The Story Read Free

loyal. As Saddam intoned their names one by one, the men were surrounded by goons and dragged out of the room. He had then called upon senior ministers, party leaders, and loyalists to form instant firing squads to kill their colleagues. After he had finished reading the list of the condemned, officials of the ruling Ba’ath Party who had not heard their names called wept openly with relief and began hysterically chanting in Arabic “Long Live Saddam!” “With our blood, with our souls,” they shouted, “we will sacrifice for you, O Saddam!” (It more or less rhymes in Arabic.)
    Years later, I would hear an audiotape of the astonishing assembly, the details of which Laurie Mylroie, a scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and I would be among the first to describe in a book we wrote and published in 1990 just before the US-led liberation of Kuwait. 5
    I had joined the Times in 1977 and became its Cairo bureau chief in 1983, responsible for covering most of the Arab Middle East. I traveled to Iraq more than a dozen times to cover the Iran-Iraq war and had grown to dread those visits. The war that Saddam had launched against neighboring Islamic Iran less than a year after becoming president was not turning out as he—or the CIA—had predicted. Though weak and internally divided, Iran’s revolutionary government, which in 1979 had ousted the Shah and created the world’s first militant Shiite Islamic state, was fighting back ferociously. Outgunned but not outmanned, given a population some three times that of Iraq, theocratic Iran seemed at times on the verge of defeating the secular state that Arabs regarded not only as the cradle of their civilization but also the “beating heart” of Arab nationalism.
    During my visits in the mid-1980s, it was still unclear which side would win. Officially, the United States was neutral. But President Ronald Reagan had secretly decided that “secular” Iraq could not be permitted to lose to anti-American theocrats who, in 1979, had attacked the US Embassy in Tehran and held American diplomats hostage for more than ayear. So even after the United States received evidence that Saddam was using poison gas and other chemical weapons against Iranian forces and, later, his own citizens, Reagan extended credits to Iraq. America would also give intelligence guidance to Iraq’s military to enhance the accuracy of its bombing raids and missile strikes. Once Saddam concluded that the United States would let him “get away with murder,” as one scholar put it, his use of chemical weapons increased. 6
    Throughout the eight-year war, however, Washington had quietly provided, or tried to provide, covert assistance to both Iraq and Iran, reflecting what was euphemistically known as a “realist” foreign policy.
    On my seventh trip to Baghdad in March 1985, I saw firsthand what our cynical policy meant for the Iranians and the Iraqis. After landing in Baghdad late at night and checking into the Sheraton, I was just dozing off when a missile struck. Its high-pitched whoosh was followed by an ear-splitting boom. The blast shattered the sliding glass terrace door of my seventh-floor room overlooking the Tigris River.
    I bolted upright in bed, moving my hands slowly across the sheets. There was no glass on the bed, but shards covered much of the floor near the window. Barefoot, I inched my way across the room toward the light switch. Nothing. The blast had knocked out the power.
    I had come to Baghdad to investigate whether Iran had begun firing Libyan-supplied Scud-B missiles at Iraq in retaliation for Iraq’s relentless rocket attacks in the “war of the cities,” the latest escalation of the Iran-Iraq war, then in its fifth year. The missiles I was trying to find almost found me.
    Flashlight in hand, my duffel bag strapped over one shoulder, and my purse dangling from the other, I inched