Why Did Saddam Choose To Fight The Gulf War In 2003?

Why Did Saddam Choose To Fight The Gulf War In 2003?
On 9 April 2003, three weeks after the US forces had invaded Iraq, an armoured engineering vehicle of the US Marine Corps pulled down a statue in Firdos Square, Baghdad. Saddam’s regime had slipped into history, at a cost of less than 150 American lives.

The war ended with no surrender ceremony or victory celebrations. Relatively few Iraqis were taken as prisoners of war. The 400,000-strong Iraqi army simply vanished into thin air, its defeated soldiers preferring to exchange their uniforms for civilian clothes and to walk back home. They had fought more than once for their megalomaniacal ruler and were too worn out to fight this one to the bitter end.

Saddam himself eluded capture for several months. He was eventually hunted down a few years later, when soldiers of the US 4th Infantry Division flushed him out of a spider-hole in a farmhouse outside his birthplace in Tikrit. Earlier, the person who had given refuge to his sons betrayed their presence to the Americans. When they refused to surrender, they were killed in an intense firefight. Their patched-up bodies were then put on display for the world to see.

The biggest mystery of the war is as to why did Saddam go to war a second time with an enemy that had beaten him the first time in 1991.

A US military project suggests a plausible answer. It is based on interviews conducted by the Pentagon with 110 of Saddam’s aides by US officials disguised as military historians. The interviewees separately gave similar accounts, corroborating the main themes.

The key message is that Saddam thought the war would never take place. He knew he was in no position to fight the US. In the Gulf War—which he had vaingloriously called the Mother of All Battles—his forces were pushed out of Kuwait in less than seven weeks.

At that time, he had almost a million men under arms, equipped with the best Soviet weaponry. When the second war began on 20 March 2003, his forces were worn out by a dozen years of sanctions, their equipment was old and rusty and their air defenses had been attenuated. Without air cover, his landlocked forces could not be expected to prevail against a superior enemy.

He, better than anyone else in Iraq, also knew that he had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with which to turn the tide. When he revealed this 'secret' to his senior military officers three months prior to the war, their faces were ashen. Gotterdammerung was upon them.

So, Saddam did not plan for war with the US. He was convinced that the Russians would be able to prevail in the UN and restrain the US from attacking Iraq. In reality, all they did was limit the number of allies that joined the US in invading Iraq. In playing his version of Russian roulette, Saddam showed that he had learnt nothing from the Gulf War. He was paranoid about internal threats and oblivious to external threats. That is why he ignored the stern ultimatum delivered to him by President Bush on 17 March 2003: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to go will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.”

Saddam made fatal errors in his military deployments, preferring to give key commands to trusted friends, some of whom had no military expertise. If war broke out, he wanted to micro-manage the war – even though he had no real military experience. He gave no real authority to field commanders. Thus, key bridges were mined but not blown up to prevent American armour from rolling across the Tigris into Baghdad. The officers manning the bridges kept waiting for orders to blow them up, knowing that if they blew them up without permission, they would be shot.

The myth that Baghdad would become a Stalingrad-by-the-Tigris was blown up in two hours by a single reconnaissance convoy of the US 3rd Infantry Division that had embarked upon a “thunder run” through the capital on 7 April. Led by Colonel Perkins, the operation had begun at 6 am simply to gauge the city’s defenses. By 8 am, Perkins had taken Saddam’s Republican Palace and was making plans to spend the night there.

Once large-scale military operations began in Iraq, no one was in charge of the Iraqi armed forces. The command-and-control structure evaporated, leaving small tactical military formations to fend for themselves. His army had devolved into automatic mode.

Perhaps this was not a surprise. In spite of his soldierly antics—like firing a shotgun from a palace balcony or dancing in the streets with a pistol in his holster—Saddam was not a soldier. He had never served in the Iraqi army. Early in life, he had had the ambition to train as an officer but lacked the education to take the necessary entrance exam. To the very end, he remained envious of his colleagues who were admitted into the Iraqi Military Academy, many from families that had served in the Ottoman army.

On seizing power in 1978, he led the country down a ruinous path in which it would fight a series of losing wars. He was a fervent admirer of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator. Any Iraqi general who showed signs of becoming popular with the troops was viewed as a threat. He would be cleverly removed from office and ultimately killed. Unfortunately for Saddam, the cunning and ruthlessness that allowed him to prevail over internal rivals conferred on him a blind spot when facing external enemies that proved fatal in the end.

When the time came, and he was standing in the dock on criminal charges, Saddam continued to be in denial, insisting that he was the president of Iraq. He extolled Iraqis to get their dignity back by expelling the occupiers, knowing that he had killed more of them than the Americans.

In his final days, he came across as a man from a Shakespearean play. It would have required all of the Bard’s talents to portray his complex character. Maybe he would have named the play Hubris Personica, in which the main character would have been a jester and a wizard, a villain and a hero, all in one.

Dr. Faruqui is a history buff and the author of Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan, Routledge Revivals, 2020. He tweets at @ahmadfaruqui