THE way that the Iraqi regime has been analysed in the past
few years reminds us of the era when Kremlin analysts scrutinised official
photos of Soviet leaders to determine who was in (sitting near the centre) and
who out (no longer in the picture). The old methods of the Kremlinologists
seemed to have inspired Global Security, a Virginia-based research institute
frequently cited by rightwing thinktanks influencing the governmental policy of
the United States.
Global Security studied official photos of Iraqi summit
meetings in 2002 and concluded disturbingly that the unusually prominent
position of Iraq's deputy prime minister and military industrialisation
minister foretold the regime's ill intentions. John Pike, credited with
preparing the report, wrote on Global Security's website: "Abdul Tawab
al-Mulla Howeish is prominently featured in many of the recent photo-opportunity
videos and photographs released by the Iraqi government. In some photographs he
is the only person other than Saddam Hussein himself whose face is
identifiable. In others he is seated prominently away from the table at which
the other attendees at the meeting are seated" (1).
This conclusion got a response from the press. On 20
September The New York Post asked Pike for additional analysis: quoted
in Niles Lathem's article, "Butcher's Evil Rising Star", he asserted
the photos clearly demonstrated the importance of Iraq's special weapons
programme. The issue was serious, and Pike restrained his imagination,
acknowledging in the London Observer that this was not a definitive
smoking gun and did not prove Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. But that did
not prevent Leela Jacinto from assuming the worst in her ABC News website
article, "A Rising Star: Saddam's Right-Hand Man Under Scrutiny From the
West" on 26 September 2002.
Rumours that Saddam Hussein had married Howeish's daughter
were connected with the truth: Howeish certainly was a rising star in the
regime. Pike's conclusions about the importance of Howeish in the pictures
would have been very interesting but for one thing, which nobody seemed to have
noticed: the man in the picture wasn't Howeish but Abdul Hami Hmoud al-
Abdallah al-Khattab, a former presidential bodyguard well known to Iraqis. As a
distant cousin of Saddam's half-brothers and the president's brother-in-law, he
also serves as Saddam's personal secretary, explaining his constant presence at
official gatherings. He is responsible for reviewing official dossiers, but his
duties do not include public speaking. Fortunately, his prominent position at
Saddam's side is not proof that Iraq is manufacturing nuclear weapons.
When war is imminent, we all expect disinformation (3).
Because the Iraqi regime is so impenetrable and in constant flux, its
behaviour, or lack of it, causes problems of circularity. Motivated by the
legitimate need to make sense of their observations, "experts" attempt
to interpret seemingly straightforward noises and signals from within Iraq.
Saddam's mercurial regime produces a lot of these, albeit fragmentary and
contradictory. Interpreting them means overstatement, and this adds to the
ambiguity of the actual signals. Foreign observers acting in good faith then
play into the hands of an inscrutable, unpredictable regime. And the
essentially false analyses get the media cover.
Consider Ibrahim al-Marashi, a research associate at the
centre for non-proliferation studies in Monterey, California, and lecturer at
the US naval postgraduate school. Parts of his doctoral thesis, Iraq's
Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis, first published in
2002, unexpectedly turned up in a recent British intelligence report, which
plagiarised his findings and caused controversy (4). The resulting fuss brought
him much publicity, increasing his readership, and he soon became a frequent
point of reference. But his research, which British intelligence repeated
almost verbatim, is in fact a synthesis of other previously published sources.
Although al-Marashi provided a comprehensive bibliography,
he left out his primary sources. He relied primarily on two dossiers published
in 1997. Jane's Intelligence Review commissioned the first of these,
which also was paraphrased in the British intelligence report. The second
study, published by the Federation of American Scientists, parroted the first
study's main findings. So what were the primary sources for these studies?
Military information is the exclusive property of the intelligence network,
usually unwilling to share its data. Moreover intelligence services, along with
Iraqi opposition parties, claim exclusive rights to information from the few
high-level Iraqi defectors, information that is in any case quickly outdated.
Iraqi opposition groups are the main source of intelligence
on Iraq, but with problems of credibility. Behind the scenes, they seem to be
at the shadowy core of these independent reports, which presumably include
documents released in early 1997 by the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC
documents strive for truth but actually contain a lot of unverifiable data.
Websites run by the Federation of American Scientists and Global Security run
almost word-for-word transcripts of the INC documents, including lists of
high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officials, and references to Colonel Ayed
al-Duri (nicknamed Abu Teiser). But is the 1997 list up to date? Saddam
replaced his internal security (political police) director twice after the 1996
appointment of Taha Abbas al-Ahbabi (whom al-Marashi mentions) and before the
publication of al-Marashi's work. Since accurate facts were available in 1997,
why did no one bother to update the information?
Drawing up lists of Iraqi officials only fosters an illusion
of authoritativeness. This causes problems: faulty information is disconnected
from its dubious sources and given credibility by serious, respectable media
outlets that quote it. This disconnection is supposed to remove doubts about
the sources' truth. But the media tendency to quote from the media ( the
cuttings-job syndrome) leads to repetition and worsens matters. This
information overload obscures the dearth and unreliability of the primary
sources.
The intelligence update of the global information company
Stratfor on 23 March 1999 was the perfect example of this. The report's author
knowingly gave credence to information he knew to be questionable. The title is
a classic: "Conflicting reports suggest interesting possibilities in
Iraq". Relying on Iraqi opposition communiqués, the author referred to the
"assassinations" of Mahmud Feizi Mohammed al-Hazzaa (who headed the
Iraqi governorate of Maysan) and a high-ranking Ba'ath party official, Abdul
Bazi Abdul Karim al-Saadun. He linked these to the disappearance on 4 March
1999 of Ali Hassan al- Majid, Saddam's cousin, allegedly implicated in a coup
attempt. But on 18 and 21 March 1999 media reports indicated that al- Majid and
al-Saadun had reappeared.
Another rumour was used to corroborate this disinformation:
there was supposed to have been an altercation over the "missing" man
(al-Majid), pitting Hashem (al-Majid's brother) and Qusay (Saddam's son)
against each other. This clash was supposed to have been fatal to several
members of al-Majid's family. The author of the Stratfor report, after a few
caveats, concluded: "At the very least these reports are intriguing.At the
very most, chaos may have reached the closest ranks of Saddam's
supporters" (5). But the regime still stands, as does Governor al-Hazzaa,
recently relieved of his duties in Maysan. Al-Saadun is still going strong in
the Ba'ath party's Command. Al-Majid, a key figure in the regime, and Hashem,
his self-effacing brother, are very much alive.
A close look shows that the Iraqi regime is filled with the
living dead. According to Iraqi opposition sources, the Republican Guard
commander who put down the 1991 Shi'ite uprisings in southern Iraq, General
Abdul Wahed Shinan al-Ribbat (himself a Shi'ite), died in 1992 as part of a
purge. But al-Ribbat served as army chief of staff through the 1990s, and was
governor of Ninawa early this year. Hamid Sha'ban Khudhayer al-Nasseri, Iraq's
air force commander in the 1980s, thought to have been executed in 1991, was
alive enough in 1996 to face serious allegations of conspiring with the
opposition (he defected in 2000). So who is the al-Nasseri currently serving as
presidential adviser? The "execution" on 17 July 1991 of Kurdish
General Hussein Rashid Hassan Mohammed al- Windawi, who was army chief of staff
during the Gulf war, seems to have been only a small blip in his long career.
These examples were taken and misinterpreted from a long
list of genuine deaths and falls from power. External observers have failed to
grasp the confusion inherent in the regime's behaviour. They insist on
presenting a picture that fits their distorted perceptions of Saddam as a
powerful, authoritarian ruler, whose long-term power basis is maintained by
violent purges, falls from grace and brutal repression. This skewed vision of
the regime contrasts sharply with more ambivalent descriptions circulating in
Iraq. There are bizarre discrepancies between the interpretations abroad and
the nuanced domestic realities.
In October 1998 Max van der Stoel, the UN human rights
commissioner's special rapporteur in Iraq, backed by Amnesty International,
issued a report condemning the arbitrary detention of Dawoud al-Farhan, a
prominent Iraqi journalist (the press is tightly controlled by Saddam's eldest
son, Uday). But al-Farhan, who had already received several warnings as
vice-president of the journalists' union, was not under detention: he was
attending a conference at the time.
The desire for accurate information on Saddam's mercurial
regime leads to the replication of, and emphasis on, cliches, while ambiguities
and contradictions that merit further analysis are ignored. The al-Hazzaa clan,
part of Saddam's tribe, is an excellent example. The 1990
"assassination" of Omar Mohammed al-Hazzaa for alleged treason has
long been used as an example of the horrors of the regime: later, his brutal
death was cited in connection with a failed assassination of Saddam's son,
Uday. According to journalist Mark Bowden, the "would-be assassins are
rumoured to be associated with the family of General Omar al-Hazzaa, the
officer whose tongue was cut out before he and his son were executed" (6).
But al-Hazzaa's three nephews, Mahmud, Tariq and Nateq Fayzi Mohammed
al-Hazzaa, are still serving as governors and army commanders: so perhaps there
is no vendetta?
The central problem is the basis of the cliched thinking
about the Iraqi regime, revealed by the way that a new crisis is always
described as the crumbling of Saddam's power structure. Iraq's obsessive
secrecy begets the experts' obsessive need for signals, which impel their quest
to interpret these signs to reveal deeper truths: these "truths" are
what the experts want to happen.
Iraq's elections on 15 October 2002 were misinterpreted. The
headline in Le Monde was: "Saddam Hussein plots his victory in
defiance of George Bush." But the elections' timing had been worked out
seven years before, after the first referendum on Saddam's rule in 1995. If the
president had called off the 2002 vote, the Iraqi people would have viewed this
as a sign of political weakness; his decision to proceed with the elections was
not arrogant. The final election results reflected the built-in mechanisms of
the Ba'ath party, not Saddam's will (7). Because of the crisis, ordinary party
activists felt compelled to break previous records: at each polling station
they compiled lists of people who had neglected to vote and marked those
ballots themselves.
Propaganda and personality cults are not real manifestations
of Saddam's megalomania. They show the Iraqi people's active, even cynical,
role in their own subjugation. But this conclusion is unacceptable to those who
seek to explain Iraq's political situation exclusively through Saddam's
character. This overriding focus on personality, accompanied by conflicting
biographies of the "real Saddam", is the consequence of the experts'
distorted vision. This has made everybody shortsighted about the really
significant forces at work in Iraq. Analysing these might provide valuable
insights into the functioning of the regime.
* David Baran is an Ottowa-based journalist
currently in Iraq
(1) See http://www.globalsecurity.org
(2) Now official
currency in the US, the term smoking gun is used for alleged evidence of
illicit Iraqi weapons programmes.
(3) For examples of
disinformation on Iraq, see The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, 6
September 2002, and Le Monde, Paris, 9-10 March 2003.
(4) For al-Marashi's
work, see the Middle East
Review of International Affairs website ; for the British intelligence
report, refer to the UK government
official website.
(5) See http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/1999...
(6) See Mark Bowden,
"Tales of the Tyrant", The Atlantic Monthly, Boston, May 2002.
(7) See David Baran,
"Iraq: the party in power",
Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, December 2002.
Translated by Luke Sandford