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How did Saddam rise?

THE OBSERVER, London
If the hawks were determined to go after Saddam, it seemed that he was equally determined to hand them the excuse they needed. For while Wolfowitz and his colleagues were building their ideological case for the US to take unilateral action to make an example of Iraq, the UN's policy on Iraq was rapidly beginning to unravel.
In September 1997, inspectors from the UN Special Commission for Iraq (Unscom), the body then charged with supervising the discovery and destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, rolled up outside the gates of the sprawling complex of the headquarters of the Iraqi Chemical Corps. They had been tasked with hunting down one of Saddam's most lethal weapons, searching for evidence of Iraq's retention of the deadly VX nerve agent. As they sat for hours outside the gates, blocked by its armed guards, they could see piles of documents being removed in pick-up trucks, while the Iraqis inside took little effort to hide the burning of other documents on the building's roof.
Throughout that autumn inspectors had played a game of cat-and-mouse with Saddam's officials, who made little effort to hide their contempt for them. Indeed, inspectors then working for Unscom had a clear impression that the Iraqi regime was not simply clumsy in its defiance. Documents had been snatched, tyres let down, vehicles blocked on the road. It was so open and obvious because Saddam intended to deliver a message. After years of Iraqi evasions and UN resolutions demanding that Iraq comply with its obligations, Saddam had figured the world was weary of the inspection process, so he resolved on a
policy of deliberately blocking the work of the inspectors to bring it to an end.
It was not supposed to be like this.
On 28 February 1991, as Iraq's exhausted and battered armies fell back towards Baghdad after their defeat at the hands of a US-led coalition that had driven them out of Kuwait through skies black with the burning oil from the fields Saddam had fired, senior Iraqi officials had conceded to a ceasefire agreement. In barely 100 hours of ground combat, and six weeks of intense aerial bombardment, Saddam's great gamble - to annex the tiny oil rich kingdom of Kuwait - had reduced the armed forces of the fourth largest army in the world to a bloody and demoralised wreck.
His soldiers had suffered 150,000 casualties. Iraqi prisoners numbered over 50,000 as division after division had been collapsed before the US advance. As Iraqi Ambassador to the UN Abd al-Amir al Anbari informed the Security Council that Iraq would finally abide by all its resolutions, Bush Snr ordered an end to the offensive. But that ceasefire would have far-reaching consequences.
Emboldened by its easy victory on the battlefield, the US insisted that never again should Iraq be able to threaten its neighbours and the world. So, the ceasefire resolution which would be passed at the UN on 3 April that year would build in an added requirement: Iraq would be punished by economic sanctions until it could prove that it had been disarmed of all its weapons of mass destruction.
Under this requirement Saddam would be forced to admit the first of the UN weapons inspectors whom he would have to allow to dig around his dirtiest
secrets. After the ease of his military defeat there was a sense of heady optimism in Washington, Paris and London. Saddam - not for the last time -would be set a deadline to disclose all evidence of his weapons programmes. He would be given 15 days to hand over all information about them, which would then be verified by the inspectors.
In retrospect, the easy assumptions of the US and its allies about their victor's peace would prove to be both a fatal miscalculation of the character of Saddam.
Saddam Hussein formally assumed power in 1979 in a ruthless internal coup within his own Baath Party, forcing President Bakr aside and purging the ranks of those in the Revolutionary Command Council who had dared to suggest that, even within their own undemocratic body, perhaps, there might be a vote over the succession.
His rise to power had been as subtle as it had been brutal. A young tough from a village near Tikrit, he had been introduced to and caught up in the fervour of Arab nationalism which swept the region on the accession to power of President Nasser in Egypt. But the young Saddam would show skills beyond being handy with his fists and a gun. An autodidact, with the ability to manipulate as well as frighten, he rose through the ranks of the new Baath Socialist Party, remoulding it in his own image as he did so.
His dictum would be simply expressed: power through terror - a policy he would pursue in his endless bloody war with Iran and his use of chemical weapons, his gassing of the Kurds, his annexation of Kuwait - and on the home front his constant purges
at all levels of the society that he would enslave.
On the strategic level too Saddam realised within months of seizing office in 1979 that he might require the same discreet level of terror in his relations with the wider world, ordering his nuclear scientists to divert their attention from Iraq's civil to its military nuclear capacity - a policy that Barzan al-Tikriti, half brother of Saddam, and one-time chief of the feared secret police, the Mukhabarat, described as Iraq's 'long arm'. So billions of dollars of Iraq's oil wealth would be diverted to series of secret projects - most valuable among them to build the Iraqi bomb.
Indeed, in all his attempts to produce viable weapons of mass destruction this would be the crown jewel. And when the first inspectors of Unscom appeared in Baghdad, Saddam would prove determined to quietly defy them, hiding away as much evidence of his weapons programmes as he dared.
The miscalculation that Bush Snr and his advisers would make - and the Clinton administration would repeat - was not to understand that by the end of Gulf War I, those weapons of mass destruction would no longer be the 'long arm', but a balled-up fist crucial for Saddam's survival on a domestic level and in the immediate region. With his army in ruins and facing rebellion in the north and south, he would need the threat of his secret weapons to stay in power.
In his own heartland Saddam was becoming concerned over the loyalty of the Sunni tribal leaders, on whom he relied so much for his power, being forced to deliver ever larger bribes. The army too, which had suffered the brunt of the losses of the Gulf war, was being viewed with increasing suspicion.