Saddam: The Secret Life

By Con Coughlin. Pan MacMillan. 350pp. $25

Reviewer :: David Sibley

Are a few bits of human viscera amid a pile of rubble in Baghdad what’s left of Saddam Hussein? If not, where is the Iraqi dictator? Has he taken the Osama bin Laden option and disappeared into the shadows, becoming but a rumour since the might of the Coalition destroyed his dictatorship in 27 days?

This book won’t tell you the answer. But it provides a chilling insight into the nature and personality of one of the world’s most gruesome tyrants and what motivated him since he emerged from a poverty-stricken childhood outside the town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, on the Tigris River.

Con Coughlin, the executive editor of the British Sunday Telegraph, has reported extensively on the Middle East during his career, including frontline reporting in Gulf War I. In this exhaustive biography of Saddam, carefully footnoted with sources clearly attributed, he pulls no punches in exploring an incredible life of violence and manipulation.

What is clear is that survival at all costs is the principle by which Saddam clawed his way to the top of the Ba’ath Party.
Coughlin has done his best to discern the truth behind the veil of lies and propaganda Saddam used as part of his cult of personality.

Saddam’s actual birth date is not known, nor is it known whether he was illegitimate. His mother seems to have a shadowy background and it is suggested she was a prostitute. In any case, Saddam appears to have had an unhappy childhood with an abusive stepfather and a neglectful mother.

His uncle Khairallah Tulfah, an Iraqi army officer who was a big fan of Adolf Hitler, became Saddam’s mentor and arranged for him to leave Tikrit for Baghdad where the young tough became involved in the Ba’ath Party, a small quasi-socialist and pan-Arabist party.

Saddam’s story is also the bloodstained history of modern Iraq. How the Ba’ath seized control from the military governments which had ruled Iraq after the monarchy’s overthrow in 1958 is a sickening but compelling story of a determined group of revolutionaries who stopped at nothing to achieve their goal of a socialist government that would unite all Arabs across the Middle East. Saddam was just one of a murderous bunch of thugs but with one essential difference – he outlasted them all.

Along the way, he used his family as his henchmen with a coterie of half-brothers and cousins prominent in his rule. Coughlin shows how they were able to bypass the Western economic sanctions after Gulf War I, earning millions of dollars by trafficking oil and humanitarian supplies while millions of Iraqi starved and went without medical assistance.

Saddam survived Gulf War I because the West was not prepared to overthrow him. This may have given him the false confidence that he could out-bluff the second George Bush he had come up against. Saddam’s failure was to understand how September 11 had changed the equation.

Coughlin makes the telling point that the mere possibility Saddam could have weapons of mass destruction and could play a part in future attacks against the United States was the driver behind the American determination to topple him.

Interestingly, he outlines the known intelligence on links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Although sketchy and inconclusive, it raises alarm bells.

Whether Saddam is dead or not, Coughlin’s study of his life is worth reading for the insights into the fear and terror of Saddam’s rule.