No stone left unturned

The truth behind Saddam

By Ben Chapman
From the May 2006 Print Edition

I was watching Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and, as usual, he had his guest interview segment. This time, former Iraqi General Georges Sada was featured, and he spoke about his new book, Saddam’s Secrets. Sada, a top adviser to Saddam Hussein, was one of the best fighter pilots in Iraq and an Assyrian Christian, not an Arab Muslim as one would expect from Saddam’s loyal and trusted retinue. In his interview, Sada spoke of how he gained Saddam’s trust by always telling the truth. Stewart was obviously stunned and asked Sada how one could survive being an adviser to Saddam and tell the truth at the same time? The answer to that came in Saddam’s Secrets.

That wasn’t the only question Sada answered. As a two-star general in the Iraqi army and the former head of the Iraqi Air Force, Sada knew everything about Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction programs. He unleashed all of the details and harsh truths about Saddam’s regime, including where the WMDs went, when, and how.

To say that Saddam’s Secrets is an extraordinary book could not describe it well enough. It is an autobiography of Sada and how he survived under Saddam despite telling the truth no matter the cost and being a Christian in a majority Muslim country. The book is even more than that. It details the history of Saddam’s rise to power, his reign, and his downfall.

Sada begins his narrative with the beginning of his military career in the 1960s, and parallels that with the rise of the Baath Party in Iraq. The details of that are well known. The Baathists were socialists based on the Stalinist model. And Saddam Hussein, who was a common street thug, much like Stalin was before he became dictator of the Soviet slaughterhouse, ruled Iraq essentially from the late 1960s to 2003. Sada explains his compulsion not only to tell the truth, but to do the right thing for his country. Sada was a loyal soldier, but he also possessed a mind of his own and a strong moral compass.

That moral compass saved the lives of 24 downed Coalition pilots during the 1991 Gulf War. Sada knew that killing these men was the wrong thing to do, both from a moral standpoint and from the standpoint of what was best for his country in terms of public relations, since Iraq had signed on to the Geneva Convention. Sada openly defied Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein. As a result, Sada was imprisoned. It was only because of Sada’s years of military service, his high rank, and the fact that Saddam knew Sada was one of the few who would ever tell him the truth, that Sada was not killed on the spot.

It also must be noted that Sada’s book is non-partisan. He criticizes Colin Powell and President George H.W. Bush for not having gotten rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991. As Sada wrote, all of their intelligence that said there would be a blood bath in Baghdad was false; Baghdad was essentially left completely undefended along with the rest of the country.

His most scathing criticism is directed toward the Clinton administration and the United Nations, detailing all of the corruption of the Oil for Food program and how the United States stood by and did nothing but, as Sada put it, “rattle papers.” He details exactly who was bribed for what, when, and why. Essentially, Saddam would swap his oil with Iran so that he could smuggle it out of his country at cheap prices under the U.N. sanctions, which only served to enrich himself at the expense of his own people. Clearly, when President George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, he inherited an untenable situation in Iraq.

Sada even criticizes the way in which the 2003 Iraq war was fought, writing that simply disbanding the Iraqi military was not a good idea; that it sent home thousands of troops with guns, with no jobs, and with nothing better to do than form an insurgency.

Now to the part you’ve all been waiting for: Saddam’s WMDs. Sada was a top general, one Saddam personally sat down with and talked to, consulted with, and trusted on a regular basis. Sada saw “special” weapons of all kinds, biological and chemical. As for nuclear weapons, he states that although the Israelis hit the French-made reactor, enough pieces and plans survived, hidden, to restart a thriving nuclear program.

Even after the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam did not account for all of his weapons and Sada points to exactly which military facilities Saddam did not allow U.N. weapons inspectors to enter, both during the 1990s and in 2002. And finally, in 2002, using converted civilian Boeing jets, Saddam hid his WMDs in Syria. Sada writes that he sent all of the evidence and documents to the U.S. State Department, where they have been classified and largely unreported.

Sada’s book also contains hopes for peace, and much praise for the U.S.-led efforts in Iraq. Sada currently serves the new Iraqi government as a spokesman. It is people like Sada who prove that what the United States is doing in Iraq is both just and moral for Iraq, for America, and for the world.

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