Saddam's Delusions: The View From the Inside

Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006

Summary:  A special, double-length article from the upcoming May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, presenting key excerpts from the recently declassified book-length report of the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.

Kevin Woods is a defense analyst in Washington, D.C. James Lacey is a military analyst for the U.S. Joint Forces Command. Williamson Murray is Class of 1957 Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy. Along with Mark Stout and Michael Pease, they were the principal participants in the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.

In a wide-ranging discussion with his closest advisers in the fall of 1990, Saddam provided an insight into his "unique" abilities: "America is a complicated country. Understanding it requires a politician's alertness that is beyond the intelligence community. Actually, I forbade the intelligence outfits from deducing from press and political analysis anything about America. I told them that [this] was not their specialty, because these organizations, when they are unable to find hard facts, start deducing from newspapers, which is what I already know. I said I don't want either intelligence organization [the Iraqi Intelligence Service or the General Military Intelligence Directorate] to give me analysis -- that is my specialty. . . . We agree to continue on that basis . . . which is what I used with the Iranians, some of it out of deduction and some of it through invention and connecting the dots, all without having hard evidence."

After 1991, Saddam's confidence in his military commanders steadily eroded, while his confidence in his own abilities as a military genius strengthened. Like a number of other despots in history who dabbled in military affairs, Saddam began to issue a seemingly endless stream of banal instructions. He could not resist giving detailed training guidance.

Dozens of surviving memoranda echo the style and content of a 2002 top-secret document titled "Training Guidance to the Republican Guard." These documents all hint at the kind of guidance military officers received from Saddam on a regular basis. One chapter of the "training guidance" document, called "Notes and Directions Given by Saddam Hussein to His Elite Soldiers to Cover the Tactics of War," charged officers to do the following: "Train in a way that allows you to defeat your enemy; train all units' members in swimming; train your soldiers to climb palm trees so that they may use these places for navigation and sniper shooting; and train on smart weapons."

In the aftermath of the 1991 war, the Iraqi military made extensive efforts to "learn" from its experiences during Desert Storm. These attempts were hampered by Saddam's conviction that his ground forces had performed well in the fighting. This certainty forced officers compiling Iraqi lessons-learned analyses to avoid issues that might involve Saddam's prestige or question the Iraqi forces' fighting abilities. Instead, they focused on peripheral issues that were almost totally irrelevant to winning wars. These restrictions led to some perverse claims, such as that the Republican Guard had actually performed well in the war by avoiding annihilation: "If it were not for these precautions, we would have suffered great loss, but when we compare our losses with the large number of fighter aircraft, missiles, and artillery bombing that the Iraqi army was subject to we find these losses trifling. That proved that the Republican Guards and the armed forces managed to reduce the danger from air strikes." Such briefings drove home the point that Iraq had done well in Desert Storm (at least on the issues that mattered most to the regime). In a short time, the constant praise for Iraq's tactics during the war -- digging deep bunkers and dispersing and hiding the Iraqi army -- made them into de facto operational doctrine.

Little evidence exists that any of the politicized Iraqi generals understood the advantages in maneuverability, speed, command and control, or training that the U.S. forces enjoyed. By the time the military was ready to brief Saddam on the lessons of the Persian Gulf War, however, they did fully understand the danger of presenting him with claims other than those he already believed. Truthful analyses therefore gave way to belittlement of the U.S. victory and denials that the United States had any advantage over Iraq other than in military technology. One comment made by an Iraqi general during a mid-1990s conference was typical: "After the liberation of our land in Kuwait, and despite the fact that more than 30 countries headed by the occupation forces of the U.S. rushed madly upon our Republican Guard, our performance was heroic."

THE RISE OF PARAMILITARY FORCES

It is hard to overestimate the effects that the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings of 1991 had on Saddam's outlook. After that point, the threat of another uprising consistently remained his top security concern. One of the precautions he took to prevent and, if necessary, quell a future disturbance was to create private armies made up of politically reliable troops: the Saddam Fedayeen, the al Quds Army, and the Baath Party militia. Ironically, these organizations actually worsened national security by making army recruitment more difficult and by stripping the military of needed equipment. And when they eventually went to battle against the onrushing coalition forces, they were obliterated in short order.

Most Western analysts have argued that Saddam created these militias to help defend Iraq from external attack. Documents obtained after Operation Iraqi Freedom, however, indicate that the original and primary purpose of the paramilitary forces had little to do with protecting Iraq from invasion. The militias were indeed charged with that task -- but only later on, after Saddam became fascinated with the success of the Palestinian intifadas and with the U.S. experience in Somalia. The original and primary purpose of the paramilitary groups was to defend Iraq from internal enemies, not external ones.

The al Quds Army ("al Quds" is Arabic for "Jerusalem") was a regional militia created to control particular areas of Iraq and crush as rapidly as possible any disturbance that occurred. The best evidence suggests that close to 500,000 Iraqis joined the al Quds force, albeit with widely varying degrees of commitment. As to its value as a military force in times of war, the minister of defense best expressed the view of his colleagues when he said, "The Quds force was a headache, they had no equipment for a serious war, and their creation was a bad idea. The Ministry of Defense was required to give them weapons that were taken from the real army. But the army had no control of them. Their instructions came only from the president's office and not from normal military channels."