Saddam must go
Still mad and bad - why Saddam must go
BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN
Some of my friends think Ive gone slightly out of my mind about Iraq.
They are mostly too polite to say so, but I know what they are thinking.
We are already bogged down in a terrible war in Afghanistan, with
no end in sight, and that fool wants to start a war with Iraq. Thats
what they are thinking. Now, its true that I think the war on terrorism
cannot be won without deposing Saddam Hussein, but I dont think that
makes me foolish. Then again, perhaps you think that is precisely what a
fool would say. So lets do a deal. I am going to tell you three stories.
You read them, and if you still think Im wrong at the end, I will
shut up about Iraq. Lets start with the story of Amal al-Mudarris,
once the best-known personality on Baghdad radio and much admired by the
educated elite. She was not, however, much admired by President Saddam Husseins
wife. Sajida Hussein began calling the presenter, complaining that she wasnt
praising her husband often enough. One day at the radio station, after yet
another crude call, al-Mudarris was chatting to some of her friends. That
woman isnt fit to be Iraqs first lady, she said. Unnoticed,
one of her colleagues slipped away and phoned the Ministry of Information.
Within minutes the station was surrounded and the presenter was arrested.
Amal al-Mudarris was tortured until she confessed what she had said. Then
she was hanged. After her execution her tongue was cut out and delivered
to her family. Since it came to power, Saddams Baath Party is estimated
to have killed 5 per cent of Iraqs population. This weekend, protesting
innocence over the attacks on New York, Saddams deputy, Tariq Aziz
said: Honestly, we do not condone the killing of innocent civilians.
Then there is the tale of Khidir Hamza, a talented Iraqi scientist with
a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics from Florida State University. Hamza
was teaching at a small college in Georgia in the late 1960s when the Baathists
forced him to come home. He wouldnt want anything to happen to his
father back in Iraq, he was told. It wasnt long before the reason
for this request became clear. Saddam wanted his help to build
a nuclear bomb. At first, Hamza and the other nuclear scientists assigned
to the task didnt take it too seriously. They thought that Saddam
would fall before their work ever got anywhere. Gradually they realised
that they were wrong. When they didnt move fast enough, one of their
number disappeared into Saddams dungeons. He was reportedly hung up
by his thumbs and beaten every day for ten years. By the time of the Gulf
War, having travelled all over the world on illegal shopping trips for nuclear
spare parts, Hamza had helped Saddam to build a crude device. Only the fact
that it was too big to attach to a missile prevented Saddam from being able
to fire it at Israel. Not long after the war, with Saddam playing cat and
mouse with UN inspectors, Hamza left the nuclear programme and fled Iraq.
The last part of his story is, in some ways, the scariest. When Hamza first
contacted the CIA, they were not interested in talking to him. They were
completely unaware of the extent of Saddams nuclear programme. They
didnt believe what Hamza told them about the way Saddam was now hiding
work on weapons development. And when Hamza went to see the International
Atomic Energy Agency, part of the machinery for weapons inspections, he
fared even worse. Saddams chief bomb-maker was told to go back to
Iraq and make peace with his President. Finally, let me tell you about Abdul
Rahman Yasin. In September 1992, Yasin, an Iraqi, arrived at his brothers
apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was not an innocent visit. From
this apartment a plot was hatched to blow up the World Trade Centre in neighbouring
New York. On February 26, 1993, the second anniversary of the end of the
Gulf War, the plot culminated in the deaths of six people, when a rented
van exploded outside the twin towers. Within a week Yasin had been arrested.
One of the conspirators had attempted to claim back the deposit on the rental
van. Unfortunately, the FBI proved even more naive than Yasins partner-in-crime.
They interviewed Yasin, thanked him and let him go. The next day he flew
to Baghdad. President George W. Bush has named Yasin as one of his 22 most
wanted terrorists. As the war on terrorism rages, Yasin works quietly
for the Iraqi Government. These three stories show that Saddam Hussein is
a murderer for whom human life means nothing, that he is determined to build
weapons of mass destruction and has come close to doing so, and that he
harbours terrorists who conspired to destroy the World Trade Centre. They
also show that while Saddam is cunning and driven, we have been pathetically
weak and naive in our dealings with him. In other words, they show that
I may be deeply concerned about Saddam, but Im not bonkers. For many
people, however, showing that Saddam is a dangerous murderer is not enough.
The Foreign Secretary, for instance, has said that he would be prepared
to deal with the issue of Iraq if he was presented with hard evidence that
Iraq sponsored or assisted the attacks on September 11. This explains why
people who agree with me about Iraq are spending a great deal of energy
at the moment trying to prove a link between Saddam and bin Laden. It explains,
for instance, what the former CIA Director James Woolsey was doing last
month tramping round a college in Swansea. Woolsey believes that Iraqi Intelligence
organised the 1993 World Trade Centre attack. A man calling himself Ramzi
Yousef has been jailed for the crime and Woolsey wants to prove that he
is an Iraqi agent. In court, Yousefs claim that he was Abdul Basit
Karim, a Kuwaiti who had studied in Swansea, was accepted by most. No one
cared much who he was, as long as he was found guilty. Woolsey, however,
cares a great deal. If he can show, for instance by asking around in Swansea,
that Yousef is not Karim, and that he stole Karims identity, he believes
it will demonstrate Iraqi Intelligence involvement. After all, who else
could have arranged a fake Kuwaiti identity, complete with doctored files
at home, if not the Iraqis during their occupation of Kuwait? The problem
for Woolsey is not in proving that Yousef is not Karim. There are four inches
and 40lb difference between the two of them. Its clear that Karim
is dead and the identity is a fake. The problem is not even proving Iraqi
involvement in the 1993 bombing. The fact that Iraq harbours one of the
conspirators proves some involvement. The problem for Woolsey is that any
Iraqi involvement in the 1993 bombing is only circumstantial evidence of
involvement in the September 11 attack. It is not the sort of hard evidence
that the Foreign Secretary is after. The same is true of most of the other
evidence linking Saddam to bin Laden and September 11. For obvious reasons,
the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC) has been hard at work finding
and promoting such evidence. It can point to several meetings between bin
Laden and Faruq Hidjazi, a former Iraqi Intelligence director who is now
Ambassador to Turkey. The INC claims that Hidjazi devised the tactic of
using a plane as a guided missile in the mid-1990s. A former Iraqi agent
has told the INC that as recently as September 2000, terrorists were seen
training on a Boeing 707 parked in Salman Pak, near Baghdad. There is also
a disputed story that the September 11 suicide bomber Mohammed Atta had
meetings with Iraqi Intelligence when he passed through Prague this summer,
and reports that al-Qaeda terrorists visited Baghdad in 1998 to celebrate
Saddams birthday and to seal an agreement that Iraq would train their
men. There is quite enough, then, to convince someone like me that Saddam
is linked with bin Laden. For the sceptics, however, it is inadequate. And
unless the anthrax turns out to have been supplied directly to bin Laden
by Saddam, I doubt whether any evidence will emerge to convince them. There
will almost certainly be no smoking gun. Saddam is far too sophisticated
an operator for that. This is unfortunate. But fortunately it doesnt
matter. The case for deposing Saddam does not rest on the events of September
11. We dont have to convince sceptical people that we should begin
a new war against Iraq. We have to convince them that we must finish the
last war with Iraq, that we have not done so and that not doing so is highly
dangerous. And this case is far easier to make. Last week, reports began
to emerge that Iraq is moving some of its chemical weapons into underground
bunkers. Presumably, Saddam is trying to protect them from the US attacks
on Iraq that Tariq Aziz said this weekend that he is expecting. Yet these
weapons should not exist. Agreeing to destroy them was part of the price
for ending the Gulf War. If the weapons still exist, the war is not over.
Its as simple as that. Since Iraq expelled UN weapons inspectors in
1998, we have only a sketchy knowledge of what Saddam has been up to. However,
we know that as time has passed, the Iraqi Presidents confidence has
been increasing. After three years in which he transferred the right to
use chemical and biological weapons to his military district commanders,
he has once again assumed direct control over them. German Intelligence
reports that he is also at work on a new class of chemical weapons, with
missiles capable of reaching Europe. German companies have been delivering
to Baghdad material necessary for the production of poison gas. The former
UN weapons inspector Richard Butler, now a bitter and worried man, believes
that it would be extraordinarily easy for Saddam to use these weapons. Even
before the events of September 11, he suggested a plausible scenario: A
hit squad from somewhere in the Middle East travels to New York City carrying
a one-litre bottle filled with one of the several chemical weapons agents
we have long known Saddam to be developing. Using a simple sprayer (like
one that a gardener or house-painter might own), they diffuse the contents
into the air over Times Square on a Saturday night. Hundreds, maybe thousands,
of people die agonising deaths as a result. Because of their handling of
the substance and the strategic concern to maintain ambiguity over the source
of the attack, the terrorists may have to be prepared to die themselves.
Then, Butler says, the world would erupt in unprecedented horror,
but as Saddam would deny involvement, few would be willing to punish him
without hard evidence. Is this beginning to sound familiar? The only defence,
argues Butler, is removing Iraqs chemical and biological weapons or,
given the likelihood that we will remain unable to do that, removing Saddam
himself. The ability to kill a few hundred people may help Saddam to gain
some of the revenge he yearns for, but it will not satisfy him. That is
why he has returned to his plans to create a nuclear arsenal. Only this
will give him what he really wants leadership of the Arab world and
leverage on the West. Our knowledge of his nuclear plans is as sketchy as
our knowledge of his chemical weapons. What we do know is that Saddam has
been shopping again. For example, a couple of years ago he bought six lithotripter
devices from Siemens, ostensibly to break up kidney stones with high-powered
shockwaves. With his six devices he ordered 120 precision electronic switches.
The switches can trigger an atomic bomb. Every day, Saddam is moving a step
closer to his nuclear goal. On November 3, 1992, more than a year after
the end of the Gulf War, the world learnt that Bill Clinton had defeated
George Bush for the US presidency. On that day Saddam led a rally in Ramadi,
one of his strongholds. Firing his pistol in the air, he declared: The
mother of battles has continued and will continue. Osama bin Laden
declared war on the West many years ago, and it took the terrible events
in New York before we realised that he meant it. What does Saddam Hussein
have to do before we take him seriously?