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Saddam Hussein Feared Iran More Than The United States
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by alia_d | July 2, 2009 at 02:24 pm
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Newly released documents indicate that Saddam Hussein may have feared Iran more than he feared the United States. Saddam Hussein's fear of an Iranian invasion was what led Saddam Hussein to falsely claim that Iraq possessed WMDs.
According to the documents, Saddam Hussein also indicated his dislike of fanatic Iranian mullahs (a hostility he shared with Bush) and called Osama bin Laden a zealot. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein believed that, in a difficult situation, North Korea would be most likely to ally with him.
Interestingly, the dictator said he communicated mostly by courier, instead of telephone. Saddam Hussein could only remember using the phone two times after March 1990.
Saddam Hussein also said that the rumors which claimed he used body doubles to protect himself were false. The rumors were "movie magic, not reality," he said.
The discovery of Saddam Hussein's fear of Iran was made by a research group at George Washington University, which obtained the information from government archives.
The summaries of 20 formal interviews and five additional “casual conversations,” as his captors called them, all from 2004, were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a private research group at George Washington University. They were posted Monday night on the archives’ Web site, nsarchive.org.
However, the information the documents reveal may present a distorted version of what the dictator actually thought, as Saddam Hussein may have been attempting to shape how he would be perceived in history.
“Saddam had limited incentives to talk,” Mr. Duelfer [an FBI agent] said, since he knew he faced trial and likely execution.
F.B.I. interrogators led by George L. Piro, a Lebanese-born agent who is fluent in Arabic, implicitly flattered their prisoner by listening patiently to his recollections and his interpretation of historical events.
According to the documents, Saddam Hussein was worried that admitting inspectors into Iraq would make Iraq weaker in the face of Iran, as an investigation might enable Iran to discover Iraq's weak points, where maximum damage could be inflicted.
In a series of interrogations before his execution, Saddam Hussein told an F.B.I. agent that, on the eve of the 2003 American invasion, Iraq was trapped between United Nations orders to demonstrate that it had disarmed and a fear that appearing too weak would invite attack from its powerful neighbor and foe, Iran.
Saddam Hussein's enmity with Iran began in 1980, when Saddam Hussein initiated a border war that lasted until 1988 and used chemical weapons against Iran.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 19:54 on July 2nd, 2009
I think if we had the research on the Iranian mullahs we would find that they feared Saddam Hussein also.
at 20:13 on July 2nd, 2009
he certainly did since he was not Shia Muslim him self and yet had a large Shia population with is Iraq.
The US did encourage Iraq to go to war against Iran and armed them accordingly.
Unfortunately his trial was a Kangaroo trial and not set by an International court since it would have exposed much of what really went on behind the doors of the US-Iraq relations over the decades.
We should in fact reopen the trial even though Saddam is dead now. And this time in an international court and call all those witnesses that the Defence tried to call and was refused by the Iraqi court.
Saddam was far from innocent, however, many far more guilty are still running free and some are still in high positions of power in the US.