When I read the book “Secrets of the Black Box” by our colleague Ghassan Charbel, I thought that he could not write a better book, since he walked the corridors of intelligence services, and delved into the labyrinths of conspiracies that no other journalist had seen or heard of before. However, his new book “From war to war: Saddam was here” is much more important, since the significance involved is that of a country as major as Iraq, the historically relevant Arab country that was destroyed by some of its own sons, before being conspired against by its enemies abroad. In the book's introduction, Charbel made a reference to the summit in May, 1990 in Baghdad, when Saddam was “boasting” his victory over Khomeini's Iran, and thus requested the Arabs to cancel his war debts, and to recognize his leadership over the Arabs. What I personally remember about this summit is that Abu Ammar and the members of his delegation left the summit in terror while the Iraqi president was accusing them of treason. I also remember what Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, the current Emir of Kuwait who was its foreign minister at the time told me in June of that year, a month after the summit and four months or so before the infamous occupation, which I will summarize here: “May God save us from Saddam Hussein. He is arrogant and conceited and is capable of anything. He sat on his chair higher than his guests the Arab leaders, even when some are older than him, and crossed his legs and raised his shoes in front of them” (or in their faces…I do not remember his words verbatim). Sheikh Sabah thus foresaw, with much certainty, the danger of Saddam; but perhaps, he did not anticipate that the latter's next adventure will take place in Kuwait. However, he correctly estimated that the war with Iran has encouraged Saddam to wage another war, instead of deterring him from repeating this feat when he was almost defeated between 1982 and 1983. In Ghassan Charbel's book, the Colonel-General Nizar al-Khazraji, the Chief of Staff of the Iraqi army, was called to the army headquarters on 2/8/1990, where he was informed by the Lieutenant General Alaa al-Janabi, the secretary general of army command, that “we have completed the occupation of Kuwait”. After that, the Minister of Defense Abdul Jabbar Shanshal arrived to the army HQ, and was informed of the same news. Saddam Hussein was thus a conspirator par excellence, and no one else other than himself knew about the decision to invade [Kuwait], other than Hussein Kamel, his son in law, and Ali Hassan al-Majid (Chemical Ali). Salah Omar al-Ali, a member of the Revolutionary Command Council and the Regional Baath Party leadership, and who later on became a Minister then an Ambassador, recounts how Saddam Hussein participated in the Non-Aligned Movement Summit in Havana in September 1979; there, he met with the Iranian foreign minister Ebrahim Yazdi, and the meeting was fairly friendly which made the Ambassador al-Ali believe that matters between the two countries will go well. However, Saddam Hussein then surprised him by saying that “this is an opportunity that will not present itself again. We will defeat the Iranians and recover every single inch that they took from Shatt al-Arab”. Also, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was Saddam's prisoner until the latter succeeded him in office. As soon as Saddam seized power, he executed 54 senior members of the Baath Party, on charges of conspiring against him. After the failed coup attempt in 1996, he also executed 39 senior officers. In fact, almost each page of the book “Saddam Was Here” contains a reference to an assassination or a massacre; this is because following the fall of monarchy, Iraq was governed by men who all had one thing in common: complete ignorance of the fundamentals of governance combined with a rare sense of cruelty of which they themselves became victims at some point, along with the other victims; as they say, “fires burn each other if they found nothing to enflame”. In the course of the book, however, the reader will be surprised to read that the revolutionaries of the first coups were far from being corrupt, and that Abdul Karim Qasim continued to live in a rented apartment, even when he was the supreme leader, while distributing houses among the officers and other officials. Similarly, Abdul Salam Arif and his colleagues were not corrupt, and used to share the bills for their meals at a nearby restaurant, even when they seized power, while Abdul Salam's brother Abdul Sami' was a drycleaner; also, Abdul Rahman Arif took power and left all while being uncorrupted, and no accusation was ever made against him. Nonetheless, corruption began with Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam Hussein and Salih Mahdi Ammash, and their sons in stories that reflect the collapse of the values of Iraqi society, in particular during the 35 terrifying years of Saddam's presidency. The book also contains long interviews conducted by Ghassan Charbel with Hazim Jawad, Salah Omar al-Ali, Nizar al-Khazraji and Ahmad Chalabi, which are all important. However, the most important one in my opinion was the 52 hour recorded interview that was conducted with Hazim Jawad, who had not spoken before that interview and never spoke again to anyone afterwards, although he promised to write his memoirs one day but did not. Thus, the accounts he gave to Ghassan Charbel remain the only narration of his role in the beginnings of the Baath party and the 1958 revolution, and in Abdul Karim Qasim's coup against his comrades, and also in the 1963 revolution and the era of Abdul Salam Arif's monopoly of power, and the Baath Party's return to power in 1968, and finally, the gradual rise of Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was just a Baath partisan when he participated in the assassination attempt against Abdul Karim Qasim in 1959, replacing another young man who could not take part in the attempt. The senior Baath party members then fled to Syria, while Fouad Al-Rikabi wanted to honour Saddam by appointing him as a member, and hence made him a candidate, something that was encouraged by Hazim Jawad. They were all in the basement of an apartment in Damascus; following this, Saddam ruled with a cave and basement mentality until he was extracted from a hole to be tried and executed. The longest interview in the book was the one conducted with Ahmad Chalabi; while I might believe some of his accounts of the events, and accept that the U.S High Commissioner Paul Bremer's first decision was to dissolve the Baath party and dismiss the Baathists from their jobs, and that it was his second decision that disbanded the Iraqi army without consulting anyone, I find it that it was Chalabi who is responsible for the destruction that ensued in Iraq following the occupation. While he perhaps did not anticipate that one million Iraqis will perish in the course of the invasion, he, in his blind hatred of Saddam Hussein (who deserves what happened to him), did not notice that he had left Iraq when the country was still in its [political] adolescence. Nor did he notice that those individuals with whom he cooperated to oust Saddam were known to be notable enemies of Islam and Muslims, and to be some of the most despicable Likudnik neo-conservatives; in fact, he kept quoting during the interview the likes of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Faith. I insist here that such figures have worked to destroy Iraq only to serve the state of Israel. Al-Chalabi mentions how he entered Iraq on foot, and talks about Kanan Makiya. However, Makiya is better than al-Chalabi because he admitted his mistake, while al-Chalabi is still brazen and insists that there is no blood on his hands, while I see his hands covered with the blood of the Iraqis. “Saddam was here” is a must-read for anyone who wants to know the truth about the tragedy of Iraq in the past half century. I presented the book while almost expressing no opinions, because my column is published in Al-Hayat, of which Ghassan Charbel is the editor in chief, and also because the author is a personal friend. For this reason, I avoided offering any praises which I would have otherwise given to him, had I not known Charbel. [email protected]
