To Back Down Would Not Fit Hussein’s Profile

Beneath the somber, seemingly calm facade, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein gets rattled by stress. He loses weight and sleeps less than his customary five hours a night. His rhetoric becomes defiant, his behavior aggressive. His calculations turn out to be gross miscalculations.

But one thing he never does in the face of crisis is blink and back down.

To do so, in a region where words often carry more weight than actions and style is as important as substance, would be to lose face. That humiliation would be unthinkable, analysts say, for a man convinced he is destined to unite and lead the Arab world and sees himself as a modern-day Saladin, the warrior who defeated the crusaders and regained Jerusalem in 1187.

Diplomats, both Western and Arab, see no chance that Hussein will accept exile nor much likelihood that he will destroy any weapons of mass destruction that allegedly fortify his dreams of power. With more than 200,000 U.S. troops at his doorstep, diplomats expect him to play for time, his ego fed by shouts of support from the Arab street and fractures on the U.N. Security Council. He is, after all, exactly where he believes he belongs -- on center stage, in the spotlight of world attention.

Iraqi television in recent days has repeatedly shown the leader meeting with military commanders, appearing calm and puffing on cigars as he receives their praise and offers folksy advice in exchange. His every statement underlines his determination to remain in power and his conviction that Iraq will fiercely fight any onslaught, that Iraqis will not allow themselves to be ruled by foreigners and that the United States and Britain will pay a very high price if they dare to invade.

“While he is not a martyr, he certainly has his eye on history, and to cut and run would be a major blow to his historical image,” said Jerrold Post, a Bethesda, Md., psychiatrist who wrote an analysis of Hussein’s political and personal behavior for the CIA.

“When conflict begins, and not before, I think he will probably use chemical weapons against allied forces in the field as well as against Israel. He could set Iraqi oil fields afire, as he did Kuwait’s in 1991. ‘If I can’t have the oil, no one can,’ he’d say. Then the question becomes: To what degree would his senior officers follow his orders?”

Pushed into a corner, Hussein and the Iraqi leadership will defend themselves to the last breath, but pragmatists within the regime may seek other options for their survival, especially after honor has been served by at least initially resisting the invaders.

Through a Western lens, Hussein seems foolhardy, unpredictable, perhaps unbalanced, certainly ruthless. But to dismiss him to the realm of madness, Post said, would be a misinterpretation. Hussein shows no symptoms of psychiatric disorders and over 34 years of leadership has revealed himself to be quite predictable and “a judicious political calculator, who is by no means irrational, but is dangerous to the extreme.”

An Arab ambassador in Washington added: “This is Russian roulette, and what he is doing is quite rational. I don’t support it, but it’s rational. On one hand, he believes he’s America’s target, no matter what he does. Therefore, there’s no logical reason to cooperate quickly. On the other, he knows if he doesn’t cooperate by disarming, he becomes everyone’s target. So he maneuvers to keep from falling into the cracks between the two. He presents himself as the macho warrior who stands up to a superior force.”

At 6 feet 2, 210 pounds, Hussein towers over his shorter, chubbier generals and sycophantic aides. Image is everything. He dyes his hair jet black and won’t wear his reading glasses in public. He swims daily to keep fit and doesn’t let Iraqi TV film him walking more than a few steps, to camouflage a slight limp that is the result of a slipped disc. Extremely concerned -- for good reason -- about security, he has not been seen in public since a military parade in January 2001.

Post refers to Hussein’s infatuation with image and messianic beliefs as “malignant narcissism.” The Stalinist-style dictator believes his destiny and Iraq’s are one. Thus any excess -- even the deaths of more than 1 million people during his rule -- is justified in the name of protecting Iraq. What the world calls terror, he calls expediency. What others call betrayal, he calls enforcing the perimeters of loyalty.

When the Iran-Iraq war was going badly for Iraq in 1982, Hussein asked his ministers for their candid advice. The minister of health suggested Hussein step down until peace could be negotiated. The president thanked him and ordered his arrest.

In response to pleas from the minister’s wife, Hussein promised to return him to his family. The next day a plastic bag was delivered to the minister’s home. It contained his body parts.

“Saddam learned early on the first rule of street politics” during his years as a young tough in Baghdad, the late Tahseen Bashir, an Egyptian diplomat, once said. “Advancement by violence was the name of the game. In the context of Iraqi politics, survival of the fittest meant survival of the most brutal, the most cunning and, above all, the most violent.”

The man Hussein would become was cast in the first years of his life. Born into a family of peasants in the tiny mud-hut village of Al Auja on the Tigris River, 100 miles north of Baghdad, Saddam (the name means “the one who confronts”) Hussein grew into childhood with wounded self-esteem that impaired his capacity for empathy with others, Post said.

According to the CIA analysis, his mother tried to abort him. He never knew his father, who died of cancer. His mother attempted suicide. His stepfather abused him physically and emotionally. His brother died of cancer at age 12.

“One course in the face of such traumatizing experiences is to sink into despair, passivity and hopelessness,” Post said in his CIA profile. “But another is to etch a psychological template of compensatory grandiosity, as if to vow, ‘Never again, never again shall I submit to superior force.’ This is the developmental psychological path Saddam followed.”

Hussein ran away from home at age 10 and went to live with his maternal uncle, Khayrallah Tulfah. The uncle was a vehemently anti-Western fascist who filled the boy with legends of the great Arab warrior-heroes, among them Saladin and Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylonia who conquered Jerusalem in 586 BC. In 1981, Hussein published a pamphlet written by his uncle titled “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians [Iranians], Jews and Flies.”

By his late teens, Hussein was leading a street gang in Baghdad. By 20, he was a strong-arm enforcer for the Baath Socialist Party, a pan-Arab party that today rules Iraq. At 22, Baath leaders gave him the mission to assassinate the prime minister. (He botched the job.) At 27, he was in prison. He helped overthrow the Iraqi government when he was 31 and became president of Iraq when he was 42.

Now 65, he is neither well-traveled nor well-read -- “that helps explain why he’s often out of touch with political reality,” one analyst said. The myths surrounding him are largely self-made. He claims to be a descendant of the prophet Muhammad but isn’t, and his military rank of field marshal is self-proclaimed. He was never in the army.

A few days into the Persian Gulf War, Hussein astounded everyone by telling his information minister, Latif Jassim, to declare victory. The war ended with Iraq having suffered one of the most lopsided defeats in modern military history. But Hussein had survived. President George Bush wouldn’t, politically. To Saddam Hussein, a patient man, survival itself was victory, and victory meant his dreams of being Saladin were still alive.