The Redhunter

- Saddam was amazed the we had stopped short during Desert Storm. After the Gulf War, he simply couldn’t imagine that we would actually go through with a ground invasion and go all the way to Baghdad.

- Saddam thought that just like with Desert Storm, in 2003 we would start with a sustained air campaign.

- Saddam turned General Patton's aphorism that “no poor dumb son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other poor dumb son of a bitch die for his” on its head. He perversely saw victory through how may Iraqis could die for him. He had an almost World War I view of war, that his mounting casualties meant that he was winning.

- During OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 2003 invasion) everyone in his government was afraid to tell Saddam bad news. Further, no one wanted to say that the military plans Saddam came up with were rubbish.

- During OIF Saddam was told his Saddam Fedayeen were being successful in attacking American supply convoys when in fact they were being slaughtered.

- “…Saddam and his advisors lived in a world determined by personal ideology and the narrow perspectives of people who grew up in small Iraqi villages. It is this insular mindset, and its subsequent manifestations that this book describes.”

I THE NATURE OF THE REGIME

- In the 1990s Saddam worried a lot about “international Zionism” and saw their troubles at the UN as being caused by "the Zionists". UN General Secretary Butros-Butros Ghali had a Jewish mother, and had married a Jew. Saddam believed that Zionists had driven the Mongols from Europe in the 13th century, and and had deliberatly pushed them toward Baghdad. The Mongols then sacked the city, leaving a mountain of skulls, which he blamed on the aforementioned Jews. As a result of this anti-Semetic paranoia, he and his security services were always on the lookout for internal "Zionist" plots.

- Saddam saw himself as a modern Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, two heroes of ancient Iraq

- By 2003 Saddam was completely ignorant of the true state of the Iraqi army. Tariz Aziz said that Saddam “lost touch with reality during the 1990s”. He was in denial about his loss during the Gulf War, for example.

- Saddam made decisions himself, for example decided to invade Iran while on vacation and without consulting any advisors. Sometimes he did consult close relatives and advisors but did so erratically. He had “mystical” confidence in his own abilities.

- In the 1990s during meetings Saddam reminded advisors who disagreed with him about his past “right” decisions. He was infallible, he thought.

- Saddam did not recognize that for Americans, Sept 11 changed everything.

My Take

Nothing terribly earth-shattering so far. The Washington Times story I summarized in my introductory piece had more from later parts of the report, ones I will summarize this week.

However, one cannot help but notice similarites between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler. Hitler too had delusions of granduer, believing himself to be the reincarnation of Frederick Barbarossa or Frederick II ("Frederick the Great"). Hitler's early triumphs such as the remilitarization of the Rhineland, Munich, the blitzkrieg invasion of Poland made him feel invinceable, with disasterous results later in the war. Hitler trusted no one but himself, and in the end lost touch with reality.

One shouldn't take these parallels too far, of course. But they are sometimes helpful in learning how to deal with an enemy.

Just as Osama bin Laden saw our withdrawals from Lebanon after the Marine barracks was bombed, and from Somalia after the "Black Hawk Down" episode as signs of weakness, so did Saddam see our loss in Vietnam in the same light. But while in 1991 we saw the Gulf War as a victory for us, Saddam came to see it as proof that we could always be counted on to stop short of driving all the way to Baghdad.

So we do now see why Saddam felt it safe to bluff, and lead us to believe that he had stockpiles of WMD.

Saddam wanted everyone to believe that despite the inspections and sanctions, he had outwitted the Americans, British, and "Zionists" and had kept a portion of his WMD stockpile. This way he could still look tough; always important for a dictator, whoee internal enemies are not always imaginary.