During my visits in the mid-1980s, it was still unclear which side would win. Officially, the United States was neutral. But President Ronald Reagan had secretly decided that “secular” Iraq could not be permitted to lose to anti-American theocrats who, in 1979, had attacked the US Embassy in Tehran and held American diplomats hostage for more than a year. So even after the United States received evidence that Saddam was using poison gas and other chemical weapons against Iranian forces and, later, his own citizens, Reagan extended credits to Iraq. America would also give intelligence guidance to Iraq’s military to enhance the accuracy of its bombing raids and missile strikes. Once Saddam concluded that the United States would let him “get away with murder,” as one scholar put it, his use of chemical weapons increased.6
Throughout the eight-year war, however, Washington had quietly provided, or tried to provide, covert assistance to both Iraq and Iran, reflecting what was euphemistically known as a “realist” foreign policy.
On my seventh trip to Baghdad in March 1985, I saw firsthand what our cynical policy meant for the Iranians and the Iraqis. After landing in Baghdad late at night and checking into the Sheraton, I was just dozing off when a missile struck. Its high-pitched whoosh was followed by an ear-splitting boom. The blast shattered the sliding glass terrace door of my seventh-floor room overlooking the Tigris River.
I bolted upright in bed, moving my hands slowly across the sheets. There was no glass on the bed, but shards covered much of the floor near the window. Barefoot, I inched my way across the room toward the light switch. Nothing. The blast had knocked out the power.
I had come to Baghdad to investigate whether Iran had begun firing Libyan-supplied Scud-B missiles at Iraq in retaliation for Iraq’s relentless rocket attacks in the “war of the cities,” the latest escalation of the Iran-Iraq war, then in its fifth year. The missiles I was trying to find almost found me.
Flashlight in hand, my duffel bag strapped over one shoulder, and my purse dangling from the other, I inched my way down the unlit emergency stairwell to the hotel’s gaudy marble lobby. Its lights were still glowing brightly—a surreal scene, given the darkness and chaos above.
An Iraqi concierge, who only an hour earlier had been overly solicitous while checking me in, suddenly barked at me, “Where are you going?”
I was leaving the hotel, I told him as calmly as possible. My room had just been destroyed by a missile.
“You are not going anywhere,” he commanded.
Seeing him reach for the bulge under his ill-fitting hotel uniform jacket, I froze as he retreated behind the front desk. Handing me a sheet of paper listing over $1,000 in charges for the night and the week I had planned to spend there, he insisted that I pay my bill, in cash. Rattled but furious, I flung two $100 bills on the desk and left. As I bolted out of the hotel, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t shoot me.
While I walked to the home of a European diplomat, I thought about the Iraqi leader. In a region of brutal tyrants, Saddam stood out. The Godfather was his favorite film—a nugget that Laurie and I unearthed in researching our book. His role model was Joseph Stalin. “I like the way he governed his country,” Saddam had told a well-known Kurdish politician.7
Like Stalin, Saddam had institutionalized terror as an instrument of state policy. With more than 150,000 employees of his competing intelligence agencies watching citizens in a country of fourteen million people (the population would surge to thirty million by 2010), his reliance on arbitrary punishment and the promotion of the most obsequious had destroyed Iraq’s civil society and all centers of opposition. Individuals were subordinate to the whims of a state that—as noted by Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi writer and exile whom I had befriended—was synonymous with Saddam.
No one could escape his vile gaze. Thirty-foot-high portraits and smaller renditions of him—as soldier, peasant, teacher, and tribal elder—were everywhere. With his black hair and trademark mustache, his portrait graced the entrances of hotels, schools, public buildings, city squares, private offices, and even the dials of the gold wristwatches favored by the political elite. As Makiya wrote, the government had devoted an entire agency, the Very Special Projects Implementation Authority, to creating and maintaining such depictions of him.8
Iraqi women died for him, literally and figuratively, and men emulated his style of dress, his swagger, even the cut of his mustache. All mustaches in Iraq seemed to resemble his; I longed to see a goatee or a handlebar mustache. In the land where Sumerians had invented writing, discourse had been degraded to a single ubiquitous image.
All roads led to Saddam, the “leader-president,” “leader-struggler,” “standard-bearer,” “leader of all the Arabs,” “knight of the Arab nation,” “hero of national liberation,” “father-leader,” and my personal favorite title, the “daring and aggressive knight” (al-faris al-mighwar).”9 A scholar said that Saddam’s name was mentioned between thirty to fifty times an hour in a typical radio broadcast; his TV appearances often lasted several hours a day. Makiya argued that Saddam’s name and image were so ubiquitous that he had become the personification of what Iraqis perceived to be the “Iraqi” character.10
In Saddam’s Iraq, real and imagined critics had a disconcerting way of ending up dead, in jail, or simply disappearing. Saddam had used the war as a pretext for persecuting the two groups he feared most: the Iraqi Shiites, a majority, and the Kurds, the luckless minority in northern Iraq who spoke their own language, had their own distinct culture, and constituted 20 percent of the population.
During my assignment in Cairo in the mid-1980s and my visits to the region, I had managed to interview almost every Arab leader—but not Saddam. I kept a stack of fifty rejected faxed requests for meetings with him in a file in Cairo. Saddam rarely gave interviews to journalists, especially foreigners.
On another trip to Baghdad in 1985, I had yet another encounter with a bomb. I was having lunch at the home of a British defense official with David Blundy, a British reporter for the London Sunday Times—a brilliant, dashing friend with whom I often collaborated. (A sniper killed David four years later, while he was covering the war in El Salvador.) As the diplomat, David, and I talked about the war, an Iranian missile struck. By the sound of the explosion and proximity of the white smoke, our host guessed that the missile had landed nearby. Since this could be a rare opportunity to see precisely which missile the Iranians were firing, we hopped in the diplomat’s jeep and raced to the bomb site.
Arriving before the Iraqi police, we ran toward the smoking crater. Scud-B missiles were more than thirty-three feet long and capable of carrying 2,200 pounds of explosives, the defense expert told us. This missile was less than half that size, and the damage around it suggested that it had contained less than 500 pounds of explosives.
I snapped pictures of the crater and the surrounding damage, removed the film from my camera, put it in my purse, and inserted instead a half-used roll of film containing photos of a boring government-sponsored trip to the Iraqi front that I had taken the previous day.
The defense attaché was measuring the crater when we saw an unmarked black car with tinted windows—standard issue for the Mukhabarat, secret police—in the far distance. If we all began running, David warned, the Iraqis would surely catch us. It could be fatal for foreigners to be anywhere near such sites. David and I agreed that while we should stay, it would be riskier for a diplomat to be found there. The Iraqis might accuse him of being a spy and us his accomplices. I shoved the film roll I had just taken into his hand, hoping that he would get it out of Iraq in a diplomatic pouch. “We’ll be all right,” Blundy assured the Brit as he made a dash for his jeep.
The black car rolled to a halt, and three stocky men in black suits scrambled out, pistols drawn. David and I raised our hands and yelled in unison, “Sahafi! Sahafiya!,” Arabic for “journalists,” among the first Arabic words foreign correspondents in this treacherous region learned.
The men took us to a police station in a part of B
aghdad I did not know. There we were thrown into an insufferably hot, pee-stinking cell. There was no toilet, no water, no bed, and no shortage of flies. While I paced back and forth, blinking at the graffiti in Arabic on the cell’s peeling walls, David spread his safari jacket out on the least filthy part of the floor and dozed off instantly. His ability to catnap through any crisis was impressive, if infuriating. “Cheer up,” he yawned an hour later, restored by his nap. “It’s cheaper than the Sheraton.”
The hours passed slowly. I was desperate for a cigarette, and so was David, but my pack was in my confiscated purse. As an Iraqi guard walked by, cigarette in hand, David called out to him. “Habibi,” he pleaded, using the Arabic for “dear friend,” “have you got a cigarette?”
The guard, who appeared to speak no English, moved closer to the cell. He had clearly understood, as he blew a smoke ring in David’s face through the bars. “What you give?” He smiled menacingly, extracting an Iraqi cigarette from his uniform’s shirt pocket and waving it in front of David.
“Ma fi lira!” David replied. “I h-a-v-e no m-o-n-e-y. You have my wallet,” he added, dramatically emptying his jeans pockets.
“What you give?” the guard repeated. David looked at me, grinning diabolically.
“Take the woman!” David offered, pointing at me—a joke utterly lost on the guard.
Only David could make me laugh at such a moment. The mystified guard walked away, shaking his head. “Majnoon,” he muttered: foreigners are “crazy.”
Several hours later, we were escorted to a bureaucrat’s office. The garishly lit room was filled with overstuffed leather sofas, ornate, wood-carved armchairs, and plastic flowers—standard issue in Arab government offices. Seated behind a desk beneath a giant photo of—guess who?—was an officious young man in an expensive double-breasted suit and a well-practiced smile. He motioned for us to sit down. He had no mustache.
Rafik, as he called himself, had just returned from university in England. He had loved studying there, he told us, showing off his English. He was responsible for determining whether David and I were spies, he continued quite casually. Why were we at the bombing site?
We were journalists doing our jobs, David explained in a tone meant to imply that surely such a sophisticated Iraqi would appreciate what reporters do. We happened to be in the neighborhood when the missile struck.
Was there no one else with us?
David and I avoided looking at each other. If the secret police had seen the diplomat, we were in trouble. We were alone, David insisted.
Didn’t we know that taking pictures of such attacks was strictly forbidden? Punishable by prison and possibly death?
“We didn’t take any pictures,” I lied. He could verify that by developing the film the police had confiscated in my camera.
Rafik picked up the phone and summoned an officer. Almost twice Rafik’s age, the officer groveled before his young superior. Rafik snapped an order at him. I couldn’t quite decipher what he said, but the policeman looked chagrined.
Suddenly hospitable, Rafik offered us tea. A tray of sticky baklava appeared, which David and I, ravenous by now, ate quickly. An hour later, the officer returned and whispered something in Rafik’s ear. From his demeanor, I sensed that the police had developed the authorized photos I had taken of Iraqi soldiers hoisting their weapons at the front.
Rafik smiled. We were free to go, he said, dismissing us. He did not apologize for having thrown us in jail. I asked for his business card. Still convivial, he said that his cards weren’t ready yet. Besides, he added, while he had enjoyed our “chat,” it would be better for all of us, especially us, if we did not meet again, or mention how we had spent our afternoon. In the future, he concluded, we should avoid bombing sites.
I did not write about our detention. Back then, the Times frowned upon first-person accounts by reporters about our professional or personal woes. Moreover, I had to continue working in Baghdad. Writing about the incident would have risked future visas for me and other Times correspondents. David and I hadn’t been beaten or tortured. We had simply been locked up and denied water, food, cigarettes, and our freedom for a half day. That was hardly news “fit to print,” as the paper’s motto boasted. Especially considering what would have happened to us had we been Iraqi.
* * *
During the 1991 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, I was in Saudi Arabia. I had been trapped there when the Saudis, without warning, closed their airspace in January on the eve of the American-led invasion. The Times began ramping up its prewar coverage in the fall of 1990, and Joe Lelyveld, then the paper’s executive editor, had sent me back to the Middle East as “special Gulf correspondent” after reading Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, the bestseller that Laurie Mylroie and I had written after Saddam invaded Kuwait in August. I had a license to roam freely and report on the ambivalent Arab reaction to the impending invasion of the region’s most powerful Arab state.
Like many of those I was interviewing, I had mixed emotions about the impending war. On the one hand, I believed strongly that the United States and its allies had to eject Saddam from Kuwait—Iraq’s “nineteenth province,” as he called it—and punish him for having plundered his oil-rich neighbor. If the world failed to react to Saddam’s latest aggression, respect for the sovereignty of nation-states on which the United Nations was based would mean nothing. At the same time, I had seen enough of war in the Middle East—the civil war in Lebanon, for instance—to know that wars are fiendishly hard to end.
I saw American diplomacy at its best under President George H. W. Bush before that war. Led by Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Bush’s team overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles to build an effective coalition against Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd had been persuaded to let the United States station forces on its soil—heretofore unimaginable, given the xenophobia of the kingdom’s Wahhabi religious establishment. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney impressed me by flying to Riyadh armed with satellite photos showing Iraqi troops massing near the Saudi border. He convinced the king that Saddam might invade Saudi Arabia next. Only decades later would Cheney confirm why King Fahd had overruled his more cautious relatives and embraced American protection. “The Kuwaitis waited,” Cheney quoted the king as having told his timorous relatives, “and now they are living in our hotels.”11
Covering the normally reclusive kingdom during the war was thrilling. Journalist visas to Saudi Arabia had been rare during my three-year stint in Cairo. But with Saddam’s forces massing near their border, the Saudis suddenly seemed delighted to host the infidel Americans.
King Fahd’s review of the coalition forces was a dramatic, made-for-TV spectacular. It had begun with his visit to 1,500 American and Saudi troops assembled on a giant tarmac at Hafr al-Baten air base. The royal entourage had then raced across the desert in a fifty-car motorcade as journalists struggled to keep pace in our jeeps and vans. At King Khalid Military City, some five thousand foreign troops from over thirty coalition nations stood in formation, each battalion behind its national flag and signposts identifying it in English and Arabic. Fahd, wearing a flowing white thobe, a gold-embroidered, sand-colored cloak, and the traditional red-and-white-checked head scarf, had used a small footstool to hoist his enormous frame onto the floor of an open jeep. At his side was Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the beefy commander of America’s ground forces. Together they drove slowly past troops assembled on the desert as far as the eye could see. Saddam had no idea what was in store for him, I thought, as I gazed at the largest international military force ever assembled for war in the modern Middle East.
Later that day, Fahd, who rarely gave interviews, spoke to me and a small group of female reporters.12 Adel al-Jubeir, then an irreverent young press aide who would later become Saudi ambassador to Washington, had suggested this unorthodox nod to American feminism to his bosses. In a tent scented by incense and roses, Fahd held forth. About seventy-two years old—Saudis are usually vague about their age�
�Fahd was imposing, well over six feet tall. Seated in an ornate, high-backed chair while we stood clustered around him on luxurious Arabic carpets, he answered eight questions with a ninety-minute monologue. The king obviously had no interest in mastering the art of the press conference.
Like most of the other rulers I had managed to interview for the Times before the war, Fahd said that he felt betrayed by Saddam. Although he had given Iraq $25 billion in aid during the 1979 Iran-Iraq war, Saddam had repaid him by sending an assassination squad to kill him after they had quarreled over money and policy. For Fahd, this war was personal.
The same was true for Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, whom I had interviewed two months earlier in Cairo. A firm supporter of the war, Mubarak disclosed his heretofore secret efforts to save Saddam from himself. His account, too, was a terrifying portrait of Arab politics: lies, backstabbing, and betrayals by Saddam and other Arab leaders who had once called Mubarak their “brother.”13
Mubarak, who led the largest, historically most significant Arab nation, had bluntly warned Saddam that war was inevitable unless he withdrew. “How can Saddam make such a miscalculation of his situation?” Mubarak wondered aloud.
Two decades later, I, too, dwelt on the puzzling consistency of Saddam’s behavior. The Iraqi leader had almost always miscalculated—in failing to see that his invasion of revolutionary Iran in 1980 would solidify, not topple, the new militant Islamist regime, and a decade later, in underestimating America’s resolve to uphold the sovereignty of Kuwait in 1991. After 9/11, he failed to appreciate America’s fury against Al Qaeda and its supporters and President Bush’s determination to prevent a hostile leader who had already used WMD against his own people from threatening to use such weapons in terror attacks against the United States, or providing them to those who would. Saddam had been the only world leader to praise the 9/11 attacks—America’s “cowboys” were “reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity,” he declared—an insult that neither the Bushes nor Cheney would forget.14 A bully, Saddam distinguished himself by being unwilling to retreat, even when confronted with the prospect of overwhelming retaliation.
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