The World

On 2 August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait. He counted himself the victor of the war against Iran, in which the ageing Khomeini had finally agreed to a ceasefire. ‘Happy are those who have lost their lives in this convoy of light,’ said the ayatollah. ‘Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice.’ He brought with him to Teheran Ebrahim Raisi, a young mullah who had studied under his deputy Khamenei, and heading the ‘death committee’ personally tortured and oversaw the executions of thousands of opposition activists. When the imam died at eighty-six, his funeral ranked with Nasser’s as the largest ever: millions of frenzied mourners overran the cortège, knocking the flimsily wrapped body to the ground, tearing the shroud to shreds and leaping into the grave, until guards fired overhead and rescued the body by helicopter to be buried later in the day. Yet his creation proved stronger: his henchman, President Ali Khamenei, was chosen as Supreme Leader,^*

and ruled for thirty years during which Iran achieved power greater than that of the shah.

Saddam, with a bloated army, mountainous debts, a rapacious family and a splintered country, also sought extreme solutions. At home, he liquidated 180,000 Kurds and Assyrians in Anfal who had assisted the Iranians, slaughtering civilians, using chemical weapons, while he procured nuclear weapons with French help. In 1981, Israel bombed his facility; when he hired a Canadian gunmaker to build a supergun, Big Babylon, Mossad assassinated him.

Saddam struggled to control his sons and cousins. His pimp and food taster, Hana Gegeo, son of his chef and his daughters’ governess, introduced him to a blonde doctor Samira, who became his mistress and then his wife, which naturally made enemies of his first wife Sajida and her sons. His trusted half-brothers wanted their sons to marry Saddam’s daughters but in the mid-1980s his rising young cousins Hussein and Saddam Kamel won the girls, Raghad and Rana. A boy who flirted with his favourite daughter Hala was killed.

Even Saddam was unable to manage his eldest son, Uday, whom he had appointed to run the Olympic Committee and the Football Association, clearly heir apparent. Yet this Caligularian psychopath with a speech impediment regularly beat up men and raped women. In 1988, he burst into a party given for the wife of the Egyptian president Mubarak and beat Gegeo to death with an iron bar. Afterwards he tried to kill himself, then, summoned by Saddam, told his father, ‘Stay with your real wife.’ Infuriated, Saddam almost killed him: he ‘was lucky I was unarmed’. An attempt to flee to America was foiled by his brothers-in-law, the Kamel brothers, igniting a feud that would end in bloodshed. Saddam exiled Uday to Switzerland and switched his favour to the less demented Qusay, who ran the SSO secret police.

Now Saddam was broke. Kuwait had lent him $30 billion and wanted it back. Tiny Kuwait had the same 20 per cent share of world oil as Iraq. Saddam claimed it as part of the old Ottoman vilayet of Basra. He probed America: ‘We’ve no opinion on Arab–Arab conflicts,’ the US ambassador told him, mistakenly greenlighting his plan, ‘like your border disagreement with Kuwait.’ Saddam’s 120,000 Iraqi troops and 850 tanks rolled into Kuwait. The amir fled; his brother was shot, then gleefully pulped by one of Saddam’s tanks. Unleashing Uday, back from exile, and the ravening Tikriti clan in a looting frenzy, Saddam annexed Kuwait.

Gorbachev was infuriated and sent his spymaster Primakov to restrain Saddam, but the Iraqi leader threatened the foundation of the west – oil – not to speak of international law. Bush vacillated; ‘This is no time to go wobbly,’ Thatcher told him. Bush won a UN resolution and recruited an unprecedented coalition, from Thatcher^* to Assad, which mustered in Saudi Arabia. Saddam had achieved the impossible: uniting most of the fissiparous Arab world against himself. Only Arafat – and a reluctant King Hussein – backed him.