When I wrote the obituary, it said: “Saddam Hussein started an eight-year war
against Iran, used chemical weapons against the Kurds of his country, tried
to make biological weapons that could have killed millions of people in the
Middle East, invaded Kuwait and started the first Gulf War and defied the
international community and set the stage for the second Gulf War and the
destruction of Iraq.” I wrote this before I saw the only film clip of
Saddam’s execution, the one that has fascinated his admirers and enemies
since. It showed him fearlessly, almost disdainfully, looking at the
hangman’s noose, while reciting from the Koran.
Indeed, there is a great deal more to Saddam Hussein than the words I used in
the obituary, essentially the same list of crimes that journalists recited
every time his name came up. Until now, we have had no explanation for
Saddam’s violence: “why” he did these terrible things, no sociological or
psychological background to the criminal deeds. House of Saddam, a
four-part series on BBC Two, which begins this week, focuses on Saddam the
father, the cheating husband, the conniving friend, the wily tribal chief
and the constant conspirator. In the series Saddam is a person and we get to
know him better, even if most people still don’t understand him.
The images of Saddam created by George W. Bush and Tony Blair are no more than
exaggerations of what I wrote in the obituary. Most of the film footage used
as evidence against Saddam in documentaries and during his trial left
viewers with a taste of blood in their mouths.
But within a few years of him being removed, people in Baghdad shake their
heads in dismay to denote their unhappiness with what followed him and how
much pain they have suffered. Some even say that they miss Saddam.
The Saddam of the television series isn’t a Sunday choirboy; he conspires
against his benefactor (President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr), murders his closest
friend (the Minister of Interior Adnan Hamdani), cheats on his wife,
executes his sons-in-law (the brothers Hussein and Saddam Kamel), imprisons
and tortures thousands of innocent people and dismantles the political party
that brought him to power (the Baath), replacing it with members of his
family and tribe who steel, rape and murder as if they were a law unto
themselves.
Yet, as his leading Arab biographer, I maintain a begrudging admiration for
him. It is not because I love monsters, it is because he was a man of
crooked principle, and he was consistent. In a way he was a true child of
the most contested piece of global real estate in history, Iraq. Saddam
Hussein didn’t create Iraqi violence, Saddam Hussein was its child.
Saddam’s end completed him. He lived like a thug and died like a gentleman.
His vision for Iraq was clear, he wanted to drag it into the 20th and 21st
centuries, but unlike other Iraqi leaders who wanted the same thing, Saddam
was willing to sacrifice half of the people he was trying to elevate to do
it. He was the most methodical Arab leader of the 20th century and the most
brutal. Among modern Arab leaders, his trip was the longest. He rose from
being a shoeless peasant who stole eggs and chickens to feed his family to
become an absolute ruler. And his death was a stunning performance, he died
with a Koran under his arm and, despite provocations by officials of the
Iraqi Government, with his dignity intact.
He had a late start in life; he owned his first shoes at 11, when he began to
learn to read and write. Later he sold watermelons on the Mosul to Basra
train and cigarettes on the streets of Baghdad. His rise to power was an act
of will. Chance had little to do with the man the world only got to know
after he invaded Kuwait and threatening the flow and price of oil. But even
Saddam the dreamer who pursued his ambitions with open eyes couldn’t escape
the wounds of his miserable upbringing and the imprint of his country’s
violent history. So the one-sided image of Saddam made in the US and UK and
advanced by experts like myself needed clarification. After all, those
mainly responsible for this image, Bush and Blair, were the same people who
fabricated the evidence to justify invading Iraq.
The Saddam of House of Saddam was designed by the BBC and HBO before I
joined the project to drama-tise his life as a consultant. It isn’t exactly
revisionist history but it is a well-developed, wide-angle view of the man.
Saddam comes through more as an Iraqi with an air of destiny about him than
as an ugly accident of history.
We meet his jealous first wife and first cousin Sajida, played to the nth
degree by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and relate to her as the desperate and angry
scorned woman. We also meet Uday, his psychopathic elder son, then his
daughters Raghad and Rana, whose husbands Saddam executed for ratting on him
to UN inspectors. There is also the visualisation of Saddam when he
personally executed his closest friend, Adnan Hamdani, but could not resist
the compulsion to visit Adnan’s widow to offer his condolences and
friendship. People who saw Saddam at the time claim his eyes were bloodshot
and swollen because he had been crying in seclusion for two days.
Overall, Saddam’s life is what good films are made of. To say that it is
stranger than fiction is to demean it. Saddam comes through as totally sane,
a committed Beduin full of basic Beduin desires and dignity, and we are left
thinking about him without hating him more or less than the Saddam of
London’s and Washington’s spin-doctors. I was never a friend or close
associate of Saddam Hussein. But in the 1970s I worked with a consultancy
that helped with his economic development plans and from 1981 to 1984 I
advised the Iraqi President’s Office on relations with America. (I am
blameless; I resigned because he wouldn’t listen to me.)
It was in the latter capacity that I met him and was fascinated by the
difference between the real Saddam and the one unloved by Western media. The
real Saddam had a soft, unmanly handshake. I remember making a mental list
of the “surprises” the first time I met him. He was deferential and so
soft-spoken I could hardly hear him and he spent some time making sure that
my hotel suite was comfortable and that “the brothers” were treating me
correctly. But the greatest surprise of all was his shyness, which made him
avoid all eye contact. This, coupled with the fact that he gave the
impression he was thinking of several things simultaneously, could make most
meetings with him disconcerting. I know some people who had a difficult time
speaking in his presence. Personally, I was not frightened but I found being
with him less than enjoyable. I did have to remind myself that shy people
kill. All these things aside, the man oozed power.
My fascination made me devote years of my life to studying him. My pursuit of
Saddam became an obsession that took me so far that I spent months reading
the books he read and had long interviews with his tailor and shoemaker.
My findings are recorded in my seven-year-old biography of the man, Saddam
Hussein, The Politics of Revenge, but my view of him has been enlarged
by my work on House of Saddam. The book condemned Saddam and praised
some of his achievements. It also was a detailed, clear appeal against
invading Iraq for fear of the consequences. I am more dislocated by what
happened because it’s even bigger than I thought before the invasion. I do
believe that our children and our children’s children will continue to
suffer because of it.
The invasion of Iraq exacerbated the divisions between the ethnic and
religious groups that comprise the country. The Sunnis, Shias, Kurd,
Turkoman, Assyrians and other groups are more apart now than ever before.
Once the most promising country in the Middle East, Iraq is having a
difficult time remaining united. Not only that, Iraq’s neighbours and the
superpowers have always had a vested interest in an Iraq beholden to them
and no two interests are the same. Iran wants a Shia Iraq it can manipulate,
Saudi Arabia wants a Sunni Iraq free from Iranian domination, America wants
an Iraq that would produce all the oil it needs and Turkey and Syria have
their ambitions. This is how it always was and that is what made Saddam
everybody’s second choice and the overall first choice for 30 years.
But my political arguments against the invasion leave unanswered the human
questions raised by House of Saddam. Why did Saddam the brilliant
populist allow his criminal son Uday to get away with murder? How difficult
was it to have his sons-in-law killed? If he truly loved his friend Adnan
Hamdani, why didn’t he try to spare his life?
House of Saddam doesn’t answer these questions but it subtly hints at a
valid reason. The man who invaded Iran and Kuwait, built a million-man army,
came close to making an atomic bomb and sent a rocket into space was Saddam
Hussein of the 20th century. The man who looked the other way while members
of his family and tribe looted, raped and murdered was a tribal chief with a
17th century emotional make-up. Saddam Hussein didn’t need any doubles, he
was a divided person. He had travelled far but his heart was still in
Tikrit.
House of Saddam, Wed, BBC Two, 9pm; Saddam Hussein, The Politics of Revenge
is published by Bloomsbury
