Richard Kettlewell

I wondered a few posts back why Iraq was so uncooperative with UNSCOM despite the looming threat of invasion.

This report has mainly gained publicity because it says the Russians passed intelligence to the Iraqis. However it also adds a further possibility for Iraqi intransigence - that Saddam Hussein simply did not believe that the Americans would risk an invasion:

Through the distortions of his ideological perceptions, Saddam simply could not take the Americans seriously. After all, had they not run away from Vietnam after suffering what to him was a "mere" 58,000 dead? Iraq had suffered 51,000 dead in just one battle on the Fao Peninsula against the Iranians. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Americans had appeared on the brink of destroying much of Iraq's military, including the Republican Guard, but then inexplicably stopped--for fear of casualties, in Saddam's view. Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo all added to Saddam's belief that the Americans could not possibly launch a ground invasion that would seriously threaten his regime.

It also says that his senior officers had similar views; a few believed in the possibility of an attack but thought it would take the form of a sustained air campaign rather than going straight into a ground invasion. (My memory says that quite a few commentators in the west expected this too.)

Blix's suspicion that Saddam was being shielded from the truth by his subordinates is also supported by this report, which argues that telling him bad news, or contradicting him, risked immediate execution, resulting in the dictator being fed entirely on lies and half-truths, particularly in deteriorating situations. Indirect routes did not worth either: according to a senior Republic Guard officer, "any commander who spoke the truth to [Saddam's son] Qusay would lose his head". The end result of this was that even if Saddam had been somehow convinced of the threat, perhaps through a hypothetical meeting with Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei, he had more confidence in Iraq's military than was justified by its actual capabilities, having been shielded from a decade of news of its decline and America's growing strength: he would have expected victory, not rapid and crushing defeat.

I've been reading Hans Blix's book on his experiences as head of UNMOVIC.

When asked about the declaration and the difficulties Iraq might have in reporting about so many types of items over such long periods, I said that “producing mustard gas is not like producing marmalade. You keep track of how much you make and what happens to it.”

...and on the next page when discussing the inspection of a presidential site on the Tigris:

In this guesthouse there were no archives, document files or stores of chemical or biological weapons and no sensitive equipment to tag, but there was lots of marmalade in the refrigerators.

I can't help but feel that someone was having a laugh...

(They did find mustard gas shells elsewhere in the same kind of time frame.)