached up one hand, clasped Saddam’s forearm. Saddam returned the grip.
"I’ll never say this again," Aziz said suddenly, "but Iraq has been in good hands. Just so you know."
Saddam counted down two dozen heartbeats.
"Thank you," he said solemnly.
As he released his grip, Aziz started coughing again. Saddam helped him lay back. Images flitted of sticking his thumbs in Aziz’s sockets, feeling the eyeballs pop. He wiped spittle away.
"You just need to be kept honest," Aziz said weakly.
Saddam allowed himself a glance at the women sitting on the other side of the room. The story would get out of course. His people would make sure of that. The gracious Saddam, giving his worst enemy a bedside visit, treating bygones as bygones.
This was how it was done. It was important that your enemies and friends believed you to be honest, so that you could lie to them. It was important that they had faith in your honour, so that you could betray them. It was important that they trusted you, that they had faith in you.... So that in the end, they obeyed you, they worshipped you, they did not question. If you just gave them the right illusions, they would cling to it like children, even reject the truth. Sometimes, he thought, people were like ants. Little ants, that you could move as you wish, destroy at whim. It was all so easy.
He thought of Stalin. Once a hero to him. But now so transparently a buffoon. Somewhere in the worship of Stalin, he’d come across a book, the Prince, and it had been a revelation. It had changed his life.
On the way out, a nurse approached, asking him to visit a room. A glance at the trusted security guards. Safe. Uday? Surprised. Danger? Unlikely. He decided to follow her in.
Suddenly, he was mobbed by screaming children. They were all around him. Filthy, unhygienic, probably diseased, unworthy, miserable children, surrounding him, touching him, crying out with glee. White hot rage flashed through him. He would execute the nurse. He would execute the entire hospital staff. He’d give them to Uday to keep in his basement! But as soon as it flared up, he barreled down on it, bolted it tight, keeping his features neutral.
The children were happy. The nurses and Doctor’s beaming. Of course. A special treat for the hospital children. Everyone loved him. He had taught them to love him.
He closed his eyes for a moment and thought of hurling a child through a window, imagined the scream, the sound of breaking glass, the wail as the tiny body spun through the air falling a dozen floors. The horrified looks on the faces of the staff. Uday joining in. He thought of hurling another, and then another, laughing out loud, laughing happily as they screamed, as the screams were cut off suddenly, their bodies exploding on impact, and hurling another through the window....
Saddam laughed with delight, his eyes crinkling merrily. He made sure to give each child a special hug.
Because psychotic religious fanatics given to denouncing America as the 'Great Satan', taking embassy officials hostage and fond of fondling charred body parts of American soldiers on television... well, they're just so darned convincing and plausible and cuddly when they want to be.
