March 22, 2003

SADDAM'S DISAPPEARANCE: MYSTERIOUS OR COREOGRAPHED?

by Srdja Trifkovic

Among the many reasons for war stated at different times, in its diplomatic efforts at the Security Council and elsewhere the Bush Administration opted for the mission to "disarm Iraq" of its weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The official casus belli was supported by claims of reliable and detailed U.S. intelligence data that could not be fully disclosed without jeopardizing the sources. No such weapons have been found thus far, however, and even if some are eventually discovered in a hospital basement or a deserted warehouse a few cynics will inevitably suspect that the evidence is suspect.

With the beginning of armed action on March 20 the emphasis suddenly shifted to regime change. That this was the war against Saddam personally, and for Iraq's liberation, was reflected in the very name given to the operation. It therefore stands to reason to expect that the endeavor will be considered neither complete nor completely successful unless the dictator was captured or otherwise accounted for. And yet the mystery surrounding Saddam's apparent disappearance is beginning to be downplayed by various U.S. civilian and military officials in a manner that may suggest a prearranged deal.

Contrary to some early reports there is no doubt that Saddam survived the initial "Shock and Awe" attack on March 20. In one video, made three days later, he accurately referred to the downing of an Apache helicopter, and in another there was a plume of smoke in the background consistent with the position of a target hit the previous night.

On April 7, we are told, the Air Force made another attempt on his life, this time based on real-time intelligence of a forthcoming meeting between Saddam, both his sons and several top Ba'ath Party officials. A B-1 bomber dropped four tons of precision-guided ordnance on Al-Saah restaurant in Baghdad's upper-crust suburb of Mansur where the meeting was supposedly taking place. In the aftermath of that attack Saddam, his sons, and most of his key aides simply vanished. Within days U.S. military sources suggested that communications "chatter" from Iraqi lower ranks indicated that he was dead. On April 10 London-based Arabic newspapers Al-Hayat and Asharq al-Awsat quoted witnesses as saying Saddam appeared near the Azamia (transliterated in some reports as Aadhamiya) mosque in northern Baghdad on April 9—the day Saddam's massive statue was pulled down and its decapitated head dragged through the streets—but the news was not given any prominence in the U.S. media. Those reports corroborated an account by a former Iraqi army officer given to Reuters.

The bombed-out site of the house in Mansur has been in American hands for over a week—and the mystery of Saddam's fate started taking strange turns. Some U.S. officials declared that he was probably killed on April 7, but "the odds of finding Saddam and his sons in the debris are doubtful as Saddam loyalists have had plenty of time to sift through the dust" and remove any remains. This is contradicted by the ability of forensic scientists to identify DNA traces of thousands of different victims even in the incalculably bigger pile of rubble in New York's Ground Zero. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld nevertheless warned at an April 11 briefing that no conclusive proof may be forthcoming: "These sites are not like this press room. These are big places with lots of acres." Gen. Richard B. Myers, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, declared that "digging in rubble" is not a priority. On April 13 the White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. opined that the Iraqi dictator is probably dead but that the evidence remains inconclusive.

There is no visible rush to establish the facts. Knight-Ridder Newspapers and others reported Thursday that there was no sign that U.S. forces were looking for Saddam's remains at the site in Mansur, though there was a steady stream of pedestrians who stopped and gawked at the rubble-filled hole. Mourning banners mark the site for people known to have died, and "the mystery surrounding Saddam is only deepened by the disappearance of some of the best-known, most dreaded members of his Baath Party—not killed, not captured, not lynched by angry neighbors. Just vanished."

Earlier this week other US officials started stressing that the success of the campaign does not hinge on Saddam's fate. "If we don't find every one of them, but we can account that the regime is not in place, then we have succeeded and we believe we have succeeded," Brigadier General Vincent Brooks told journalists at US Central Command in Qatar. The new pitch was based on the assertion that we may never know the truth, but the issue is in any case irrelevant. On April 17 hundreds of daily newspapers all over the United States carried an Associated Press dispatch from Qatar under the headline "Saddam, Dead or Not, Is History." His case is already treated as "an unsolved mystery" that may not matter a great deal since his "unmourned demise" is an accomplished fact and his images are fading fast from the streets of Iraq. "It really doesn't matter where he is. There is no chapter of Saddam Hussein to close," Abdel Moneim Said, head of Egypt's Al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, was quoted as saying. Even if no one ever knows what happened, it will not have any political impact: "The story of Saddam will gradually vanish; a week from now, probably, he will be totally forgotten."

According to our usually reliable sources in the British intelligence community, however, what we are now witnessing is a prearranged performance. They assert that a deal had been cut with Saddam even before the first shots were fired, "in which the US would pretend they had killed him and his gang and in exchange there would be no fighting." Only days before the war Saddam was offered the option of going into exile by Mr. Bush, the theory goes, but he felt that he could not give up without a token fight. That fight was also necessary to the United States in order to establish the kind of control over Iraq that would not have been possible in case of internal regime change. Allowing Saddam and his entourage to slip out of the country, assume new identities, and quietly enjoy their billions of stolen dollars was considered a price well worth paying in return for a quick, relatively bloodless victory that also turned out to be much cheaper than originally estimated in Washington.

This scenario seems to have been confirmed by subsequent events. According to our British sources, the odd bits of fighting here and there, especially in the first week, "may have just been a warning to the US not to renege on the first deal." The American government is known to break promises, and "Saddam was too wily to trust them."

The lack of truly significant captures—never mind the half-brother who allegedly headed the Iraqi intelligence twenty years ago—is certainly odd. Like the lack of a battle in Tikrit, it is also natural if they have all gone, including not only Saddam but also information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the president's powerful sons, Odai and Qusai, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, and Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.

Our informants assure us, however that the facts of the case concerning Saddam's disappearance will not remain obscure for ever: "this will spill out later as the spooks are boiling mad and in the mood to tell us things again."

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