Saddam's perverse appeal

SADDAM HUSSEIN: The Politics of Revenge by Sad K. Aburish (Bloomsbury, 20)

THIS long biography opens with a prophecy: Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq, just might one day "occupy a place of honour in Arab history." For those in this country who think of Mr Saddam as the fellow who once murdered a minister in Cabinet, squandered heaven- sent oil revenues on invading his neighbours with armed forces he had himself demoralised, lined up 32 countries against him, converted Iraq into "an emirate of rubble", and now dares not put his head outdoors, that prophecy will have a novel ring.

The virtue of this book is that it shows, not always by its author's intention, Mr Saddam's perverse appeal.

Most Iraqis I know wish Mr Saddam either a painful death or victory, usually but not always in that order. Sad Aburish, an American citizen of Palestinian origin now resident in London, is in no way blind to Mr Saddam's faults. But he says they are typical of his tormented country and anyway matched or exceeded by those of his adversaries, and particularly Britain and the United States.

Saddam Hussein, who was born in humble circumstances in the town of Tikrit on the upper Tigris in the late 1930s, found his course in life as a strong-arm man for relations and townsmen active in the Arab nationalist movement known as the Baath Party. As the Baath came to power in Baghdad in a succession of coups d'tat in the 1960s, Mr Saddam quietly took hold of all the levers of power, converted the party into a family business and, by nationalising the Iraqi oil industry in time for the surge in prices in 1973-4, won over the middle class to what might be called a welfare tyranny.

So far, Saddam Hussein was a standard Arab modernising autocrat, though - and Mr Aburish eventually concedes this - suspicious and cruel to a degree for which not even the British had prepared Iraq. But in the late 1970s, Mr Saddam assumed the presidency of Iraq and made a bid for Arab leadership. He invaded Iran without any clear purpose or strategy for getting out again. The rest is well-known: a gruelling eight-year war, a thoroughly bankrupt nation, quack remedies nuclear weapons, anthrax, Kuwait - United Nations sanctions and uninterrupted political violence.

Mr Aburish's book is rich in information, all of it fascinating, most of it plausible, some of it verifiable. He seems not to have been recently to Iraq, for the reader has no scent or taste of Iraqi life, nor an inkling of what a nice place it would be if it weren't so goddam menacing. He is good on Mr Saddam's background, its bedu traditions degenerated into swagger and gangsterism. He shows how even Mr Saddam's virtues (sexual and financial continence) have been debauched by his milieu.

Mr Aburish betrays his sympathy in adjectives. At different times, Saddam Hussein is very attractive, daring, fearless, remarkable, able, admirable, remarkably clear, nothing short of brilliant, highly intelligent, effective, methodical, polite, exceptionally intelligent, superhuman in energy, a genius, dazz-ingly deliberate, daring again, astute.

Nor is Mr Saddam the ultimate cause of Iraq's misery. The ultimate causes are Britain, which smashed Iraqi society for good in its brief and belated colonial experiment in Iraq in the 1920s, and the erratic policies of the US.

Racist, vindictive and colonial, the two are now conspiring to starve Iraq to death.

"What America and Britain are doing at present confirms the substantiated historical claim made by many Iraqis that their country, the only Arab state with the potential to move into the modern world, was and is the object of Western prejudice which preceded and supersedes opposition to the person of Saddam," Mr Aburish writes.

For what it is worth, I think the sanctions policy is one of the most squalid ever pursued by this country. The blockade should be lifted instantly. The time and energy deployed in monitoring Iraqi imports of bed-sheets should go into a weapons embargo. Ideally, the embargo should also apply to Mr Aburish, who admits to assisting Mr Sad-dam develop chemical weapons (unwittingly) and nuclear weapons (enthusiastically) during two periods as his agent in the 1970s and 1980s.

One comes away from this book in black dejection. As Mr Abur-ish confesses, he belongs to "the generation of despair", the Arabs so demoralised by Israel's victory of 1967 that they will run after any tinhorn dictator, however ignorant and self-destructive, if he will only stand up to the West. That generation seems to be reproducing itself.

P James Buchan's latest novel is A Good Place to Die, published by the Harvill Press.

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