IRAQ: Americans debriefing captured members of Saddam Hussein's regime are building up a picture of his thinking as the US-led invasion began.Steve Coll reports from Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein refused to order a counter-attack against US troops when war erupted in March because he misjudged the initial ground thrust as a ruse. He had been convinced earlier by Russian and French contacts that he could avoid or survive a land invasion, former Iraqi deputy prime minister Mr Tariq Aziz has told interrogators, according to US officials.
Mr Aziz, who surrendered to US authorities on April 24th, has also said Iraq did not possess stocks of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons on the eve of the war, an assertion that echoes the previously reported statements of other detained Iraqi leaders and scientists. Yet Saddam personally ordered several secret programmes to build - or buy - long-range missiles in defiance of international sanctions, according to Mr Aziz's reported statements.
The former deputy prime minister has described an argument he had with Saddam in 1999, in which the Iraqi president insisted that UN Resolution 687 - enacted to limit Iraq's armaments - prohibited long-range missiles only if they were armed with weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Aziz said he countered, "No, it's a range limit" and said that all Iraqi missiles able to fly beyond 150 kilometres (about 93 miles) were banned, according to a senior US official familiar with the interrogation reports. Saddam demanded in reply, "No, I want to go ahead," according to the senior official.
After nearly five months of prisoner interviews, document searches and site visits, "We know the regime had the greatest problem with the 150-kilometre limit" on missile ranges, said Mr Hamish Killip. He is a former UN arms inspector now working with the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA-supervised body appointed by President Bush to lead the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Saddam and his most senior military commanders saw the range limit "as an invasion of their sovereignty," Mr Killip added. They fumed because hostile neighbours might hit Baghdad with missiles, but Iraq would be unable to answer back.
Yet investigators have found no comparable evidence to date that Saddam was willing after 1999 to risk being caught in major defiance of UN bans on nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, officials involved in the weapons hunt said.
"They seem to have made a mental separation between long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction," Mr Killip said.
Mr Aziz's statements about the Iraqi missile programme have been largely corroborated by documents and interviews with engineers and scientists, officials said. On other subjects, the English-speaking bookworm's reliability as a witness is uncertain. After a turn as the Iraqi president's histrionic spokesman and foreign minister during the early 1990s, Mr Aziz had grown estranged from Saddam as the war approached earlier this year. Officials say they are cautioned by Mr Aziz's long history of deceit and opportunism.
Still, Mr Aziz's extensive co-operation with interrogators has become a fulcrum of recent US and British efforts to explore enduring mysteries of Saddam's conduct during the last two years, several officials said.
As the hunt for major finds of chemical or biological arms has turned cold, US-led investigators seek to understand why Saddam acted as he did if he truly had no sizable arsenal of contraband weapons. From their digs in looted factories and sprawling ammunition dumps, they are moving more and more to an exploration of Saddam's mind.
In addition to Mr Aziz, interrogators have systematically interviewed dozens of former Iraqi generals, intelligence officers and scientists in recent months. They have tried to isolate them from one another to prevent co-ordinated answers.
Among the interrogators' questions are: if Saddam did not have chemical or biological weapons, why did he fail to disabuse US and other intelligence services of their convictions that he did? Why did he also allow UN inspectors to conclude that he was being deceptive?
In early weeks, said officials involved, generals and intelligence officers close to Saddam typically blamed their government's poor record-keeping for arousing suspicions in Washington and at the United Nations. This has been a defence used by Iraqi spokesmen during years of cat-and-mouse struggles with weapons inspectors.
More recently, however, several high-ranking detainees have said they believe that Saddam was afraid to lose face with his Arab neighbours. Saddam concluded that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other countries paid him deference because they feared he had weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was unwilling to reveal that his cupboard was essentially bare, these detainees said, according to accounts from officials.
In separate interviews, several former high-ranking Iraqi generals not held in detention offered similar views. Saddam "had an inferiority complex," said Maj Gen Walid Mohammed Taiee (62), chief of army logistics as the war approached earlier this year. "From a military point of view, if you did have a special weapon, you should keep it secret to achieve tactical surprise . . . But he wanted the whole region to look at him as a grand leader. And during the period when the Americans were massing troops in Kuwait, he wanted to deter the prospect of war."
Interrogators asked Mr Aziz whether Saddam was also trying to bluff Iran, fearful that his hostile neighbour might be developing weapons of mass destruction. Mr Aziz replied, according to the senior US official familiar with his interrogation reports: "Every time I brought up the issue with Saddam, he said, 'Don't worry about the Iranians. If they ever get WMD, the Americans and Israelis will destroy them'."
In the end, say investigators, this fragmentary testimony about Saddam's thinking about special weapons is uncorroborated by hard documentary evidence or an unimpeachable inside source.
"The question we all have is, 'What was so damned important that you were willing to go through all of this?'" said Mr Killip of the Iraq Survey Group. He continued: "I've not heard any totally convincing explanation that's backed up with facts. And it's truly puzzling."
Mr Aziz's extensive interrogations - eased by a US decision to remove his family from Iraq to safe exile in a country that American officials would not name - paint Saddam on the eve of war as a distracted, distrustful despot who was confused, among other things, by his meetings with Russian and French intermediaries. Mr Aziz said Saddam emerged from these diplomatic sessions - some secret at the time - convinced that he might avoid a war that would end his regime, despite evidence to the contrary.
Mr Aziz has told interrogators that French and Russian intermediaries repeatedly assured Saddam during late 2002 and early this year that they would block a US-led war through delays and vetoes at the UN Security Council. Later, according to Mr Aziz, Saddam concluded after private talks with French and Russian contacts that the United States would probably wage a long air war first, as it had done in previous conflicts. By hunkering down and putting up a stiff defence, he might buy enough time to win a ceasefire brokered by Paris and Moscow.
Mr Aziz's account, while provocative, has not been corroborated by other sources, said US officials. They said they were aware Mr Aziz might be trying to pander to his American captors' anger at French and Russian conduct before the war.
The public record of French and Russian back-channel contacts with Saddam on the war's eve is thin and ambiguous. Former Russian prime minister Mr Yevgeny Primakov, long close to Saddam, made an announced visit to Baghdad in February and a secret trip just days before the war's opening on March 20th. A few weeks later, after Baghdad's fall, Mr Primakov held a news conference to explain that, at his clandestine last-ditch meeting,he had urged Saddam to resign.
Mr Primakov said Saddam listened attentively to his ideas and asked him to repeat himself in front of Mr Aziz. But then Saddam changed the subject and mentioned that, in 1991, the leadership of what was then the Soviet Union had also suggested he resign, and he had ignored them.
"Until the last minute, Russia and President Putin did everything in their power to prevent this terrible war," Mr Primakov declared at his news conference, according to the Russian Interfax news agency. Russian commentators raised doubts about Mr Primakov's version, however, arguing that he was too close to Saddam to deliver the sort of tough message he described.
The nature of French contact with Saddam before the war is even less clear. Several media outlets reported early this year that France had opened a private channel to Saddam, but the French Foreign Ministry denied this, insisting its diplomats had made plain to Saddam that he should stand down.
In any event, Saddam emerged from these contacts convinced that Washington would not launch an immediate invasion of Iraq, according to Mr Aziz, as US officials described his statements. Even as US and British forces massed on the Kuwaiti border, Saddam was so sure of himself, Mr Aziz reportedly said, that he refused to order an immediate military response when he heard reports that American ground forces were pouring into Iraq, concluding that the crossing was some sort of feint.
Mr Taiee, one of the former major generals interviewed, agreed that Saddam had "not expected a war". The Iraqi president had concluded that "there would be bombardment as in '98 and the regime would continue and he would be a hero. Then, in case war did happen, these promises he had received from the French and Russians - plus the resistance he thought the army would put up, not knowing that they would go home - would be enough to win a ceasefire and a settlement."
But Maj Gen Amer Shia Jubouri (50), a former army division commander and chief of the Iraqi war college, said in an interview that he believed "the French and Russian governments delivered very clear messages to Saddam that the war was going to happen," and that if Saddam believed otherwise, it was a result of the president's own confusion.
"He obviously misunderstood the theory of deterrence," said Mr Jubouri. "You have to know when this theory can be successful, and when it can be disastrous."
Once the war began, Saddam fulfilled few of his threats. The CIA warned that Saddam might use chemical weapons. Instead, after initial resistance, the regime and army melted away.
Investigators have considered the possibility that Saddam intended all along to make a strategic withdrawal from Baghdad and fight a guerrilla war, but they say they can find no evidence of such a strategy from interrogations or documents. They also doubt Saddam could have persuaded his generals to abandon Baghdad as part of a defensive strategy, and they argue that if this was really Saddam's plan, it was poorly executed.
American and British interrogators have asked dozens of generals who served in high-ranking command roles in Iraqi army divisions during this year - some imprisoned, some living freely - why Saddam did not use chemical weapons to defend Baghdad. A number of these generals have said that they, too, believed chemical weapons would be deployed by Saddam for the capital's defence. Yet not one of the officers admitted receiving such weapons himself.
"The only consistent pattern we've gotten - 100 per cent consistent - is that each commander says, 'My unit didn't have WMD, but the one to my right or left did'," said the senior US official involved. This has led some American interrogators to theorise that Saddam may have bluffed not only neighbouring governments and the United States, but his own restive generals.
"He would not hesitate to deceive even his hand-chosen commanders if he thought that by this he could achieve success," agreed Mr Jubouri, the former general.
Investigators of the Iraq Survey Group have discovered that, in the months before the war, many specific military and civilian defensive measures ordered by Saddam in past conflicts were only partially carried out or were ignored. There appears to have been "some kind of breakdown in the structure that was controlling things," Mr Killip said.
Former military leaders, including dozens of detained generals who have been interrogated, have cited the Iraqi president's military incompetence, isolation, and reliance on family and tribe in a time of crisis as central factors in the regime's collapse.
In discussing Saddam's failure to use chemical weapons in the defence of Baghdad, officials said, the generals often rant sarcastically that Saddam's government did not even prepare land mines and other basic military defences to block or slow the US advance. Why, they ask, should chemical weapons be any different?
"There was no unity of command. There were five different armies being used, no co-operation or co-ordination," retired Maj Gen Abed Mutlaq Jubouri (63), a former division commander later jailed by Saddam for conspiring against the regime, said in an interview.
"As to the defence of Baghdad, there was no plan."