The US vs Saddam: twenty-five years of mendacity and backstabbing
ATA LAVISH DINNER at the Supreme Court in January 1998, the hard-nosed Swedish arms inspector Rolf Ekéus was buttonholed by George H. W. Bush, with his sons Jeb and George Jr in tow. Amid thick mahogany panelling, busts of justices past and the dainty strains of the Japanese ambassador playing Schubert on a piano gifted by Leonard Bernstein, the former president quizzed Ekéus on the condition of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The nuclear threat? No longer a threat, he was told. Illicit chemicals? Vapours on the wind. And the biological agents programme? “A great prize”, beamed Ekéus, referring to its demise, though he noticed that, in contrast to his father, Dubya was barely paying attention. Even then, five years before the Americans rumbled into Baghdad looking for something that didn’t exist, they knew there was nothing to find.
For leading the UN squad that aggressively disarmed Iraq of all but its conventional munitions after the Gulf War, Ekéus deserves to be better remembered. His is one of the few salvageable achievements in the sordid, belligerent, backstabbing saga of the US’s dealings with Saddam Hussein, as detailed in Steve Coll’s rigorous new history The Achilles Trap. Any reflection on it spurs, however, a queasy-making question: if Saddam really did possess WMD, would the US have invaded, occupied and gutted Iraq in March 2003? Would Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have risked the troops of V Corps facing VX or sarin as they thrust through the Karbala Gap? And would Tony Blair have so readily sent British tankers into Basra?
Iraq in 2003 was weak – weaker, certainly, than Iran and North Korea, the other two prongs of the ludicrously monikered “axis of evil” trident. Having been routed in 1991, its army had collapsed from a standing force of one million men to one of 300,000, lacking much in armour and aeroplanes. The country’s once capable high-tech infrastructure – the pride of the whole region, dating from the era when Saddam still cared about posing as a modernizer – was kept in a state of rust and ruin by a vicious scheme of international sanctions that the Hussein family, by its own thievery, did little to alleviate. Infant mortality, according to the regime’s own studies, tripled in the era of the sanctions; the number of surgeries in Iraqi hospitals fell by twothirds. The lights never stayed on for long. The 2003 invasion put a bow on a lost decade. And both Bushes (with Bill Clinton wedged in the middle) had done all this to a former friend and business partner – a dictator whose prior use of chemical weapons in his ru
