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Thursday, 11 December 2008 19:33 |
Part One; The Beginning of the End
This new update is few pages from the first part of the final section which is entitled “the fall” of MY book on Saddam, the first part of this section which is called the beginning of the end is very long and I was worried that installing it in one piece would be too much to digest in one sitting and very boring , so I decided to divide it into several pieces, the first of which is following, it describes Saddam’s invasion and occupying Kuwait and the events which led to it. This will be followed by the other debacles and miscalculations of Saddam which ultimately led to his fall. If you get bored or if you think that what I am talking about is some nonsense sign out and go to CNN.
The Beginning of the End
AND then every thing suddenly changed. His foreign minister arrived in Washington shortly after the cease fire on the 8th of September to meet the then U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, his master has survived reasonably intact after an eight catastrophic years which has not ended with a clear winner from amongst the combatants themselves, the real winner was the U.S. itself. The Islamic regime in Tehran which has humiliated the Americans in the taking of their embassy staff hostage and the appalling failure of their rescue mission which has been ordered by president Carter which has exposed very serious shortcomings in America’s military preparedness in her diplomacy and her political leadership and has so aggressively threatened America’s interests in the gulf and the stability of her allies in the region, this regime has emerged after the end of the war bloodied and extremely weakened, the threats it has posed after the fall of the shah greatly minimized, it was now plunged in a sea of very serious troubles, its economy in tatters, huge chunks of its territory were devastated and whole cities have been ruined all of that has happened as a result of the war which was waged against them by Saddam on behalf of the U.S. The foreign minister was expecting a very special reception in recognition of the services his master has rendered to the Americans. Her humiliation has been avenged and her interests in the gulf more secure and her allies much less threatened, but he was to have a very unpleasant surprise, he was kept waiting for his appointment for more than an hour and when he was finally received by the secretary, Mr. Shultz was more than his usually cautious and unsmiling self, the meeting was very frigid, the foreign minister was informed when he was waiting outside that the secretary himself has made a very strong statement condemning the latest Iraqi use of chemical weapons against the Kurds two weeks earlier , to add salt to the insult the U.S. senate has voted a day earlier to impose sanctions against the regime although they were not applied immediately. All of this pointed very clearly to a dramatic and a very real change in America’s attitude towards Saddam, America’s attitude towards Baghdad was now linked to a new perception of Iraq’s post war position in the middle east and from Saddam’s naked attempts to inherit the old shah’s role of the strong man of the middle east and the bully of the gulf, from this point onwards the two countries were unmistakably on a collision course which gradually escalated into a very serious confrontation which started with the Bahzoft affair.
THERE was at that time a huge military industry establishment near Hilla 70miles south of Baghdad which was involved in chemical weapons production and possibly also work on nuclear warheads, there has been very recently a huge explosion there were at least 700 people were known to have perished, but as usual every thing was hushed up and the people were told absolutely nothing about what has happened, enter Bahzoft.
THE story of Bahzoft is another bizarre incident in the long bloody history of Saddam Hussein and his regime, an incident still shrouded in a great deal of secrecy, very little is known about what really happened in spite of the passage of about 15 years now since it happened. Bahzoft was a young Iranian in his late twenties who has left his country after the Khomeini take over, he has landed in England as a refugee and has settled in a small town near the university city Oxford, he has enrolled in a technical college there and was living with an English family who described him as a nice boy a bit naïve but with a reputation for lavish living which he was able to afford in the beginning, his father who was a middle ranking executive in the Iranian oil company was sending him enough money, but with the mounting economic difficulties in his own country as result of the war with Iraq the money began to arrive less frequently and they finally dried. So he began to search for other sources, he is said to have offered his services to the British intelligence and to the BBC he is also known to have engaged in some shady and lawful practices like attempting a petty robbery of a local bank using a weapon which proved later on to have been a toy, later on he was able to find himself a job with one of London’s major newspapers, the Observer as a reporter and in that capacity he was able to visit Iraq several times during the war and report from there without any trouble in fact his nationality and the fact that he was an opponent of the Islamic regime were a great help in his dealings with the Iraqis, now he wanted to go to Hilla and investigate the recent explosion at the military industry site, but this time he was not given the required permission, but that did not dissuade him and went ahead with his own plan to go there, he was able to persuade a middle aged British nurse who was working at that time in a Baghdad hospital run by an Irish group to accompany him to Hilla using one of the hospital’s cars and when he reached there he was able to take some photographs and few samples from the sand from nearby the site, but when he was leaving the place he was intercepted by the security agents he was arrested with his friend, his photographic material and the sand samples were taken away, he was searched and was found to have in his address book the name of a well known Israeli intelligence agent, he was carrying British travel documents but not a proper British passport, he was accused of being an Israeli spy, he was tried and sentenced to death he had always insisted during his ordeal that he was innocent but he was hanged. The British nurse was given a 15 years sentence but she was acquitted few months later the result of the efforts of the Zambian president Kaunda who had very good relations with Saddam and in fact has named of the most important streets in his capital Baghdad in honor of his friendship with Saddam. Kaunda was interfering with Saddam on her behalf under pressure from a British Millionaire Tony [Tiny] Roland who had massive investments in the African state and owned the Observer. The British government gave the poor Bazoft very little help during his capture and trial but hell broke after his hanging.
THE British prime minister Margaret Thatcher accused Saddam Hussein of a barbaric act deeply repugnant to all civilized people, this was taken by Saddam and coming from a woman for that matter as a personal insult to his 6.000 years history of civilization, he was now regarding the lady as the real influence behind the conspiracy he said was against him and Mrs. Thatcher remained for a very long time even after leaving 10 downing street in November one of his most hated enemies, the American position paralleled that of the British all of which was making him more belligerent and confrontational, he has come out of the last war severely weakened politically and economically but was still in possession of a formidable military machine, he was now dreaming of becoming a regional super power by adopting shortcuts to military superiority, so in spite of his dire financial state he was engaging in greater efforts at getting better and longer range missiles than what was already under his disposal, he was working more aggressively on a greater variety of chemical weapons including the binary a new invention which he said could wipe half of Israel after one attack and biological weapons and on nuclear warheads also on some crazy ventures like the super gun, a piece of artillery which was said because of its very long barrel to capable of reaching very distant target, the super gun was the brainchild of Gerald bull a Canadian who is said to have suggested his weapon to Hitler but apparently the Fuhrer was not impressed by the idea like Saddam.
ALL these efforts and plans were being continually opposed and frustrated by the Americans and the British but he was on the other hand greatly encouraged by some of his Arab brothers and some others in the Moslem world who were suggesting that Saddam was being punished now because he dared raise his head and that the west does not want an Arab or a Moslem country to be strong and that they will do everything to stop that, a position which appealed to his mentality and encouraged him to persist in these efforts and increased his belligerency when his opponents were trying their best to frustrate them and preventing him from acquiring the advanced technology he very strongly vied for. Super gun components were intercepted on their way to Baghdad and confiscated, 40 highly specialized capacitors, high voltage electrical triggers which are used to detonate nuclear devices were found when during a joint operation by British and American customs services a group of Iraqis were trapped trying to smuggle them to their country. Dr Bull was assassinated in Brussels and the Egyptian physicist who was participating in the nuclear program was found dead in his room in a Paris hotel during a holiday there. Saddam was persisting in these efforts in spite of his increasing financial difficulties a good deal of which was the result of a very severe decline in the price of oil which is his first source of income, a sharp reduction in Iraq’s oil revenues which he blamed on the Kuwaitis whom he accused of dumping large amounts of oil much more than their Opec quota a good deal of which he said the Kuwaitis were pumping out of the Rumaila field which he said belonged to him, to complicate matters the Kuwaitis were now asking for the money he owed them from the days of the war with Iran, very slowly the Kuwaitis were becoming the focus of much of his anger.
SO in a desperate attempt to convince the other Arabs of the seriousness of his grievances and to try and help with the Kuwaitis and the Saudis he invited all the Arab heads of state to a meeting in Baghdad ostensibly to protest the large scale Jewish emigration form the soviet union but the real aim was to pressure Kuwait, needless to say the summit failed to resolve the crisis, he was in spite of his very serious situation very demanding and intimidating and declaring hat the Kuwaitis and the others were refusing to help because of American pressure, his agents were constantly reminding them that he was the power which ha protected them from the dangers they were facing from the Khomeini’s Iran. The failure of the summit to find a way out of the crisis must have been the last straw he was convinced from then on that the only method of dealing with the crisis was the use of force. So in June 1990 his RCC openly demanded that Kuwait should pay for the oil they have been illegally pumping out of his Rumaila oil fields in the area bordering the emirate, the Kuwaitis refused very stubbornly and undiplomatically, in fact the Kuwaitis were now rejecting all his demands with such a disregard and disdain which was making more furious and forced him to the raise the temperature few degrees more when he declared during a television address on the anniversary of the 17th July revolution that it is better to be dead than to lose the means of earning a living, he accused Kuwait and the UAE in actively participating in a plot against him which was perpetrated by the Zionists and the Imperialists and insisted that he was not prepared to put up with the situation any longer, he then made the threat which formed the basis for his invasion of his neighbor 16 days later;
If words do not give sufficient protection , then we will have no option but to take effective action to put things right and ensure that our rights are restored.
KUWAIT has become THE enemy, His speech on that day was directed primarily at the Kuwaitis, and he has already made up his mind on the method of dealing with his trouble them, force, but it is often said that he was at that time contemplating the occupation of the Rumaila oil fields or at worst only the northern territories of Kuwait, but these are no more than the opinions of some of the people who have talked or written about the crisis, it is impossible to imagine what was on his mind on those fateful days, but the Kuwaitis were becoming themselves even more intransigent and in a letter to the secretary general of the Arab league they said;
The sons of Kuwait in good times and bad are men of principle and integrity; they will not yield to threats or extortions under any circumstances.
ON the 21ist of July the Americans were detecting increasing movements of Iraqi troops towards the Kuwaiti border, their satellite photography was showing that at least 20.000 men have been moved there and that more were coming but Saddam Hussein has assured the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak that he was not going to use military force until after all diplomatic options have been exhausted, so there was the meeting between Miss April Glaspie the American ambassador in Baghdad and Saddam.
THE Glaspie-Saddam meeting has become part of the tittle-tattle of the Kuwaiti crisis, there are so many versions of it, no one knows what has actually happened during that historical encounter, who said what and how it affected the subsequent events in spite of the fact that it is now more than 15 years since it has taken place. What is known is that the lady ambassador a 48 year career diplomat, with a wide knowledge of Arab affairs who speaks the language was summoned on the 25th of July to the presidential palace for a meeting with Saddam, she was posted in Baghdad two years ago and has met him alone only once before, he used to see foreign diplomats in groups. Saddam was receiving conflicting signals from Washington, some officials were stating that the U.S. has no commitments to defend Kuwait on the other hand it was announced the day before that the U.S. was carrying a joint military exercise with the UAE soon. During the meeting the lady was subjected to an hour and a half harangue by the president, he was complaining about important officials in the state department and the intelligence community who were plotting against him, and he left a good deal of time to complaints about the American media whom he said were propagating lies and threats against him and participating in the plot against him to undermine his position, weaken him and trying to depose him. The ambassador we have been told that she has told him that the U.S. admires your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country, I know you need funds, we understand that you should have the opportunity for rebuilding your country and then she is supposed to have said the words which were subsequently used by her critics as the proof of her failure to have communicated the exact position of the U.S. and that she was not firm enough with him and that she has not warned him strongly enough of the consequences of his contemplated adventure and that what she has told him was the encouragement he needed to go ahead with his adventure;
We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait, we hope that you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via the secretary general of the Arab league or the Egyptian president, all we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.
WHEN she has finished Saddam we are told again that he was asked to talk to the Egyptian president on the phone in an adjoining room, the talk with Mubarak lasted about half an hour, he returned to his meeting with the ambassador and said that the problem has been solved and that he has told the Egyptian that he is certainly not going to invade and that it was agreed that the two sides to the conflict, him and the Kuwaitis are going to meet in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia under the auspices of king Fahd to put the final touches on a final agreement to this unfortunate disagreement. The above mentioned story was leaked by the Iraqis few weeks later what is evidently a very well doctored transcript a very unusual step by the usually very secretive regime which failed to mention the cardinal point, his promise to the Egyptian president that he definitely not going to invade.
MISS Glaspie left to the U.S. a little bit later supposedly for her summer holiday, when she was back in her country she was relegated to a minor office in the State Dept., was prevented from seeing the media or giving interviews except for a single one with the New York Times late in 1991, 8 months later she was asked to give evidence to the U.S. House of Representative’s foreign affairs sub-committee on Europe and the middle east, to the committee she emphasized very clearly in very clear and plain language that he was not going to attack Kuwait. She was almost forgotten but she surfaced few years later also in the Middle East with the Palestinian refugee relief efforts. A great deal more has been said about this meeting they are all incomplete including my own, this meeting was part of the behind the scenes maneuverings before the invasion the whole truth about it will probably remain buried for at least the near future.
THE meeting with the Kuwaitis which was arranged between Saddam and the Egyptian president when he was meeting the American ambassador was duly held in Jeddah/Saudi Arabia on the first of august, but it was doomed from the beginning, there were very ominous signs, the Iraqis were intimidating and making very excessive demands their delegation included no other than chemical Ali the “gasser” of Halabja whose inclusion was clearly meant as a direct threat and an unmistakable warning to the Kuwaitis, in fact the chemical was made governor general of Kuwait when it was officially annexed to Iraq few days after its occupation, was called the 19th province and the name of its capital was changed from Kuwait to Kadimah, the Kuwaiti crown prince has already received a call from Mrs. Thatcher exhorting to remain firm and not to yield to the Iraqi’s demands which were now running in the billions of dollars and were backed by a huge deployment of forces on their border, she has also told him that his country will be backed by the Americans and the British to the hilt if he did. The meeting was extremely tense and the atmosphere simply electrical Saddam has made up his mind about his next step invasion but not on its timing, during the debate between the two delegations which was very heated very intemperate and obnoxious language was used, the Kuwaiti crown prince is said to have shouted across the table telling the Iraqis;
If you are so short of money why not send your wives out to the streets to earn you the needed cash,
THIS was a very direct and an unmistakable reference to the old stories from Tikrit about Saddam’s mother and his own legitimacy, Saddam was wild with rage when he heard the story and gave the order then and there to invade he said the emir of Kuwait is not going to sleep in his palace tonight, that was during the early hours of the 2nd august 1990 and the military machine which was mobilized on the northern Kuwaiti border started rolling into the emirate.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Thursday December 11, 2008
Berkley, Michigan
Email:
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