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March 02, 2006
Saddam's Secrets
I am about a third of the way through Saddam's Secrets by General Georges Sada. This is actually a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. He has so far told the story of Saddam's rule and rise to power and mixed it in with his own biography. He knew Saddam before he came to power and both Hussein and Sadas wive's were teachers in the same school when they were younger. Sada joined the Iraqi air force straight out of high school because he wanted to be a fighter pilot and ended up becoming one of Iraqs best pilots, which included stints in the Soviet Union and even a few months in San Antonio at Randolph Air Force Base. The best anecdote was how Sada accidentally smuggled a bible into the Soviet Union. He brought an Aramaic bible (Sada is an Assyrian and a Christian) for his personal use without thinking about it and the KGB officer who saw it did not realize what it was. He met some other Assyrian Christians in the Soviet Union and ended up secretly giving them his bible because they did not have one.
Sada remained in the air force through many regime changes and rose in rank to general via ability. The corruption that occurred in Iraq's military and society under Saddam partly explains why Iraq kept losing wars. Saddam had no military training or experience when he was promoted to four-star general (he later promoted himself to five-stars) and Saddam routinely awarded political allies generalships that they possessed no qualifications for. When party loyalty and connections are more important than competence and experience and you fight countries like Israel, Great Britain, and the US, your army is going to lose. The book contains other stories that I did not know about, like how Saddam had risen to prominence after personally trying to assassinate one of Iraq's earlier presidents. He fired hundreds of rounds into the car with a machine gun, but the president survived.
I started reading this to see Sada's take on what happened to Saddam's chemical weapons and he has said Saddam still had them right before the US invaded, but has not gone into detail about what happened with them. He did say that Saddam had planned to use chemical weapons against Israel with Iraqi fighter jets during the first Gulf War, but Sada convinced Saddam that Israel would shoot down the jets before they reached Israel so Saddam changed his mind.
Posted by Pete at March 2, 2006 09:03 PM
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