Simply put, Mr. Ambassador, it’s a matter of war and peace. U.S. and U.N. officials claim Saddam Hussein might use his presidential compounds to hide weapons of mass destruction. These aren’t, after all, just stately mansions. There are scores of official residences, and some are sprawling complexes that cover several square miles, with as many as 90 buildings. Amid waterfalls and man-made lakes in Saddam’s assorted Xanadus, there’s reportedly a factory for building pleasure boats and a prison for torturing dissidents. Almost anything could be hidden away. So Washington and London want a search warrant from the United Nations: a Security Council resolution guaranteeing inspectors the right to go anywhere in Iraq any time, including those palaces.
More than that–and this is the reason the debate continues at the United Nations–the Bush administration wants a warrant to wage war the minute Saddam or his minions get in the way. No more lying, cheating and special pleading of the kind inspectors faced repeatedly from 1991 to late 1998, when they were withdrawn prior to American and British bombing raids. “We will not be satisfied with Iraqi half-truths or Iraqi compromises or Iraqi efforts to get us back in the same swamp,” warned Secretary of State Colin Powell. Hans Blix, head of the new inspection organization UNMOVIC, first announced his team was ready to go to Baghdad last week, then stood down when it was clear Washington wanted to ram through new guidelines.
Eight “presidential sites” in particular are at the center of the debate. In early 1998, with Security Council backing, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to special procedures for inspecting these palace-and-office complexes scattered around the country. There would be diplomats in tow, and ample warning that inspectors were on their way. Theoretically, that could allow files to be hidden or movable biological-weapons labs to be towed out of sight, which is just what the United States and Britain want to avoid. But other permanent members of the Security Council–the Russians, the Chinese and the French–are less worried about Saddam’s palatial shell game than they are about Bush’s alleged inclination to shoot first and ask questions later.
Is there really reason to believe Saddam is hiding horrific weapons, or the plans to make them, in his presidential residences? Good reason, yes. Hard evidence, no. Of course, those who’ve watched Saddam closely over the years find reason to believe almost anything. “The Iraqis started us down this road with all their lying and hiding,” says Scott Ritter, an outspoken former member of the arms-inspection teams in the ’90s. Eleven years ago the United Nations demanded that Iraq provide a “full, final and complete declaration” of all its weapons of mass destruction. Robert Gallucci, another American who helped set up the first inspection regime known as UNSCOM, recalled in a speech last year “the initial [declarations] were laugh-out-loud funny.” The Iraqis claimed there were no nukes, and no biological weapons at all. Deadlines came and went for eight years, and so did declarations, not one of which proved full or complete, much less final.
But suspecting Saddam of lying about his doomsday arsenal and finding his arms caches or factories are quite different propositions. The issue of the presidential sites came up after inspectors finally discovered, in 1995, just how badly they’d been lied to about the biological-weapons program. It was much more extensive and dangerous than they’d thought. “There was a systematic governmentwide effort to hide things, and we’d been investigating the bottom of the food chain,” says Charles Duelfer, deputy head of UNSCOM at the time. The inspectors wanted to go to the center of decision making. “It’s not like we thought there was going to be anthrax under Saddam’s bed,” says Duelfer. “The real objects of our intentions [were] documents and computers.”
Yet after months of haggling and the specter of war, when the inspections finally were carried out, nothing was found. Former inspector Ritter (whose credibility has been damaged by his acceptance of $400,000 from an Iraqi-American businessman to fund a documentary critical of U.S. policy) claims there was a more nefarious purpose. Several of the inspectors were gathering intelligence on where Saddam lived, worked and probably took shelter in air raids–not so they could eliminate his weapons, but to eliminate him.
“Embedded in the team was a British M.I.6 case officer, whose job was to recruit a senior Iraqi official,” Ritter told NEWSWEEK. “We were trying to use the inspection team’s access to achieve this recruitment. Also embedded in the team were CIA officers, whose job was to do a structural-intelligence analysis of Saddam Hussein’s bunkers, and to pinpoint the residences and offices of every senior Iraqi government official.” The recruitment failed, but when the United States and Britain launched four days of punitive attacks in December 1998, “every residence and every office occupied by senior Iraqi government officials was precisely targeted,” Ritter claims. “The only way that information was gathered was through the process of inspector access to these facilities.”
Even if there is no plot to terminate the dictator, inspection of his palaces is–and is meant to be–a terminal humiliation: an assault on the integrity, sovereignty and national security of the Iraqi state that Saddam claims as his very own. (When U.S. officials criticized the dictator for erecting 14 luxurious mansions in the early 1990s, while his people suffered from hunger and lack of medicines, he was quick to correct them. “Not only 14 new palaces, there are –many more across Iraq,” he declared in his sepulchral monotone. “But these are not Saddam’s palaces,” he added shamelessly. “They are the people’s palaces.”) Invade his residences and you dis him in front of his people, you break the bond between the state and Saddam that all that residential grandeur is meant to symbolize.
As a civil engineer who worked on several Saddam residences told NEWSWEEK last week, there’s a lot of Saddam in every one of those buildings. “Saddam was very much obsessed with his palaces,” said Entifad Qanbar, now exiled in the United States. Saddam likes to identify himself with the ancient King Nebuchadnezzar, not only because he built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but because Nebuchadnezzar, as Saddam likes to say, “was the one who brought the bound Jewish slaves from Palestine.” In Babylonian palaces, many of the bricks were stamped with the ancient king’s sign. Now those in Saddam’s palaces are stamped in similar fashion, with a drawing of the dictator, or an eight-pointed star, and the motto: BUILT IN THE ERA OF SADDAM HUSSEIN.
“Yusuf,” a former bodyguard of Saddam’s, spent 10 years serving in 20 of his residences before escaping in 1999 to Jordan. An unlettered soldier, Yusuf has difficulty describing the opulence he saw. “Whatever there is in the whole world, these palaces have it.” He recalls as many as 5,000 security staff actively guarding the tyrant’s mansions. Saddam’s personal food taster is a retired field marshal named Abdul Mahoud, and because Saddam likes to swim, each palace has several pools. There are ponds for fish, “and all kinds of zoos for animals,” Yusuf says.
Is there more? Yusuf claims he saw refrigerated rooms in the basements of the Salahadin palaces, some of them occupying an entire floor underground. And he often saw refrigerated containers, ready to hoist onto trucks and move elsewhere, in the palace compounds. Storage for volatile chemicals or bioweapons? Or merely for sides of beef? “Everything is possible,” said Yusuf. But if there ever were weapons there, it’s doubtful they’ll be around when inspectors come knocking. Such is life in the era of Saddam–for as long as it lasts.
