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Saddam Part Two: The Republic of Terror |
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Sunday, 28 September 2008 14:49 |
Part B: The Vice Chairman
Today’s update is the second part of the second section of my book on saddam, it is a very long piece compared to the previous ones, but I did not want to play with it. This is one of the most important parts of the book so it is going in its entirety, anyone who is bored with it can simply sign out and go to the New York Times, CNN or any of the other decent and greatly informing giants. The following is the second part of the second section of my book; this one is entitled the vice chairman of the republic of terror.
SADDAM has learned a very good lesson from the first. Ba’athist experiment with government, he was with the success of the new one without any doubt the real and unchallenged power he now had in his hands the 3 most important bureaus of the party: The military, the financial and the intelligence arms. Gone were the days when he was relegated to the insignificant bureau the one which deals with the affairs of farmers and agriculture, but he also knew that he lacked the knowledge and experience needed to run a country like Iraq with its long history of instability and repeated bloody revolutions, so he decided to stay away from the limelight but not of real power so the government was organized around a politburo like body which was made up from the leadership of the party a 12 member Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). The colorless al-Bakr was chairman and Saddam acquired the vice chairmanship, for the day to day administration of the country a hodge podge group of insignificant personalities were made members of a cabinet with the al-Bakr as its premier. Al-Bakr was also made the president of the country and the commander in chief of the armed forces, all of these in addition to his party role as secretary general of the regional leadership of the Ba’ath party quite an impressive collection of prizes to some one who has failed a very simple English language examination when he was being considered as a candidate to a military school after serving for few years as a primary school teacher during the mid forties, all this was a very cleverly perpetrated hoax on the people and to a great extent on the world al-Bakr was in spite of all these titles no more than a facade and a front. The real power was invested in Saddam which he was now exercising from behind the scenes through the 3 important arms of the party plus Haneen. In Arabic the world Haneen means nostalgia but this was no nostalgia it was and remained always an extra secret intelligence unit which was organized and was always controlled by him, it was made up of some of his most intimate and trusted relatives and advisers and it remained very small but very brutal and effective in his hands, a very useful instrument in his machinations and in the service of his intrigues and conspiracies.
SADDAM was a narcist and an extremely suspicious creature he never believed truly in anybody including his own sons the only one he believed in only was Saddam. And during his last years in power no one including his sons, his brothers and his nearest relatives or the highest ranking members of his political and military establishment and even very prominent foreign emissaries or heads of state would reach his innermost sanctums before he or she would be subjected to a most rigorous and a humiliating body search including sometimes a PR. Saddam was an absolute paranoid and to escape the fears and to guard against unforeseen surprises and conspiracies he embarked on a very active program of building what in the end was a truly monstrous security apparatus which was made up of at least a dozen different organizations which totaled during its heydays hundreds of thousands of members.
OFFICIALLY and to the unsuspecting or probably more accurately the naïve or in some cases accomplices in the outside world Saddam was the vice chairman of the RCC but he was in all respects and at age 31 the actual number one with all the threads of real power in his own hands but as we have already mentioned he was concerned in the beginning primarily with the job of securing his rule and establishing his unchallenged authority, he accepted very willingly the titles of al-Bakr the most he sometimes did was talking about a partnership with the old man with him as the humble number two. The other real reason why he continued to claim total allegiance to the al-Bakr leadership was that he was at that the number two title freed him from administrative work and government routine because he was during those early days very busy as we have just mentioned on the solidification of the bases of the regime and the building of his security monster the failure of the 1st experiment was still a nagging worry about the long term prospects of the survival of his regime, and to make these worries even more acute there was after only a few months an attempted coup by one of his most trusted comrades a man who was now in charge of internal security of the whole country a coup during which was killed few important party members and officers but in the end he was able to crush the attempt with the help of the president of one of the old Soviet Union puppets. The president of one of its satellites, this was followed by a systematic scheme of elimination of the remnants of the old party leaders an prominent members and few civilians who have participated in the behind the scenes arrangements for the 17th July revolution a lot of people were taken care and sent to their creator by carefully engineered traffic accidents, very carefully timed cardiac arrests and plain murders in clear day light. The other devilish plan which was perpetrated on the poor people was a very well organized scheme aimed at creating a state of terror which in fact reached in the end such a degree the poor people were practically paralyzed and incapable of presenting any resistance or opposition to the regime not to mention the chances of overthrowing it. The republic of fear has arrived, was in control and terror was in full gear, one of the most evil experiments perpetrated on the poor people was the incredible events during the days of what became known as “Abu Tubar”. Every member of a three well known families Was found over the period of few weeks very badly mutilated beheaded with the heads placed in a deep plate the kind people put fruits in, the murders followed each other with two to three weeks in between, during the time they lasted and when they stopped the community was left in such state of sheer terror and fright you could easily grasp their fear in your own hands, and then the murders suddenly stopped and a poor, small very visibly frightened man was shown on television and accused of being responsible for the murders and was hanged. The Tubar is a very heavy cutting instrument a kind of a very dangerous machete and as large as the accused man, no one was convinced that the incriminated creature could have performed those ugly murders many believe that the killer was Saddam Hussein himself but these minor violations of human rights were not a big problem and they never stopped him because they gradually guaranteed his total grip on power and his control of major events and allowed him to force his views and opinions over some major political and diplomatic activities inside and outside the country, but to perpetuate the charade he was still calling himself the vice chairman and still in many cases giving the credit to the nominal number one, all of which was part of the very subtle and carefully prepared program of the creation of a hero.
ONE of the most important aspects of government in which Saddam involved himself in and very energetically was the question of oil, he knew that his plans would have to be backed by money and that is why he made sure he would be in charge of the financial aspects of the regime and gave himself the responsibility for the financial bureau of the party.
OIL is money and power and it would be impossible to fully understand the modern world without understanding the history of oil, the story of oil is a fascinating story, a magnificent epic story, a compelling story that clarifies the contemporary world situation, a situation which will never be properly understood without understanding the politics of oil it is one of the most important factors which makes the world go around, oil is still central to the security, prosperity and the very nature of the civilized world and especially the western civilization. In fact modern society has become a hydrocarbon society and modern man is a hydrocarbon man. This story is a chronicle of epic events that has touched on all our lives and it mingles with the lives of people like Rockefeller, Churchill, George Bush, Henry Kissinger, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and no one seems to have understood the oil lesson and its significance and the power it can provide than Saddam Hussein.
THE story of Iraqi oil started with another adventurer, an Armenian by the name Gulbenkian, Calouste Gulbenkian was born in a family which has made a fortune from importing kerosene to the Turkish emperor, the family lived in Constantinople, the boy was a loner and there was to be no great love lost between him and the rest of humanity, the young Calouste often spent his after school hours in the bazaar listening to deals being made sometimes making small ones himself imbibing the arts of oriental negotiations, he had a very important quality, he was totally and completely arrogant and self oriented. The man was able when he was still very young in the year 1907 to acquire with a relentless tenacity a concession for the exploration of oil from the Turkish ruler in what was at that time known as Mesopotamia which is current day Iraq, and was able to establish with the British and Germans what was called the Turkish petroleum company, but with the end of the of the 1st world war and the defeat of Germany and the dismemberment of the Turkish empire Iraq fell under the occupation of the British and the oil company was renamed the Iraqi petroleum company with its shares divided between the British, the French and the Americans as the main shareholders 5% of which were left to the Armenian boy for his rights in the early concession and from then on Gulbenkian became known as Mr. five percent and when from there to make an astonishingly big fortune, and from then on the IPC became one of the biggest jewels in the British crown and a source of great financial and political influence. But it was never fair or honest in its treatment and dealings with the Iraqi people from were it was pumping out huge amounts of crude from the unbelievably large fields in Kirkuk and paying the rulers peanuts for it which the rulers used for their own purposes and on personal needs, and this situation continued until the very early fifties when slightly more revenues were coming into the country. But with the very dramatic political and geo-strategic changes which were engulfing the middle east a bit later when the whole map of the middle east was so dramatically changing with the emergence of new leaders who were having a much better appetite for arms and other and other personal projects and greater designs which required more and more money they started to exert increasing pressures on the oil companies which were operating inside their borders which included various kinds of harassment especially through the work forces involved in the various stages of the industry from digging to exporting. The IPC began to feel the crunch with the first major political change in Iraq the events of July 14 in 1958, to make things even more difficult to the western world and the emergence of new players in the oil industry in the Arab world which increased the available oil on the markets the appetite for oil in the west was increasing even more dramatically thus increasing their reliance on middle eastern and Arab oil the companies continued to insist on the direct control of the industry backed by their own governments because of the very delicate and critical importance of oil as far as their motherlands were concerned. And no where these realities more evident than was the case in Iraq, when Saddam appeared on the scene in 1968 he knew that one of the most important factors which are going to influence his programs and designs for the building of his own Reich would be money and he immediately started to create difficulties to the companies by using the workforce and other ingenious methods from the world of the republic of terror so finally a very clever deal was struck between the companies operating in Iraq and our man whereby the companies agreed to leave their inside activities to the regime which would be responsible for them and receive the crude at the outlets the deal was a masterful piece of show business which was announced to the people as a very strong challenge to the oppressors and a return of the oil wealth to its rightful owners the people and more and more theatre. The deal was proclaimed on June 1st 1972, again by the colorless al-Bakr with Saddam still behind the scene orchestrating the show and to the end and to the last days of his rule the people never truly benefited from its oil nothing significant reached them from the huge revenues which were pouring into the country, the money was spent on frequent futile wars on the building of fabulous palaces and mansions, huge chunks were being regularly embezzled outside the country into secret accounts in major banks and during the very last years the oil was treated by him and his thugs as a personal asset and was smuggled outside the country in spite of the un sanctions under the noses and frequently the collaboration of its officers and those of its officials who were responsible for the enforcement of the sanctions.
ANOTHER very important problem he engaged himself in was the “Kurdish Problem”. The Kurds are the second largest ethnic minority in Iraq, they are non-Arabs of Indo-European descent they are spread across four middle eastern states in south east Turkey north west Iran and north east Iraq in a triangle which have the majority with a small number of them in north west Syria they represent about 15-20 % of size of Iraq and about 4-5 millions in there with a total number of the Kurds in those four places of about twenty millions but these figures are probably only a bit better than guesswork, all the four counties the Kurds had the honor to share their lands with them never bothered with a proper census, all the four feel that it is in their best interests to minimize the numbers.
THE Iraqi Kurds have always been very vocal in expressing their national aspirations and several times during the past decades before the second world war had revolted against the central authorities but they were never able to achieve their cherished dream of autonomy and self rule, the Kurdish problem became even more difficult to deal with after the 2nd world war. The Kurdish national movement came into sharp conflict with the rising tide of pan Arabism, the Kurds and at least a substantial majority of them did not ask for separation or independence from their countries they aspired to an autonomy within Iraq which would allow them to manage their local affairs and in their own language, the post war years witnessed the emergence of a most formidable Kurdish leader a vigilant tribal head who championed the cause of autonomy Mullah Mustafa Barazani, he was involved in a very bold attempt by the Iranian Kurds at establishing self rule in Iran which was called the Mahabad republic which was declared in a small territory in the most north western part of the country but the attempt was short lived and was quickly crushed and Barzani with a small band of his followers was forced to leave to the Soviet Union in 1947 through a very dangerous route were he stayed there unable to return to Iraq until the events of the 14th July revolution. The fall off the monarchy and the emergence of Kassim, when he was able to return were he was received victoriously by his people and fairly warmly by the new regime and its leader, which was followed by serious and protracted talks during which Barzani formally asked for autonomy, Kassim in the beginning with the euphoria of the early days of the revolution and the victory over the monarchy was forthcoming and made some vague promises but in the end he reneged and failed to honor his commitments, he has underestimated the depth of the Kurdish aspirations which started a rift between the two leaders a rift which gradually deepened and in 1961 flared into actual war, the war lasted more than two years and left a large number of Iraqi casualties which was in fact one of the most important reasons which led to the fall of Kassim and his regime, this was followed by the abortive Ba’athist experiment during which there was a short lull and a half hearted attempt at a negotiated settlement of the issue but the Ba’athists never negotiated in good faith and the Kurds never forget the deception that was incurred on them when during the negotiations in Baghdad there representatives were arrested and a renewed military offensive was launched against them again. The first Ba’athist experiment has lasted only few months and was followed by the brothers Aref who recognized the futility of the war and with the increasing disillusionment of Barzani with the promises of help from the soviet union and the then Shah of Iran a truce came about between Barzani and the Aref regime a truce which lasted until the fall down of the that regime and the second arrival of the Ba’athists under the leadership of Saddam when hostilities were renewed, but very early on during the next decade Saddam has come to understand that after more than eight years of fighting with the Kurds and thousands of deaths it was futile and began to insist on the need to make peace with the Kurds but this was again never a genuine desire it was part of his scheme of solidifying the regime and making sure it survives so he forced his army to swallow its pride in a recognition of Kurdish autonomy which was declared very theatrically in the now famous the 11th of march 1970 declaration.
SADDAM has guaranteed the Kurdish people self rule and inside a fully autonomous region with promises of help in improving the social and economic conditions in the Kurdish area a self rule to be exercised by a local administrative authority adequate guarantees were provided to recognize Kurdish language as officially co-equal with Arabic and to promote Kurdish culture and traditions this program is reputed to have been the brainchild of one the new wave of Kurdish leaders intellectuals who were led by Jalal Talabani. Saddam never meant to honor his commitments and promises and mullah Mustapha knew that it was no more than a tactical in a continuing program of conspiracies and deceits so he rejected it and war erupted again but it was a stalemate the Russians and the Shah did not on their parts honor their commitments to either side the Kurds were forced to retreat to the mountains bordering turkey and Iran because of the Iranians’ failure to provide them with the help they have promised earlier and the Iraqis were seeing their supplies which came mainly from the soviet union being gradually depleted because the Russians claimed that they were neutral in the Kurdish-sad dam war the Iraqi situation was becoming increasingly critical and threatening the very survival of Saddam’s regime so he had to swallow the bitter pill and force his armed forces to accept a humiliating compromise, the treaty he signed with Shah under the auspices of the then president of Algeria Houari Boumediene in 1975. At the very moment he was swallowing the sour 1975 agreement he started his plans to revenge his humiliation at the hands of both the Kurds and the Shah but by the time he was able to exercise his revenge the Shah of Iran has already been toppled and his wrath fell on his successors but the Kurds remained in his eye sight and they were destined to suffer even greater atrocities in the near future but that is coming soon.
THE other major piece of propaganda was his convening of the Arab summit in Baghdad in response to the Egyptian president’s Anwar Sadat’s gestures towards Israel which culminated in the end with his signing of the piece treaty with the Jewish state after his dramatic visit to Jerusalem and his much publicized address to the Knesset and his meetings in camp David with the then Israeli prime minister begin under the auspices of president carter. S ad at has been very disappointed and frustrated with the attitudes of his Arab brethren that in spite of a very long awaited move against Israel his last attempt at forcing Israel into surrender the October 1973 war has turned into a major fiasco not the least because of the failure of his cousins to honor their promises of help and money which never arrived, after a long wait and very prolonged preparations he finally attacked on one of Israelis most sacred days the Yom Kippur, which was a real surprise and caught Israel almost napping a surprise which allowed the Egyptians to achieve some very dramatic successes in the beginning including the overrunning of the so called Bar Lev line on the eastern edge of the Suez canal which was often claimed by the Israelis to be an impregnable defense line this was followed by the liberation of some of the lands in western Sinai which were occupied during the 6th day war in 1967, these events presented the Israeli government and the people of Israel with a very shocking experience but they were able within few days to overcome the shock and were able to stop the advance of the Egyptians and within few more days were able to reverse the tide and succeeded in encircling one of the most important Egyptian armies inside the desert and threaten it with complete annihilation and also advanced inside Egyptian territory after themselves crossing the other side of Suez and were now in a position to threaten the Egyptian capital itself, there were also during this war some minor activities on the Syrian front but the Syrians were even in a worse dilemma, the Israeli artillery were focused on their own capital which was within only few miles distance and in their immediate range, the Iraqis moved some of their own forces but they appeared in the theater of operations long after a cease fire was in place and Anwar as-Sadat was begging for the relief of his encircled army, with the promised help of his brethren failing to arrive in spite of the desperate Egyptian situation, they were very busy making very loud voices and threatening serious punishments to Israel’s allies including a half hearted oil embargo which had absolutely no effect on the major events, enter Dr Kissinger whose efforts and very active shuttle diplomacy succeeded into bringing the two adversaries face to face which resulted in many bilateral meetings at various governmental levels and finally resulted in signing the camp David accords and then the formal recognition by Sadat of the state of Israel and the signing of the peace treaty, the Jerusalem visit of Sadat and the recognition of the state of Israel and the signing of a peace treaty wither was a very hard pill for the Arabs to swallow, Israel was the number one enemy and they have only very recently been talking about throwing the Jews into the see the Arabs’ sentiments were reaching a boiling point a situation in which our man saw a great propaganda opportunity enabling him to achieve a good deal of recognition and respect, so he convened a summit in Baghdad to which almost all of the Arab leaders their sheikhs their emirs their presidents and kings duly arrived to share in a great deal of sloganeering and talking but nothing serious or effective Sadat was in a very ugly mood and even refused to meet with a high level delegation from the summit and even refused to accept its letter from its chairman who was non other than the colorless al-Bakr the president of Iraq who was no more than a front to his vice chairman, Sadat refused to budge and started to treat his cousins with increasing degrees of disrespect and disregard he has regained some of the lands Egypt has lost during the 6 days war there was now an Egyptian ambassador in the Israeli capital and an Israeli one in Cairo which was a sour in the Arab eyes but all of this was of no concern to Saddam what mattered to him was the propaganda victory and the recognition he has gained in the Arabs’ eyes by his schemes and machinations. The other problem with which he involved himself and very actively was the question of the Iran Iraq relationships, Iran and Iraq had a very long history which goes many to many centuries in the past, these relationships were not always very congenial or peaceful, and this has left a lot of strain over even their most recent ones.
DURING the years of the 2nd world war and those that followed its end both were occupied by the British, during the early forties both have +acquired a strategic significance to the British the British military were driven in a very short time from most of north Africa under the onslaught of field marshal Rome and his African corps and were forced to retreat to the Egyptian border were they were hurriedly preparing a last minute defense of Egypt in a desperate attempt to stop the Germans, the British forces were exhausted and demoralized and the German’s advance was threatening east Africa and the middle east with its vast oil resources a commodity the Germans were having increasing difficulties in acquiring a prize that would have been a great boost to their war efforts now that their supplies of it were becoming increasingly scarce a situation which was seriously threatening their military campaigns added to their failure to secure the oil riches of the Caucasus because of the military stalemate on the Russian front.
THE British were organizing their defenses at a point in the northwest of Egypt around a small outpost at the border called al-Alamein and were preparing for the worst by deploying other forces in Palestine Iraq and the gulf. The British were miraculously saved at the now famous al-Alamein battle under the command of their brilliant Montgomery who with a good deal of help from the Americans, a help which included a good number of the most recent hardware the Sherman tanks and after a very effective retraining and careful preparation was able to reverse the tide and was chasing the Germans over the north African coast until they were driven out of all of north Africa a bit later which opened the way to the later military successes of the allies which culminated later in the complete defeat of the Germans and the end of Hitler and his 3rd Reich, the victory at al-Alamein was a turning point and in the words of Churchill we never had a victory before it we never had a defeat after it Egypt was saved and the great riches of the middle east including the precious oil did not fall into the German hands, they were denied the prize. The British left their forces in their a bit longer, but they finally left in 1946 and still retained a great deal of influence through the regimes they have created in those countries, in Iran they forced the abdication of its ruler Reza Shah Pahlavi who has spent the war years in exile outside his country in favor of his young son Mohamed Reza Pahlavi and have consolidated their control of Iraq after the death of its second king ghazi who has died in a car accident most probably engineered by the British themselves.
THE relationships between these two neighbors were on the average during this period fairly reasonable and apart from some occasional hiccups and minor skirmishes here and there everything was quiet. This has been to a great extent the result of the British influence over the two neighbors, the British dependence on the middle eastern oil has become by now almost total and extremely critical a very important factor in Britain’s oil equation was that their fleet has been by now changed into oil operated, they were exerting very effective and subtle pressure on both sides, the young Shah had his first babtizement in fire when a group of ultra nationalists and communists succeeded in throwing him outside his country nationalized the oil industry under the fiery prime minister Mossier, but he was saved by the Americans, a very successful coup was engineered by the CIA [Roosevelt] and he returned to his throne after a short exile, the great help of the Americans and the now rapidly deteriorating power of the British both at home and abroad [ they have won the war but they have lost their economic and diplomatic muscle] for these very practical reasons the Shah started to shift his allegiance to the Americans but in spite of all that his relations with the Iraqis remained good, they were both monarchies and Iraq houses some of the most sacred shrines of the Shiites, to which hundreds of thousands of Iranians piligrimed every year, these relationships received a tremendous jolt on July 14 1958 when Kassim succeeded in throwing out the Iraqi monarchy the brutality and atrocious events which has happened and the hysteria and the frenzy of the Iraqi mobs and the fact that the coup was administered by young middle class army officers sent very many signals and made the Shah very nervous and worried, but when the major western governments recognized the new regime he followed suit in two weeks time but the relations were never the same again to make things even worse the new Iraqi regime was assuming increasingly anti western policies and attitudes and with the fall of Kassim almost totally into the hands of the communists things started to become more and more ugly, and with the quarrel between Kassim and the Kurds boiling he put himself into the Kurdish camp and started to give them support against the central authority and from then the two countries were again at loggerheads, there were other serious bones of contention, the differences over the borders and the Shatt al-Arab.
EVEN before the 14th July revolution in Iraq the Shah firmly believed that only the United States could stand in the face of the Soviet Union’s ambitions in the Gulf and its cherished dream of a warm water port so he was always encouraging the Americans to take a more active role in the Gulf. With the major agreement between the Soviets and the new regime in Baghdad which he regarded as dictatorial and unworthy of trust he sought to undermine and hoping to replace with something more acceptable so the relations with Kassim were never good at the best of times now that the Shah was encouraging and in fact helping the Kurds in their longstanding conflict with the central government which had eased for a short time after the 14th July events but was now erupting again, the other bone of contention between the two was the historic dispute over the waters of Shatt al-Arab.
DURING the Aref regime which followed the fall of Kassim the relations were considerably reduced because they appeared anti communists no major issues were raised by the two Aref brothers what problems arose were dealt with by negotiations. The rise of the Ba’athists to power who advocated a blend of pan Arab ideas and socialism was very unwelcome to the Shah, they advocated non-aligned foreign policy which in the Shah’s eyes only beneficial to the soviet union but he only supposed that they will also be short lived, but he was disappointed and when they failed to disappear he started to take things in his own hands and one of his attempts was helping former officers try overthrow the regime which failed and only helped poison the relations between the two neighbors and remained so until the Algiers agreement in 1975.
THE political situation during the early seventies was becoming increasingly confused and complicated the Arab Israeli war of 1967 the British preparing to exit from there and the growing interest of the Americans in the area and the internal turmoil in the Arab world following the 6 days war were creating new realities, enter Saddam Hussein.
THE Shah never trusted the Ba’athists, he was appalled by their chaotic rule and clumsiness and the atrocities of their first short lived revolution and he believed that the new one will also be short lived but he was evidently greatly mistaken, so when it did not come to the end he expected to tried to encourage the process by engineering a coup against them which failed miserably something which did not augur well for future dealings so he concentrated his efforts on providing the Kurds with more and more help in their renewed struggle with the central authority and Saddam has never forgotten his humiliating 1975 agreement so he was very actively preparing for his revenge. But by the time he was ready destiny struck Again and the Shah was already out of the scene he has been toppled after a very dictatorial and assertive rule and in spite of a very strong support by the Americans and what has become the 3rd most important army his internal policies guaranteed his terrible fate, he was toppled by a group of clergy under the leadership of ayatollah Khomeini which forced him to flee his country no one would grant him refuge until he was granted sanctuary by Sadat of Egypt were he lived there and died from a blood malignancy after one year.
DURING the last few years of the Shah’s rule in Iran the country was in an absolute turmoil, the economic situation was terrible there was massive poverty. The huge oil revenues were spent on very expensive military hardware and the rest spent on his personal dreams and projects including a fairy tale extravaganza in the memory of the 1000 year anniversary of the peacock throne were millions were spent on truly grandiose celebrations in the old city Persipolis including a food which was brought daily from one of the most famous restaurants in France Paris’ Maxim and those of his family a lot was embezzled outside the country when millions of Iranians were dying from poor health and malnutrition. These difficulties and problems in spite of some last minute attempts at reversing this sad trend were being very cleverly exploited and encouraged by an old shi’ite cleric who has been banished by the Shah for his political activities to the Iraqi city of Al-Najaf from were he was continuing his struggle. One of the things the Shah has insisted upon in the Algiers accord with Saddam was the expulsion of the old man from Al-Najaf a condition which in Saddam’s hurry to clinch the deal has accepted and the old man was in a very short time kicked out were he was granted refuge in France which proved to be a god sent opportunity because from there he was in a much better position to continue his fight it was much easier from there to maintain his contact with is followers utilizing the much better communications facilities when he was finally able in early 1979 to crush the Shah’s regime and sending him wandering across the globe with him returning to his country to a truly victorious return, a dazzling reception with hundreds of thousands of Iranians sharing in the celebrations in a wave of incredible religious sentiment. Khomeini was now the absolute authority on the pinnacle of now became the Iranian Islamic republic he was now the unchallenged leader but he never forgot the insult he has received at the hands of Saddam, his humiliating deportation from Iraq a few years earlier.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Sunday September 28, 2008
Berkley/Michigan
Email:
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