On the Attack for Iraq

The long line of white Mercedes sedans, perhaps as many as ten or twelve, moves at high speed through the center of Baghdad. The road has been cleared beforehand, except for an assortment of security cars disguised with foreign license plates. Each of the sedans in the procession is occupied, but on any given occasion, nobody can be sure which of them is actually carrying the VIP. The subject of all this elaborate camouflage: the tough and belligerent, extremely ambitious President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

At 43, Saddam is the Arab world's newest and most determined strongman, and he is not about to allow himself to be toppled from his pinnacle by simple negligence. His bold designs to supplant the late Shah of Iran as the watchdog and kingpin of the Persian Gulf have made him a force to be reckoned with throughout the region. At times, in fact, his behavior seems oddly reminiscent of the ousted Iranian monarch--his largesse with the nation's new-found oil wealth, for example, and in his touches of self-esteem that some critics say verge on megalomania. Saddam's portrait hangs everywhere in Iraq, from coffeehouses to supermarket check-out counters. Poets eulogize him in the press ("Since there was an Iraq, you were its awaited, its promised one"). Every evening Iraqis are treated to a film of their President strolling through factories, bouncing babies on his knees, chatting with peasants--all to the soft strains of Tchaikovsky. Of late, in further pursuit of popularity, Saddam has even traded in his natty, British-tailored suits for a military fatigue jacket, pistol belt and red-checked kaffiyeh, making him look rather like an Arabic Fidel Castro.

Saddam tolerates no opposition. Iraqi jails are said to be filled with political prisoners. No sooner had Saddam assumed the presidency from ailing Ahmed Hassan al Bakr last year than he ordered scores of top government officials arrested on charges of plotting to overthrow his regime. He presided over the execution of 21 officials, including a popular Deputy Premier who had been a close friend. Two battered typewriters on which he and his revolutionary comrades once composed antigovernment propaganda are now on display in a Baghdad museum. At the same time, however, Iraqi citizens must have a license to own a typewriter, a measure aimed at curbing dissent. There is no Iraqi press that is not controlled by Saddam. Foreign publications from both the U.S. and Europe are banned.

Born to a prosperous farming family in Tikrit, a small town 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, Saddam as a student eagerly joined the nationalist ferment against Iraq's pro-Western monarchy. In 1959, under sentence of death in absentia for his involvement in an assassination attempt against President Abdul Karim Kassem, a general who had seized power the year before, Saddam fled to Syria and Egypt. In Cairo he studied law and joined the Baath Party, a revolutionary group of Arab nationalists. He returned to Iraq in 1963, and by the time the Baathists staged their 1968 coup under General Bakr, Saddam had become second in command. He set up his own secret police organization, suppressed all challengers, and soon became the real power in the country.

To some who have watched him at first hand, Saddam projects a dual personality. Says a Western diplomat: "You think he's the most brutal of the brutal, and then there he is in the market fondling babies. It's really quite amazing." On tour, he loves to hand out wads of freshly minted bank notes to astonished villagers, and one of his pet schemes is to see that everyone under 45 becomes literate. Typically, however, there is no free choice about it: those who do not go to class are fined or jailed. In 1963 he married a cousin. They have four children.

Saddam is fascinated by American technology, and Baghdad says it will buy from the U.S. even if the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. "If we want to buy a computer, and the U.S. has got the best," he says, "then we'll buy it." About Iraq's resources, he notes: "We do not drink oil, we sell it, and we know that our major markets are in the West and in Japan." But Saddam is not content to be a merchant; he wants to be a powerful statesman. In 1982 Baghdad will host the Conference of Non-Aligned Countries, and Saddam is said to be determined to assume leadership of the movement.

In pursuit of his ambitions, Saddam obviously knows how to make political use of oil profits. He keeps a monthly $150 million slush fund at his disposal for dispensing patronage and buying influence. One recipient of his financial support: the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose leader, Yasser Arafat, was in Baghdad last week attempting to mediate in the war.

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