The following piece, by Milton Viorst, about the late Tariq Aziz, was originally written for the New Yorker in the last months of2002, after Iraq had agreed to re-admitting UN weapons inspectors and a fewmonths before the invasion. The New Yorker, for whatever reason, declined to publish it at the time, even though Viorst had been that magazine’s correspondent in the Middle East for many years. With the passing yesterday of Tariq Aziz, SST makes this sad and prescient essay available to its readers. Roger Trilling
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'Tariq Aziz sees the dream of a lifetime vanishing before his eyes. “When we made this revolution we were young men in our thirties,” he said during our meeting in Baghdad in September, “and now we’re in our sixties. We have made mistakes. Maybe we’ve been in power too long. But we’ve done good things for our country and we’re proud of our work. Now we have to contemplate that an American attack will wipe it all out.” Aziz’s tone was free of defiance. It was, rather, a message suffused with despair.
Aziz was, like most Iraqis of his generation, imbued from childhood with a deep indignation of imperialism. A monarchy installed by Britain was still in power when, as a teenager, he enlisted in the revolution. Saddam Hussein, several years his junior, was shepherding goats among his clansmen in the village of Tikrit. By the time Iraq’s king was overthrown in 1958, Aziz had sold his soul to Saddam, the up-and-coming leader of the Ba’ath Party, in the revolution’s behalf. A few years later, Saddam came to power, and Aziz could exult in the fact that the goal of the revolution had been met: Iraq was sovereign, for the first time in centuries governing itself. Now, with American battalions poised on the horizon, Aziz foresees imperialism’s return.
“I look at the situation philosophically,” Aziz once said to me. “The West is not prepared to accept a strong, modern, assertive developed country in the Arab world. I’m not a strong believer in conspiracies, but they do exist. And they exist more in our part of the world than elsewhere, because we have oil, a strategic position and Israel. This thing started with the collapse of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Since then, America has become more and more arrogant. Our people are frustrated, our mood is fatalistic. It seems to be our tradition to suffer and to fail.”
Tariq Aziz is known to the world as the voice - sometimes soothing, often irascible - of the government of Saddam Hussein. In the flow charts of power, he is more than a spokesman. He is a member of the Revolutionary Command Council, the state’s highest authority. He belongs to the leadership of the Ba’ath Party, the ruling political body. And he is the deputy prime minister, reporting only to Saddam, who holds the titles of prime minister and president. Yet, for all the power of his offices, Aziz is regarded as an outsider in the ruling hierarchy. It is a role that comes to him naturally.
Born in a Christian village, Aziz was the son of a functionary in the governorate of Mosul, a major city in northern Iraq. When he was ten, his father, for unexplained reasons, left the bureaucracy and moved the family to Baghdad, where he found work as a waiter in what has been described as a seedy bar. The family’s rootlessness, in a society that normally ties its members for life to their place of birth, made Aziz a cultural misfit. This role was reinforced by his Christian identity.
Aziz is a Chaldean Christian, one of 400,000 in a land of 20 million Muslims. For Arab Christians to become Ba’athis was not unusual; many were attracted to the party’s secularism, which promised to erase religious distinctions in the society. Michel Aflaq, the party founder, was himself a Christian. Ethnically, Chaldeans are more closely related to the Biblical Babylonians than to the Arabian tribesmen who settled Mesopotamia in the seventh century; some Iraqis do not even regard them as Arabs. Culturally, they tend to be richer, better educated and more widely traveled than other Iraqis. Many have emigrated toAmerica, including at least one in-law of Aziz. Iraqis say that Saddam sees Aziz’s religion as an asset, since a Chaldean could never be a rival for power in a Muslim land. Aziz married a Chaldean and has three children, one of them named Saddam. But it was politically useful for him to change his own Chaldean-sounding name, Mikhail Youhanna, to the Arabic name by which he is currently known.
Recruited by the Ba’ath Party while majoring in English at the Baghdad College of Fine Arts, Aziz was from the start an intellectual in an organization dominated by roughnecks. Saddam himself rose through the ranks on the strength of clan connections, an instinctive canniness and a disposition to brutality. His circle was made up chiefly of friends and kin from Tikrit, many of whom, like him, had not finished high school. Veryearly, Saddam took a liking to Aziz and saw his intellect as potentially useful in party struggles. But while Aziz climbed the civilian ladder to power after the Ba’athis seized power, his party rivals established beachheads within the army and the secret police. Even today, he is unloved by the toughs who remain closest to Saddam, but he benefits from the leader’s protection and has access to his ear.
Aziz’s first official post was editor of the party newspaper, Al-Thawra, which he used to burnish Saddam’s image. In 1974, he became information minister and, a few years later, foreign minister. In 1980, soon after Iran’s Islamic revolution, he was the target of an assassination attempt by Shi’ite radicals linked to Teheran. Saddam, claiming the attempt was directed at him, replied by executing some 600 of the Shi’ite faithful and expelling 100,000 more. Saddam then used the episode purge Shi’ites from the government, relying further on his Sunni base to tighten his tyranny. Aziz was among the few surviving outsiders. He often cites the assassination attempt as proof that Iraq cannot possibly sympathize with Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden. The episode, within the context of a struggle for preeminence between Iraq’s secular and Iran’s religious revolutions, was a factor in igniting the Iraq-Iran war.
As wartime head of foreign affairs, Aziz reached the pinnacle of his influence. Served by his mastery of English and finely honed negotiating skills, he lobbied for Iraq in the capitals of the world. He also shaped a foreign ministry that was acknowledged by the international community to be highly competent, with well-trained professionals rather than party hacks in charge of conducting Iraq’s diplomatic business.
Aziz’s efforts broke the ice with Egypt, from which Iraq had been estranged since Cairo’s 1979 peace agreement with Israel. He supervised a deal that brought badly needed fighter planes and missiles from France, with which he has maintained a special relationship. He also presided in 1984 over the
restoration of relations with the United States, which Iraq had severedduring the Six-Day War of 1967. Received royally at the White House, Aziz predicted an extended “honeymoon” with America, and announced that Iraq’s leaders, having matured, were ready to abandon diplomatic “rejectionism,” even with regard to Israel. His rivals grumbled that he had become America’s man, which seemed plausible enough from his statements that, when the war was over, Iraq would emulate the West in creating a free and democratic state.
Saddam’s dictatorship did not become free and democratic, of course, and the “honeymoon” with Washington did not last much beyond the 1988 Iraq-Iran cease-fire. Washington collided with Baghdad overloan agreements, oil prices and arms purchases, and denounced Iraq for gassing Kurdish villagers, which Aziz vehemently denied. Saddam launched fiery rhetorical attacks on Israel and, over Western protests, Iraq executed Farzad Barzoft, an Anglo-Iranian journalist on charges of spying. Aziz’s spin on the deterioration was that the US, profiting from the end of the Cold War, decided to crush any ambitions Iraq might have to dominate the Persian Gulf, with its vast oil reservoirs. In 1990, Saddam raised the stakes by invading Kuwait. The firstPresident Bush replied with a massive attack that decimated Iraq. A decade later, his son declared his intention to clean up the issues that the Gulf War had left unresolved.
In a government as tightly closed as Saddam’s, it is not easy to determine where Aziz stands in deliberations on how to respond to Mr. Bush. Aziz, who answers a wide range of questions with candor, is notably evasive about relations among leaders. Experts on the Iraqi system - diplomats, scholars, defected officials - mostly agree that after thirty years in power, the men around Saddam have overcome their natural antagonisms to work together smoothly. Part of the explanation is that each has his own domain, Aziz’s being foreign relations. It is agreed that all are careful to suppress opinions, and even information, that Saddam does not want to hear. A Saudi intermediary at the negotiations to end the Iraq-Iran War relates that Aziz insisted that a Saudi prince dispatch to Saddam an unacceptable Iranian proposal, declining to deliver it himself. Certainly, no Iraqi doubts that, in the end, all decisions are made by Saddam, and by Saddam alone.
If there has been any rearrangement of the power balance over the years, it has been in favor of 35-year-old Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s second son. Saddam is one of the aging Arab revolutionaries who, having overthrown kings, seek to pass power - under a system dubbed “dynastic republicanism” - to their sons. Assad in Syria succeeded in doing it; Mubarak in Egypt and Qadaffi in Libya are working at it. Qusay was fingered as heir-apparent after a succession of well-publicized escapades left Uday, his elder brother, with a reputation for recklessness. Saddam relegated Uday to the direction of youth programs and an official newspaper, while Qusay was trained in the apparatus of the army, the party and the secret police, where real authority lies. Qusay now holdshigh posts in these organizations and, according to a recent British report, he may be in charge of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons. Like his father, Qusay operates behind the scenes, rarely appearing in public. Iraqis see him as a shadowy figure who is ruthless, silent, cruelly ambitious and unlikely tochange the way the regime conducts its business.
Qusay, for reasons that appear more related to family than policy, has sought openly to undermine the influence of Tariq Aziz. A few years ago, he imprisoned Aziz’s son, Ziad, on a charge of corruption, which Iraqis recognized - in a government riddled with corruption - as throwing down the gauntlet. Qusay, not Aziz, is said to have persuaded Saddam to undertake an offensive to circumvent the UN embargo in force since the end of the Gulf War and to reduce Iraq’s diplomatic isolation. Begun in 1998, the initiative succeeded in improving Iraq’s relations with its neighbors and with the Arab world, while swelling Saddam’s support at home by raising popular standards of living. It also provided disturbing evidence to President Bush, who took office two years later, that Saddam’s regime, unless disciplined, would in all likelihood grow stronger.
When Mr. Bush, in September, appeared before the UN to put forth his series of demands on Iraq, however, it was Tariq Aziz, not the reclusive Qusay who was called upon to answer. In my meeting with him, Aziz declared that Iraq would not submit to any of Mr. Bush’s demands, including the readmission of the UN weapons inspectors. “President Bush has made clear that even if the inspectors come back, there is no guarantee that they will prevent war,” he said, “We know that Iraqis, not Americans, will be the major victims of a war, and maybe we can delay it. But if Bush wants it, war will come whatever we do.” Saddam himself was quoted as telling an Arab foreign minister, “If I allow inspectors to return, I’m allowing the end of the regime.” It was the same hard line he took with President Bush’s father in refusing to evacuate Kuwait in 1990. Twice in an hour of talks with me, Aziz echoed this position with the grim explanation, “We’re doomed if we do and doomed if we don’t.”
Aziz, like other Iraqi officials I met, made much of allegations that American spies had worked within the UN inspection teams. The allegations surfaced in 1998. UN records make a strong case that until then Iraq, in the hope of ending the embargo, had submitted, however reluctantly, to the inspectors, who made major progress in finding and destroying arms, especially chemical stocks. Based largely on leaks by the inspectors themselves, the charges changed the atmosphere, stiffening Iraqi resistance.
American authorities never denied the charges, arguing instead that spying was necessary to locate hidden weapons. Iraqi officials claimed that the espionage, far from targeting weapons, was directed at thewhereabouts of Iraqi leaders. Late in 1998, Washington announced that it would bomb weapons sites throughout Iraq in response to Saddam’s stonewalling. The UN reacted to the warning by withdrawing its inspectors, and four days of bombing followed. Iraqis said the bombing was aimed not at weapons sites at all but at killing their leaders, particularly Saddam Hussein.
“By the time they left,” Aziz said irritably, “what we had were not weapons inspectors but spies.” The words brought me back to a remark he made to me some years before about the trial of the Anglo-Iranianjournalist. “Barzoft was a spy,” he said. “We punished him the way we punish others for this crime. We are verysensitive about security matters in our region. We react strongly, but that is how we are.”
Saddam himself is famous for this sensitivity, especially as it regards his own safety. He is known to change bedrooms every night and desist from speaking on the phone. He almost never greets his people in public. I have heard Iraqis mutter that, in his concern for his own skin, he abandons the duties of leadership. Aziz himself told me the reason Saddam never went to the UN to speak out, as President Bush did, for his country’s position was that he was sure the Americans would try to kill him. He acknowledged that the security issue complicated Iraq’s options, making the first George Bush’s insistence on withdrawal from Kuwait seem a cut-and-dried choice. Aziz left no doubt that, whatever Saddam’s calculations for passing on the regime to his son, his belief that the weapons inspectors were a threat to his life stood as a barrier to ending the crisis.
After my talk with Aziz, I spent some time wandering through downtown Baghdad with an eye to comparing the public’s mood with his obvious despair. The damage inflicted by the Gulf War had long since been repaired, and the larger-than-life tableaux of Saddam which leap out at every intersection had been refurbished, with the same face looking a little older. The tiny shops that dominate both the twentieth-century boulevards and the ancient souk which runs along the Tigris were vibrant with people. The city did not suggest a society living at the edge of impoverishment, much less of war. No gangs of workmen were digging bomb shelters or building walls of sandbags. The young men who stood smoking on street corners wore jeans, not uniforms. If Iraq was getting ready to resist foreign armies, it was mobilizing elsewhere, not in Baghdad.
Talkative as ever, the shopkeepers showed no animosity toward me, notwithstanding their daily dose of anti-American propaganda. All seemed to know of Mr. Bush’s demands from listening to Al-Jazeera, VOA, the BBC or Radio Monte Carlo. In 1991, after Iraq’s defeat, the message I heard on the street - generally whispered, but sometimes delivered with bravado - was that it was time for Saddam Hussein to depart. But his support had obviously rebounded. The Iraqis I met on this visit directed their anger at the United States for a decade ofbombing raids, as well as for the ongoing shortages that the embargo produced. If, in 1991, they understood that the world was reacting to Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, a decade later they maintained they had no idea what sins Iraq had committed, or what America wanted. They seemed to speak as nationalists, not Saddam-lovers, in contending that the government, in defying Bush, was watching out for them.
Still, once past the anger, I heard an echo of Aziz’s message of resignation. When I asked young men whether they would fight, their response was a shrug, or at best a dutiful yes. Merchants, after reminiscing about holidays in Italy when Iraq was rich, before the wars, said such days were unlikely ever to return. One evening I attended a gathering in the garden of a historic house along the river, where artists and intellectuals, conveying no obvious patriotism, much less personal loyalty to Saddam, nonetheless declared their gratitude to the government for distributing food rations at the beginning of every month, for keeping the schools running albeit with antiquated text books and for maintaining medical services notwithstanding shortages of drugs and equipment. They talked of their pride in keeping their society intact. Yet they said they expected their lives to take a turn for the worse, without their being able to do anything to stop it.
One woman told me the public mood recalled to her the bleak days of the Gulf War when a reporter on an American ship would announce over the BBC that missiles had just been dispatched, inviting three or fourminutes of sheer terror until they struck. “I feel President Bush has already launched the missiles,” she said. “Whether they fall on me or on my neighbor is so random. But there is nothing we can do. We can only wait.” Turning to metaphor she added, “When the Americans finish with us, we’ll just get up, take our brooms, sweep away the rubble and start over again.” A few Iraqis predicted wryly that after Saddam had been killed off, the Americans would present them with a fresh Saddam, scarcely different from the original.
Over the week-end that Tariq Aziz was telling journalists like me that Iraq would not readmit the weapons inspectors, Naji Sabri, Baghdad’s foreign minister, was meeting in New York with the assembled foreign ministers of the Arab League. Sabri’s older brother, once a high foreign ministry official, had been executed by Saddam in 1979 for involvement in aconspiracy; somehow Naji was pronounced clean by the security services and allowed to go on with his career. Through Sabri, the Arabs delivered to Saddam their belief that the impasse over the inspectors was providing President Bush with a pretext for starting a war that was likely to affect all of them. In the past, Saddam had not concealed his contempt for his fellow Arabs for submitting to Western power. Now the Arabs were telling him that, if he wanted their support, it was his turn to yield.
That Monday, Aziz had been scheduled to open an international conference of largely left-wing politicians and intellectuals who had converged on Baghdad to proclaim their solidarity with Iraq’s defiance. But soon after the delegates read in the shabby newspaper published daily by the information ministry that Saddam had been in non-stop session with the national leadership, an announcement was made that the conference was postponed. It was a tip-off that something big was afoot.
The next day, the world learned that Iraq, in a formal letter from Sabri to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, had agreed to the weapons inspectors’ unconditional return. Aziz had spent much of the week-end in long-distance consultation with Sabri and Annan, helping to draft the letter. It described the inspectors’ return as “the indispensable first step toward an assurance that Iraq no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction.” Mr. Bush reacted by dismissing the announcement’s significance, but all Baghdad took the letter as a 180 degree turn, and seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
When the international conference opened that afternoon, Aziz made a cryptic allusion to the New York meetings, the only reference to Iraq’s change of position. The delegates responded with effusive speeches thanking Saddam for his wisdom. Later, I learned that Saddam had personally monitored every moment of the New York talks before yielding to the Arab insistence on his acceptance of the inspectors. His decision did not, of course, end the story. Since September, he has, with backing from France and the Arab states, Aziz’s clients, waged a rear guard action in the Security Council over the terms of the return. In late November, the inspectors arrived in Baghdad, initiatingwhat was expected to be months of work. Saddam had won a respite from the threat of war, though it was surely not enough to lift Tariq Aziz’s foreboding about the fate of his life’s work. "