Titans of History (78 page)

From his new position Saddam oversaw the nationalization of the Western-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company, using the funds accrued to develop the country's welfare state (especially its health
system). He also initiated a major drive against illiteracy, made improvements to Iraqi infrastructure and generally sought to encourage modernization and industrialization. At the same time, however, he also worked assiduously to accumulate power to himself, moving loyal lieutenants into key positions, building up a brutal secret police and strengthening his grip on levers of state.

In mid-1979 Saddam pressured the ailing al-Bakr to resign, and assumed the presidency himself. He immediately summoned the Revolutionary Council, comprising the senior Ba'ath Party leadership, and announced that “Zionism and the forces of darkness” were engaged in a conspiracy against Iraq. Then, to the horror of his audience, he announced that those involved were present in the room. While Saddam sat smoking a huge cigar, a series of names were read out, and, one by one, sixty-six people were led away. Subsequently twenty-two of these men were found guilty, and Saddam personally supervised their killing, requiring senior figures in the Iraqi leadership to carry out the death sentences.

Saddam set about transforming Iraq into what one dissident labeled the “Republic of Fear.” His notorious secret police, the Mukhabarat, together with the state internal security department the Amn, established a fierce grip over the entire country. Regular massacres were carried out of Jews, Freemasons, communists, economic saboteurs or merely people who crossed Saddam or his greedy, pitiless family, all of whom served in his government. Purge followed upon purge, attended by show trials and televised confessions. Over the subsequent two decades Saddam Hussein killed at least 400,000 Iraqis—many of whom endured all manner of torture. His psychopathic sons, particularly the sadistic, demented heir apparent Uday, conducted their own struggles for power and brutal reigns of terror, personally torturing their enemies. At one point, Saddam's two sons-in-law, fearing murder by Uday, fled to Jordan, but were tricked into returning and then slaughtered by Uday.

Not content with dominating Iraq, Saddam was also determined to assert regional hegemony. He invaded Iran in 1980, using Iran's Islamic revolution of 1979 as a pretext to seize Iran's oilfields, and thus sparked a disastrous eight-year war that ended in stalemate and cost over a million lives. Adept at playing off the great powers against one another, he was significantly aided by the West, which regarded Iran as the greater of two evils.

During the war, Iran had encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to mount an uprising against Ba'athist rule. Saddam responded in merciless fashion, deploying mustard and nerve gas against the civilian population—most notoriously at the town of Halabja, where some 5000 Kurds died in a single attack in March 1988. Four thousand villages were destroyed and 100,000 Kurds slaughtered.

The end of the Iranian war left Iraq exhausted despite huge oil revenues. In August 1990 Saddam invaded and occupied Kuwait. It proved to be a catastrophic miscalculation. The United Nations authorized a massive US-led military coalition to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, which they swiftly achieved in 1991. Iraqi Kurds and Shiites—encouraged by the coalition—rebelled against Saddam, but without Western military support they were brutally put down.

By the terms of the ceasefire agreement, Iraq had agreed to abandon nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Yet Saddam failed to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, barred them entirely from 1998, and engaged in constant military brinkmanship and diplomatic chicanery.

Saddam's situation was transformed by the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001. President George W. Bush—confident after overthrowing Al-Qaeda's backers, the Taliban, in Afghanistan—advocated “regime change” in Iraq and the creation of Iraqi democracy to encourage freedom in the Arab world, citing as justification Saddam's dictatorship, continued
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorist groups. Ironically, there were no weapons of mass destruction, but fearing that the truth might expose his regime's weakness to Iran, Saddam miscalculated (for the second time) that America would not dare invade. In March 2003, US-led coalition forces invaded and overthrew Saddam, who was finally captured, tried and sentenced to death. His execution, embarrassingly bungled, symbolized the incompetence and lack of preparation of the well-intentioned US/UK invasion and the subsequent military quagmire. Nonetheless the sentence was richly deserved.

1942–2011

It is the Libyan people's responsibility to liquidate such scum who are distorting Libya's image

Colonel Kadaffi

Colonel Muammar Kadaffi was the long-serving Libyan dictator who combined reckless terror with flamboyant buffoonery, until his pitiless repression of a popular revolution united the Western powers, led by Britain and France, against him in an armed intervention that ultimately led to his own lynching and death. Throughout his career, his colorful follies and brutal killings won him a prominence beyond his own meager talents and the power of his small country, Libya. Like Saddam Hussein, it was his downfall as much as his misrule that made him important.

Born in a Bedouin family in Sirte, he trained as an army officer, spending time in Britain, where he recalled playing football in
Hyde Park. On his return to Libya, then a kingdom under King Idris, he admired the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdul Nasser in neighboring Egypt and formed his own camarilla of radical free officers who seized power in September 1969. Kadaffi was then only a lieutenant at age twenty-seven, but he became president of Libya, leading a tiny junta of fellow officers such as Major Jalloud. However his deputy Jalloud was soon marginalized as Kadaffi himself assumed autocratic powers.

Promoting himself as a radical Arab socialist-nationalist, he dreamed of assuming leadership of the entire Arab world, particularly after the death in 1970 of his hero, Nasser. Throughout his career, he tried to increase his own importance (and copy Nasser's short-lived union with Syria) by offering to merge with other countries: in the early 1970s, he tried to merge with Egypt. When President Sadat resisted and then made peace with Israel in 1977, Kadaffi ordered the invasion of Egypt—a brief war that ended in total defeat. In the 1980s, he interfered in Chad, tried to force a merger between the two countries, then sent his troops to fight there and ended up being humiliatingly defeated in the so-called Toyota War.

At home, he tolerated little opposition and ruled by playing off the army and the tribes and by organizing a brutal secret police, who terrorized political opponents and Islamists alike, while assassinating any opposition in exile.

In 1977, he formally stepped down as head of state to become “Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution” without any official position in his Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which was meant to be run by people's committees. In fact he remained dictator but he spent much time communing with the people in his ornate Bedouin tents (which were often pitched amidst fortified army camps to avoid assassination). Kadaffi wrote his
Green Book
, a tract in the vein of Chairman Mao's
Little Red Book
, which laid
out his own special brand of popular rule, Arab nationalism, socialism, rabid anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism and was obligatory reading in all Libyan schools.

A rampant exhibitionist as well as a shrewdly pitiless tyrant, he used Libyan oil revenues to fund foreign terrorists across the world. The Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany and the IRA in Britain as well as radical Palestinian terror groups all received money from Kadaffi's generous purse. In 1984, Libyan diplomats fired on dissidents protesting outside their London embassy, killing policewoman Yvonne Fletcher. In 1986, Libyan intelligence bombed a Berlin nightclub frequented by American troops, killing three and wounding 229. President Ronald Reagan called him a “mad dog” and US planes attacked Libya, almost assassinating Kadaffi. Kadaffi sought revenge by organizing in December 1988 the destruction of an American civilian airliner which exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland killing 270 innocents. Faced with American hostility, he moved closer to the Soviet Union, but Libya had become a pariah state for much of rest of the world.

He pursued his own arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons and was an ally of Saddam Hussein, but when the latter was defeated and overthrown, Kadaffi performed a diplomatic somersault. He allowed one of his own intelligence agents—Abdul Baset Megrahi—to be tried for the Lockerbie crime, paid compensation to the families and in 2003/4 he began secret negotiations with the Americans and British to return to respectability. He also admitted to the existence of and gave up his nuclear/chemical programs. Megrahi was released from Scottish prison for health reasons soon afterward, a travesty of justice that looks very like a fulfillment of one of Kadaffi's demands. British prime minister Tony Blair flew to Libya to establish a new era in relations in a famous meeting in Kadaffi's desert tent. As Western oil companies rushed to win new Libyan business, Kadaffi enjoyed his return to
the world stage, happily giving long orations to the UN or pitching his tent in a Paris park, showing off in a variety of costumes—sometimes military uniforms with dark glasses and gold braid, sometimes Bedouin robes—accompanied by his special female bodyguards and always by his Ukrainian nurse. He had been celebrated for his radical glamour in his younger days—indeed there were recurrent stories of Western female journalists succumbing to his seductive tyrannical chic—but by the 21st century, he was clearly an unbalanced, demented and deluded dictator with blood on his hands and an unfortunate taste for facial cosmetic surgery. Like Idi Amin, he would have been funny had he not been so homicidal.

After forty years in power, Kadaffi ruled like a desert emperor, even calling himself the King of Kings, or the King of Africa. He clearly planned a dynastic succession for his sons in the tradition of the Assads of Syria. Kadaffi ruled increasingly through his sons, who served variously as military commanders, football bosses, diplomatic envoys, international playboys—and political henchmen. He played off his more conservative sons against his high-profile international envoy, Saif al-Islam, who promoted himself as the liberal reforming heir to the throne. Saif Kadaffi mixed with British bankers, tycoons and academics, corrupting and deceiving them with his promises of reform. When the convicted terrorist Megrahi was released, it was Saif who flew him back to a triumphant welcome in Tripoli.

Just as the West reconciled itself to the monstrous Kadaffi, his own people could take no more. In the spring of 2011, huge popular protests started against the dictator across Libya, but especially in the eastern city of Benghazi. Kadaffi and his sons tried to repress the revolution but when the dictator threatened to annihilate the rebels of Benghazi and dispatched an army to do so, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President
Nicholas Sarkozy, backed by US President Obama, quickly put together an armed response. Eschewing any troops on the ground, the British and French bombed Libyan forces in a sustained but brave intervention that ultimately brought down the dictator. Tripoli fell to the National Transitional Council (NTC) militias on September 16, 2011. Kadaffi himself vanished but reappeared in his home city of Sirte, which held out for another month. When it fell, he tried to escape in a convoy that was hit by Western planes and then attacked by NTC fighters: Kadaffi was captured, and, begging for forgiveness, was brutally lynched, spattered in blood and then shot on camera, a scene then played across the world on twenty-four-hour news. Along with the fall of Egyptian President Mubarak, this was the most dramatic revolution of the so-called Arab Spring and the successful template for David Cameron's new doctrine of limited intervention.

1942–

I'm the greatest thing that ever lived. I'm so great I don't have a mark on my face. I shook up the world
.

Cassius Clay, soon to become Muhammad Ali, after defeating Sonny Liston in 1964

Muhammad Ali was not just the greatest boxer of his generation, he is one of the greatest sportsmen of all time. As a fighter, he displayed a prodigious, sublime talent, but he also transcended the world of sport. Deep-felt conviction, outspoken politics,
courage, wit, style, sheer chutzpah, all have combined to create a living legend. Since retiring, Ali has triumphed as an iconic figure who lit the torch at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and has spoken poignantly about nonviolent Islam in the post-9/11 world.

Cassius Clay, as Ali was named at birth, took up boxing as a twelve-year-old. He had an exceptional amateur career, winning 134 bouts and losing only seven. He went to the Rome Olympics in 1960 and won a gold medal at light heavyweight, impressing with his speed and lightning reflexes. The Miami boxing trainer Angelo Dundee took Clay on as a young professional and had little to do to improve his brazen style. He kept a low guard, relying on his speed to dance around opponents. Early in life he would proclaim himself “the greatest.” When he destroyed the great heavyweight Sonny Liston in two fights—the second a severe pounding in May 1965—it seemed that he was set to fulfill his own prophecy.

Outside the ring, Clay was undergoing a transformation that would shape the rest of his life. He became involved with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam—a radical black Islamic movement. It appealed to Clay because of the racism he had experienced growing up in the Southern states of the USA. Soon the outspoken young man had changed his name to Muhammad Ali. By the time of the rematch against Liston and a subsequent savaging of another big-name heavyweight, Floyd Patterson, Ali was as divisive outside the ring as he was brilliant in it.

The combination of Ali's extravagant fighting style, his forthright talk and his refusal to join the US Army in 1966 (“Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he explained at the time) rapidly made him a hate figure for white America. He declared himself a conscientious objector, and in 1967 he was stripped of his world title and banned from fighting in America for three years. Undeterred, Ali delivered more than 200 anti-war speeches condemning the actions of the USA in east Asia.