Why Saddam has cast himself as the Godfather of Baghdad By Adel Darwish (Filed: 21/03/2003)
It was a lavish lunch in the late autumn of 1972 at the Palace of Arts and Culture for the official opening of Baghdad International Arts Festival. An immaculately dressed, well groomed man of authority invited a group of foreign journalists to his table.
For hours, he charmed us, puffing a Cuban cigar, and steadily outdrinking the foreign hacks for whom the name "Saddam Hussein el-Tekriti" - then deputy chairman of the Ba'ath party regional command council - meant little. But days later, the whisper that we had been "photographed in the paper with Mr Deputy" started to open doors locked to other journalists.
I don't know if it was the Johnny Walker Black Label, the charm of the poker-faced "Mr Deputy" or our inexperience, but none of us picked up a clue as to this man's coming role in a sequence of events still unfolding today: to his likely next step; to what would motivate him in this confrontation with America; to the roots of his conviction that Arabs prefer the illusions he offers them to the democracy promised by President Bush.
By the end of the decade he was no longer "Mr Deputy", but Az'im al-Qaed ("the pioneering leader"), al-Rukn ("the cornerstone") and al-Muheeb ("the fearful"). Saddam's favourite film, he told us that afternoon, was The Godfather - and he seemed, as president, to become the personification of Al Pacino's murderous gangster Michael Corleone.
In that film, the shooting of the Godfather throws New York's underworld into anarchy, confusion and bloodshed. George W Bush and Tony Blair might do well to heed the parallel. The disappearance of Saddam from the scene could throw the region into just such confusion, and they may be in no doubt that Saddam will make every effort to maximise that effect.
"Once loyalty to the family and its head is in doubt," said Saddam, stubbing his cigar to emphasise that we had missed the wisdom of Michael Corleone ordering the killing of his brother-in-law, "the life of the individual concerned, or a few men, becomes worthless."
This view became his own doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, under which, as the head of the Iraqi family, Saddam liquidated hundreds: like his brother-in-law, who became too popular; like his two sons-in-law; like the very cousins who once sheltered Saddam when he was an orphan.
I met him again 14 years later - in a bunker east of Basra, during the war with Iran. His bodyguards snatched away my camera. Taking a photo had been my immediate reaction to the surprise of finding Saddam in the underground command centre to which we were hurried when Iranian shells fell nearby.
Before a word left my lips, he signalled to the guards to return my camera, and asked whether London was "still foggy". It was a reference to a short film he had liked during the 1972 festival. This extraordinary talent for accumulating and remembering details was one of the things that enabled him to weed out or promote aides and officials with such ruthlessness.
His 1979 takeover had been a replica of Michael Corleone's violent accession to his father's empire in The Godfather. Half the Ba'ath party was bloodily purged when he ousted President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who had been Saddam's "godfather" in the 1960s. Many of the "traitors" were guilty of future intentions; the "proof" was in details he remembered of some of their minor deeds. Others were guilty of "thoughts" he read in their eyes.
The Godfather derives his legitimacy from loyalty and obedience, secured by a system of terror and reward. Saddam told me he admired Michael Corleone as a statesman; a man able to provide his family with protection and a concept of "justice" unavailable under Western civil laws.
As he grew from a hired gun arranging individual killings into a mass murderer, Saddam cultivated admiration beyond his borders. Arabs seeking a "justice" they thought unobtainable through international law saw him as a modern Saladin, standing up to "crusaders". He is ferocious, in turn, towards those he believes have betrayed him: ungrateful Arabs such as the Kuwaitis, hosting equally ungrateful American troops. He once protected the interests of both against Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.
"A nation is like a woman," was Saddam's comment on the scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone tells his girlfriend the story of his father threatening to kill a man. "Her superficial revulsion hid her burning desire for him, knowing he would one day be the Godfather," said Saddam. He said that nations, like sexy women, fall in love with strong leaders and despise the "nice ones".
Saddam is likely to maximise the suffering of his own people, both for propaganda and to slow down the advancing invaders. He will not balk at firing oil wells, nor at destroying dams on the Euphrates and Tigris, causing disaster on a massive scale. American and British forces will have to provide aid, medicine and food for thousands of injured and for refugees. The humanitarian response to pain and suffering - or even ethical debate in the West - he despises as a sign of weakness that he will exploit.
At a private screening in Baghdad in 1982 of The Long Days, a documentary drama about Saddam's life, I was among a handful of selected guests clustered at the end of a 30ft table invited by the Iraqi cultural attaché in London, Naji Sabri, who is now the foreign minister. Saddam suddenly appeared at the far end of the table, following a brief blackout.
The actor portraying Saddam did no more than grimace when a bullet was extracted from his flesh with a razor blade, and iodine was poured on the wound. Saddam ordered the mortified producer to reshoot the scene to reflect his "accurate" reaction to the pain. Saddam said: "I didn't even flinch."
Nor will Saddam flinch at the deaths of thousands of his own people if he thinks it will secure his survival or bolster his myth.
Adel Darwish is the author of Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War
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