Review Iraqi Perspectives Project, A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership

Woods, Kevin, with Pease, Michael, Stout, Mark, Murray, Williamson, and Lacey, James, Iraqi Perspectives Project, A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership, San Bernadino: Joint Center For Operational Analysis, 2013

 

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq thousands of Baathist documents were captured and former members of Saddam Hussein’s regime were interviewed by the United States. That resulted in the Iraqi Perspective Project which published three books on its finding. One of those was A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership which tried to explain the Iraqi government’s world view and how that shaped its response to the 2003 invasion. The main thesis was that Saddam never took the United States seriously and did not believe it would overthrow him until it was at the gates of Baghdad.

 

The book begins by explaining how Saddam Hussein saw the world. His main concerns were preventing a coup or an internal revolt. Iraq had a history of coups which was how the Baath Party took power in 1968. During the 1990s there had been several coup attempts as the country deteriorated under United Nations sanctions. Saddam therefore took all kinds of precautions such as creating overlapping military units like the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard, and not allowing any of them to communicate with each other or move their forces without his permission. Various officials also said that Saddam didn’t trust intelligent people to be around him seeing them as possible threats. That created a culture of fear and lies around him because anyone that stepped out of bounds could be eliminated. After the Gulf War there were uprisings in the north and south which challenged Saddam’s hold on the country. The two no fly zones the U.S. and its allies imposed on Iraq afterward hindered Baghdad’s ability to control his population and made him think that they might rise up again. Saddam was obsessed with staying in power. He’d survived various coup attempts and revolts so he feared them the most.

 

In terms of foreign foes Saddam saw Iran and Israel as his greatest rivals and never took the United States seriously. Iran could occupy Iraq due to being a neighboring state and its revolution also appealed to some Shiite Iraqis. Iraq had fought an eight year war with Tehran making it the greatest external threat. The Iraqi dictator’s upbringing in Arab nationalism also made him see Israel as an opponent and always believed there were Zionist plots against him. The U.S. on the other hand was viewed as a paper tiger. President Bush had forged a huge coalition during the Gulf War and it suddenly stopped the fighting leaving him in power. He created an entire myth about this being a huge victory. During the 1990s Washington had only carried out airstrikes for things like violating the two no fly zones or not cooperating with United Nations weapons inspectors. Saddam also saw how the U.S. withdraw from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident and how it relied upon air power in the former Yugoslavia. Saddam had no respect for these actions and constantly denigrated America as a false superpower. He believed Iraqi bravery could overcome any military force the U.S. could muster against his regime. This is one of the most important findings of the Iraqi Perspectives Project. Advocates for the 2003 invasion claimed that Saddam viewed America as his greatest enemy and worked with terrorists and developed weapons of mass destruction all to use against the United States. This was completely wrong. 13 years of conflict following the Gulf War actually made Saddam disregard American power not fear it or want to confront it. Elites in countries always think others think and act just like them. This study found that those kinds of assumptions can be false and lead to huge mistakes like the Iraq War.

 

The majority of A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Saddam’s Senior Leadership is about how Iraq prepared and fought the 2003 invasion. The most surprising revelation is that given Saddam’s negative view of the U.S. he didn’t believe there would be an invasion and never thought President Bush would depose him. Instead, Saddam and his advisors believed that if Washington acted it would just carry out air strikes or at worst would repeat the Gulf War where they occupied parts of southern Iraq and then left. Right up to the start of the invasion Saddam felt like his main priority was keeping a tight grip on his public so there wouldn’t be a revolt. This also led him to veto requests by his military to destroy bridges, set his oil fields on fire, etc. because he would need transportation routes to confront any uprising and oil would be necessary to fund his government.

 

There were dozens of other interesting details the authors found. For instance, Iraq’s national defense plan was changed by Saddam in December 2002 to focus upon defending Baghdad to the death but he never gave any details on how that would work and his coup proofing actions made it impossible to carry out. Saddam’s rule created such a culture of fear within the regime that no one wanted to give him bad news because of what might happen to them. That meant during the invasion he got nothing but reports of Iraqi victories. Iraq’s close relationship with Russia also backfired as Moscow told Baghdad that the real U.S. invasion was not coming from the south but the west leading Saddam to order his forces to shift in that direction and away from where the Americans were coming from. The book was basically a dissertation on how dysfunctional the Iraqi state was. Saddam thought he was a military genius when he knew nothing on the subject. His orders always made things worse. He was also cut off from reality as his subordinates rarely told him the truth.

 

There is one point which the book gets wrong which is about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It said Saddam was caught in a Catch 22 trying to tell the United Nations it had no WMD while still hinting that it did to deter Iran and Israel. Surprisingly it uses a quote from 1990 as evidence even though that was before Iraq had been told to disarm. There was a recent article by Samuel Helfont of the Naval War College which also went through the captured Iraqi documents and found that Saddam constantly told his lieutenants that there was no WMD and informed the inspectors that it had destroyed all its weapons in the mid-1990s. The problem wasn’t Iraq trying to play a double game but America’s mistrust of Saddam. At the start of inspections Iraq hid its programs which created the image that Baghdad would never come clean. When Iraq destroyed its WMD and said so there was no one in Washington that believed it.

 

The Iraqi Perspective Project’s book provides a wealth of information about how Saddam’s government was broken and led him to make one bad decision after another. It also gives a warning to policy makers and leaders that they need to see the world through others’ eyes because it can be completely different and lead to misunderstandings and wars. That’s what happened to America’s political elites who became obsessed with Iraq after the Gulf War believing it was one of the main threats to US power when in fact, Saddam was more concerned with his internal situation and Iran and Israel than anything Washington was doing.

 

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