“The Americans wanted
to hurt Iraq by hurting its army. Its army would get destroyed. Such an
opportunity was to be … taken advantage of by all the greedy people or the
hateful ones or those who had beforehand evil intentions against Iraq, whether
they were from outside or inside Iraq. The entire siege, the air bombardment
until the land attack began, they were all methods to create the appropriate
environment for the operation that took place.”
- Saddam Hussein, April
3, 1991
Starting in March
1991 southern and northern Iraq rose up in rebellion against Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi army had just been defeated in the Gulf War and angry soldiers in the
south started a revolt in Basra that quickly spread across the entire south. A
few days later the Kurds begin rising up as well seizing the major cities in
the north including Kirkuk. By the start of April the government had recovered
and most of the Kurds were fleeing to Turkey and Iran, while southerners were
driven into Iran and the marshes of Basra and Maysan.
To Saddam this was all part of a plan by the Americans to
undermine his rule. On April
3, as the last vestiges of the uprising were being put down in Sulaymaniya,
Saddam met with his advisers. He called the revolt “The Page of Treason and
Treachery,” and claimed that it was a result of the Gulf War. He declared that
the war was really meant to destroy the Iraqi armed forces so that his
opponents could take advantage of the situation. He blamed groups based in
Iran, probably referring to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq
that deployed
its Badr Brigade during the period, for starting the fighting in Basra. At the
same time, he did acknowledge that there were opponents in the south, but they
didn’t want a rebellion. According to him that idea was completely sprung by
outsiders. Saddam had a different view of the Kurds. There he said the Kurdish
parties wanted revenge for being defeated in the Anfal campaign during the
1980s. The meeting revealed some of the thinking of Saddam. The 1991 revolt
solidified his belief that the main threat to his rule came from domestic
forces, namely the Shiite Islamists and the Kurds. At the same time, his other
major nemesis was Iran, which he had painted as the historical foe of Iraq
since the Iran-Iraq War. Together these two groups were consistently plotting
against him, and trying to take him down. Saddam saw the Gulf War through this
prism, and believed the Americans were simply working with his longtime
opponents, completely missing Washington’s response to the invasion of Kuwait.
SOURCES
Woods, Kevin, Palkki, David, and Stout, Mark, The Saddam Tapes, Cambridge, New York,
Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City:
Cambridge University Press, 2011
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