Inspecting Saddam
An Israeli historian helps diagnose the dictator
By Tamar Miller and Tamar Morad, 10/27/2002
N THE FALL of 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Israeli historian Amatzia Baram asked some prominent Arab intellectuals to predict the Iraqi dictator's next move. "They assured me that Saddam would withdraw peacefully," Baram recalls. "They assumed that he was fully aware that his army had no chance." Even senior Iraqi officers, taken prisoner in the Gulf War, said they had assumed that Saddam would back down in the face of the Allied ultimatum. Yet Saddam stayed and fought, Baram says, "until he brought upon his armed forces the worst defeat in Iraqi history."
Baram, 64, a professor at the University of Haifa who helped found its new Persian Gulf Research Center, is one of the world's leading Iraq scholars. He serves as an advisor to the Israeli government and says he "occasionally compares notes" with US government officials on issues related to the Gulf region. His analysis of the Iraqi situation comes with a strong warning. As Baram explained over breakfast in downtown Boston recently, "Saddam wants weapons of mass destruction not for survival, but to manifest his historical destiny -- to become protector and ruler of the Arab world."
At a time when scholars and politicians are combing Saddam's past for clues to his future moves, Baram was traveling the East Coast and Canada to give testimony before Congress and address university audiences and Jewish groups. Baram's command of the historical evidence is broad and confident: He is the author of, among other well-regarded works, a 1991 study of Saddam's use of Iraqi history, traditional mythology, and archaeology to shore up the ideology of the ruling Ba'ath Party. But his conclusions are stark: Saddam is most certainly pursuing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and doing so with the worst intentions. "How will Saddam behave when he is the proud owner of a nuclear arsenal?" Baram asks. "Chances are he will immediately gamble on it."
Baram, as an Israeli, has never been able to visit Iraq, and he has never met Saddam. But in the 1970s, when Iraq and its leader were neglected territory among Middle East scholars, he began an intense personal study, creating an extensive Hussein family tree going back 11 generations, and tracking down dozens of close sources, including Saddam's childhood neighbors from the village of Tikrit and their Baghdadi cousins -- Jews now living in Israel who tell a story of a child with a tragic beginning.
When Saddam's mother, newly widowed and pregnant with the future leader, discovered that her older son had a brain tumor, the neighbors' relatives drove 100 miles from Baghdad to take them to the hospital. After the child died on the operating table the mother tried to throw herself in front of a bus. The Jewish neighbors intervened and nursed the despondent woman back to health -- in effect saving the life of the future dictator. Back in Tikrit, the young Saddam was raised by relatives, primarily an uncle whose army career was ruined after he participated in a pro-Nazi revolt against British colonial dominance. Saddam's mother married an abusive man whom the future dictator despised. "Even after Saddam became the strongman in Iraq, and all the family lived in tremendous affluence, Saddam's stepfather was still living in a mud hut in the tiny old dusty village of Uja," says Baram.
Despite Saddam's ruthless reputation, Baram says, "he is also very loyal and remembers favors -- even from a Jew." A Baghdadi Jewish merchant now living in Israel told Baram of languishing in jail for ten years until Saddam, touring the prison to inspect "the daily catch," recognized him as a man who had given him spare change in his street-kid days, and set him free.
Baram is fascinated by what he bluntly calls "Saddam's evil." Yet he also speaks of being "touched" and "moved" by what he sees as Saddam's attempts to fill a well of childhood deprivation, like the extravagant public birthday parties featuring enormous cakes, serenades from little girls, and games with prepubescent boys that show off the 65-year-old dictator's prowess with his sword -- bigger and longer than anyone else's.
Baram's long article "Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography," published in the Jerusalem Quarterly in 1980, was one of the first biographical accounts of the Iraqi leader. (In that early effort, he spoke of the "father/son" relationship between Saddam and Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, the Ba'ath party leader whom Hussein succeeded in 1977.) Baram recently collaborated on a study, sponsored by the US Air Force, of Saddam's personality and modus operandi with Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist who helped found the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior and now directs the political psychology program at George Washington University. The essay appears in a forthcoming volume titled "Know Thy Enemy." Though the authors emphasize there is "no evidence that he is suffering from a psychotic disorder," Post does label Saddam a "malignant narcissist" -- a person dangerously obsessed with the admiration of others and acutely sensitive to offense. (When The New Yorker recently asked Post what he would do if Saddam showed up in his office for treatment, he quipped, "I'd run.")
These efforts at preventative psychobiography recall the secret dossier on Hitler commissioned in 1943 by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, which assessed the German dictator's personality ("Hitler has many characteristics which border on the schizophrenic," its authors concluded) and attempted to predict his behavior. But Saddam is no Hitler, Baram says, "not only because Iraq has never had a fraction of Germany's capabilities, but also because he is not pathologically anti-Jewish." At the same time, he adds, "Saddam is similar to Hitler in his compulsive, big-time military gambling, even against the advice of his professional generals."
Like other high-rollers, Saddam tends to get caught up in "spirals of elation and risk-taking," argues Baram. "Such a spiral is more certain to come about when he feels that he is under some threat, when he is the subject of Arab adoration, and when he perceives an offense to his honor. But a sense of military omnipotence is the most important precondition," he says.
One such scenario occurred after Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution, when the Iranian army was weakened and Saddam felt threatened by Iraqi Shi'ites. Saddam claimed victory six days after launching an attack in Sept. 1980. The streets erupted in celebration -- and the war dragged on for another eight years, Baran drily notes. Similarly, in April 1990, after the successful test of the Tammuz missile, Saddam threatened to "burn half of Israel," and assured Yasser Arafat that he would soon "liberate Jerusalem" -- a promise Baram reads as "a possible threat of Israel's nuclear extinction." This threat prompted more "adoration," Baram says, followed by a burst of overconfidence, and then, four months later, the disastrous invasion of Kuwait.
Not all of Baram's colleagues swallow his psychohistorical analysis of Saddam and the Arab street, or his hawkish recommendations. John Esposito, a professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, agrees that Baram is "certainly onto something" when he says that Saddam will use his weapons to secure his place in history. "I think where he might go slightly askew is with the excessive psychologizing," he says.
Stephen Walt, an Iraq expert at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, warns, "Be suspicious when a scholar or expert from another country -- no matter which country -- tells us how to do things." He adds: "Saddam is concerned with survival. He never used weapons of mass destruction against anyone who could pay him back."
But if Saddam's acquisition of nuclear weapons converges with a threat to his power, and a delusional "surge of elation," Baram argues, he will "push the button that will cause thousands, or millions, to go down with him." Baram recalls the testimony of Hussein Kamil, Saddam's son-in-law and the general formerly responsible for Iraq's extensive arms procurement, who defected to Jordan in 1995. (He later returned to Iraq, where he was murdered.) According to Kamil, prior to the Gulf War Saddam ordered him and other senior generals to launch all of their chemical and biological weapons against Israel should communication with Baghdad be lost.
Baram is firm: Unless Saddam experiences "a total personality metamorphosis," once he has nuclear weapons the world will face a "100 percent" chance of catastrophe.
Why should we push toward what he admits might be a disastrous strike against Iraq? "Because the alternative is worse."
Tamar Miller, former executive director of Harvard's Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East, is vice president for education at American Higher Ed, Inc. Tamar Morad is a former reporter for Ha'aretz in Jerusalem.
This story ran in the Boston Globe on 10/27/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
