WASHINGTON — On Nov. 15, 1986, Saddam Hussein gathered his most senior aides for an important strategy session. Two days earlier, President Ronald Reagan had acknowledged in a televised address that his administration had sent weapons and spare parts to Iran.
“It can only be a conspiracy against Iraq,” said Saddam, who implied darkly that the United States was trying to prolong the Iran-Iraq war, already in its sixth year, and increase Iraq’s casualties.
In truth, the Reagan administration had arranged the arms shipment for a variety of reasons that had little to do with Iraq: to secure the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, to open a private channel to the new rulers in Tehran and to generate secret profits that could be sent to rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government.
But Saddam would not be dissuaded from his conspiratorial view. He mentioned the arms sales again in his meeting on July 25, 1990, with April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, when he again misread Washington and assumed that the United States would stand aside when his army invaded Kuwait a week later.
The deliberations inside Saddam’s inner sanctum are chronicled in a voluminous archive of documents and recorded meetings that U.S. forces captured after they invaded Iraq in 2003. Much of the collection, which is housed in digital form at National Defense University, has yet to be made public.
But a small portion of the material has been opened up to researchers outside government, and 20 transcripts and documents were released last week in conjunction with a conference on the Iran-Iraq War in Washington.
Even in an age of WikiLeaks, such a detailed record of a foreign leader’s private ruminations - one that reveals the leader’s calculations and his government’s perceptions of U.S. policy - rarely becomes public.
It is the Iraqi version of the Oval Office tapes that helped take down President Richard Nixon and gave historians a window into the White House from 1940-73, when a recording system was in place.
In the case of Saddam, the transcripts depict a leader who was inclined to see enemies everywhere, who often displayed a shallow understanding of diplomacy outside the Middle East, and who harbored grand ambitions for his country but was prone to epic miscalculations.
Saddam so grievously underestimated Iran’s military that he wrongly assumed that Iran’s initial airstrikes in the war had actually been carried out by Israeli warplanes. He personally selected which rockets to use on one attack against an Iranian city, and he boasted that Iraq had a chemical weapons arsenalthat “exterminates by the thousands.”
He felt threatened enough by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist groups that he discussed his desire to “trick” them into thinking that his government, too, endorsed Islamic values.
From a historical perspective, Saddam’s decision to confront Iran and his reaction to the Iran-Contra affair are two of the most intriguing areas in the documents.
Saddam set the stage for war with Iran by repudiating a 1975 agreement that had settled a dispute over the Shatt al Arab, the strategic waterway along their border.
According to Amatzia Baram, an Israeli expert on Iraq who has studied the archive, the pivotal decision appears to come in a meeting on Sept. 16, 1980, when Saddam took the optimistic view that the Iranians, fearing the Iraqi forces massed near the border, would give in without much of a fight.
A top-secret report from the Iraqi General Military Intelligence Directorate supported Saddam’s upbeat assessment. “It is clear that, at present, Iran has no power to launch wide offensive operations against Iraq or to defend on a large scale,” the report noted. It also predicted “more deterioration of the general situation of Iran’s fighting capability.” But the war, which ultimately lasted eight years and produced hundreds of thousands of casualties, turned out to be far more difficult than Saddam expected. Soon afterit began, Iranian aircraft bombed a series of targets, including Iraqi oil refineries and Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant south of Baghdad. The feat so surprised the Iraqis that they assumed that the attack could not have emanated from Iran.
“This is Israel,” Saddam exclaimed in an Oct. 1, 1980, meeting. He then complained that Iraqi officials had not followed his suggestion to bury the nuclear facility under the Hamrin Mountains north of Baghdad, before approving a plan to fortify the complex with millions of sandbags. But those sandbags proved to be of little use when Israeli warplanes actually did strikethe site the next June.
Later, Saddam said he was not surprised that Israel felt threatened by Iraq, which he asserted would emerge from a triumph over Iran with a military that was stronger than ever. “Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel,” he said in a 1982 conversation. “Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq.”
As Iraq’s war with Iran proceeded, Saddam did not hesitate to give battlefield advice, despite his shaky knowledge of weapons and tactics.
“Do you have cannons that shell air bursts to fall on them while they are in the streets?” he said in a meeting on Oct. 1, 1980, to discuss the bombardment of Abadan, a city in southern Iran. “We want their casualties to be high.”
He was often cordial to his inner circle but was capable of coldhearted calculations about the forces he had sent to war.
Early in the conflict, Saddam was frustrated with Iraqi bomber pilots who, hobbled by poor intelligence, had returned from missions over Iran after failing to strike their targets. Deciding that he needed to make an example of the airmen, Saddam demanded that the pilots be executed, a practice that former Iraqi commanders say was common during the war.
The Iran-Contra affair proved to be particularly bitter for Saddam and his aides, and they struggled for weeks to comprehend it. Among other things, they could not understand why the Reagan administration had taken military action against Libya in 1986 but was reaching out to Iran, since Iran, Saddam said, “plays a greater role in terrorism.”
“I am trying to understand exactly what happened here,” Saddam said. Tariq Aziz, his foreign minister and Iraq’s face to the world for years, noted, perhaps in jest, that Iraq had supported independence for Puerto Rico.
But Saddam said that something more important than Puerto Rico was at stake: the struggle for influence in the volatile Middle East. “They like Iraniansmore than us,” Saddam said. “They do not like them because they are nicer than us or because they are better than we are. They only like them because they can be pulled from the street into a car easily, unlike us,” he added, comparing the Iranians to willing prostitutes on the street.
For all his distrust of the United States, Saddam also feared that the Soviet Union wanted to keep the Iran-Iraq War going to distract Iran from helping Muslim groups fighting in Afghanistan and the Soviet republics, the documents show.
In an undated recording in the 1980s, Aziz dismissed Javier Perez de Cuellar, a longtime secretary-general of the United Nations, as a U.S. tool.
“I mean, he has been living in New York for the last 15 to 20 years, maybe,” said Aziz - “which is a Jewish city.”
Hal Brands, an assistant professor at Duke University who has studied the archive, said that Saddam’s ascent to power, the product of years of Baathist plotting and brutal infighting, probably influenced his view of other countries.
“He came to power through conspiratorial means and tended to assume that everybody operated that way,” Brands said.
The notion that Israel and the West had joined forces to undermine his government persisted well after the Iran-Iraq War ended.
In 1990, Saddam intervened to ensure the execution of Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born journalist who had settled in Britain and was working for The Observer, a British newspaper.
Bazoft was investigating a mysterious explosion at a military complex south of Baghdad when Iraqi authorities arrested him and chargedhim with spying for Israel.
The Bazoft case drew worldwide attention, and the British government appealed for clemency. Saddam was unmoved. Told that it would take a month for the Iraqi legal process to be completed, he took charge of the matter.
“A whole month?” he exclaimed. “I say we execute him in Ramadan, and thiswill be the punishment for Margaret Thatcher.”
Bazoft was hanged on March 15, 1990, six months after his arrest and shortly before Ramadan began. In response, Britain recalled its ambassador. Five months later, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 10/30/2011