Springtime for Saddam

In W. D. Snodgrass’ poem cycle The Fuehrer Bunker (1977; 1995) leading Nazi personages recount the final days of the Nazi regime from deep inside the bunker where Adolph Hitler and his circle were holding out shortly before the end of World War II. In one of the more interesting poems, Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, describes the scene about one week before the regime falls:

Down there, they’ll be talking strategy, talking
of miracles. Dry spit on his lips, he will
lurch up off the table shaking worn-out
maps, quote his latest falsified
reports, assign forces wiped
out months ago, supplies
we never had, shriek
at the generals
for merciless
revenge

For months (years even) the German high command concealed defeats, lied about troop deployments, misstated supplies, and generally misled Hitler to such a degree that he had lost touch with military reality, as the passage above demonstrates. They did this, of course, because they were scared to death of Hitler, and rather than risk his ire, they simply colluded to keep him in the dark. Often enough, it was Hitler’s military strategies that had gotten the Wehrmacht into tight fixes, with overextended supply lines stretching deep into a Russian winter (why is it all dictators believe themselves to be masterful military strategists?).

And so it is that despotic power (mixed with a goodly dollop of megalomania and bloodlust) reaches a point of diminishing returns. Men who motivate others through fear and who have concentrated all power into their hands alone simply cannot depend upon receiving sound information. This has never been shown to be more true than with the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) 230-page report, released today, detailing the inner workings of the Iraqi government on the eve of its collapse in 2003. The report, two years in the making and recently declassified, is the subject of a long essay in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray (the essay debuted in web-only format on March 12).

JFCOM’s report is the product of scores of interviews with top Iraqi military and bureaucratic leaders immediately following the war and pieces together a rather interesting portrait of life at the top of Iraq’s military-industrial complex under Saddam Hussein. The highlights of the report include:

• The widespread culture of lying, motivated by fear, that kept unpleasant truths from reaching Saddam regarding the readiness and effectiveness of his troops

• Saddam’s paranoid delusion that an internal rebellion was of more immediate concern than an American invasion

• Saddam’s false belief that France and Russia could prevent an American invasion, and would choose to do because of lucrative business contracts with the Baathist regime

• Saddam’s calculated game of obfuscation regarding whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He wanted some folks to belief Iraq did have WMD, believing the perception would serve as a deterrent

• A fairly strong case that the current Sunni insurgency was not the product of pre-war Baathist planning

• Saddam’s belief that Iraq was winning the war, even as American armored divisions were tearing through Baghdad. This explains why Saddam never gave the order to torch the oilfields or to flood the southern portion of the country by destroying dams

Fascinating stuff. I have not completed the full report yet, but if you can access the Foreign Affairs article, which I have read, it is well worth the read.