http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/international/middleeast/23GORDON.html
Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
RESIDENTIAL PALACE, Baghdad — As American and British forces prepared to invade Iraq, the workers at Saddam Hussein’s presidential compound here were hard at work on their own secret war preparations: removing the ornate furniture from Mr. Hussein’s palaces to hide it until after the war.
While the allies were preparing to unleash their missiles and bombs, Mr. Hussein’s aides were busy establishing a strategic reserve of handsomely upholstered sofas, fine china, wall hangings with pastoral scenes, and wall-sized mirrors decorated with cherubs. A label was affixed to each of the items explaining precisely where it came from right down to the very floor and room.
In terms of aesthetics, the furniture seems to be a foreign despot’s misguided attempt at sophistication. Mr. Hussein and his colleagues, it seems, dwelled in a world in which excess was the norm, no expenditure was too extravagant and ostentation was substituted for good taste.
But the cache also provides a window into the Mr. Hussein’s strategic calculations — or more accurately his miscalculations. Mr. Hussein and his colleagues, it seems, were expecting to ride out the war in their bunkers and to return afterward to their former life of splendor. They were not only expecting to endure the allied bombardment; they were hoping to retain the seat of power along with all of their furniture and imperial trappings.
After fighting the Americans in the 1991 Persian Gulf war and surviving four days of American air strikes in 1998, Mr. Hussein and his deputies had a good sense of what structures would be high on the allied target list (the leadership’s offices and residences, airfields and other military assets) and which would be off limits (schools, mosques and civilian neighborhoods.)
So, they planned accordingly.
In the Amiriyah section of Baghdad I met an Iraqi aviation engineer who told me that the government had decreed that the engines be removed from all of Iraq’s jets at the international airport. The airport, in fact, is dotted with engineless airplanes. (Two were turned into burned-out hulks anyway by over-eager American troops determined to deprive the regime of any chance to escape.)
The military did much the same. The Iraq Air Force buried entire aircraft in its western desert to try to hide them from the Americans. Tanks were buried near Al Kut. Weapons and ammunition were hidden in the nation’s schools.
The leadership applied the formula, too. Mr. Hussein’s Abu Ghurayb Palace was stripped of its furniture. Paintings were even removed from their frames. (The Americans fired a cruise missile into Mr. Hussein’s vacant palace bedroom anyway.) There is also the $656 million dollars that was found hidden in a gardener’s shed and in other modest buildings in Baghdad, a cache that the Iraqi power elite clearly planned to recover one day.
Mr. Hussein’s presidential palace here — a sprawling compound that has gone from being the nation’s power center to a furniture warehouse — is another case in point. For the regime’s loyalists life was good. This was not just a government installation. It was a planned community for the elite on the banks of Tigris, with parks, swimming pools, Disney-like castles, moats, and man-made pounds plied by paddleboats.
Brig. Gen. Sayyad Yassen, a Republican Guard commander, was one of the favored few. He had a home in the compound with a swimming pool, a sauna, and a river view.
American troops found $16 million today in another house across the street, and an officer said there could be much more. A white Mercedes with a bullet hole in the front passenger window was parked outside.
“These are the real looters,” said Sgt. First Class Greg Walker, who took me around in a Hummer.
General Yassen’s home was filled with beds, an indication that soldiers bunked there with the intent to defend the regime. The Special Republican Guard, which was charged with defending the capital, however, seems not to have made much of a fight once it was clear that the American armor was on the way. Some Republican Guard troops left their uniforms in their lockers and their boots by their cots. For soldiers determined to avoid the American prisoner of war camps, army boots seem to have been a decided liability.
The abandoned uniforms suggest an answer to one of the great riddles of the war: what happened to the Iraqi Republican Guard? In one of the fastest demobilizations in history, the Iraqi troops that escaped the American bombing appear to have cast off their military gear and tried to blend in with the civilian population.
"You could say the Iraqi Army has us surrounded,"said Col. Martin Stanton, a senior officer at the land war command for civil-military relations. “They are lining up each day looking for work.”
These days, the presidential compound is an American headquarters — M-1 tanks rumble along the avenues; soldiers have turned one of the buildings into a indoor shooting range; other soldiers have make the generals’ homes temporary camps.
The Pentagon’s Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which is charged with overseeing the rebuilding of Iraq and the establishment of a new government, is setting up its office in a hall the Iraqi Foreign Affairs Ministry used for official functions. The office is just short walk from the stockpile of fine furniture, much of which seems to be have been built in France.
I wandered through the rooms with an Arab-speaking officer. Some of the pieces, he explained, were from the Republican Palace, others from the Huraa Library and the Mothers of All Battles Hall. There was even a splendid chair with finely stitched cushions. Its label indicated that it have been removed from the “special corridor.” That, my guide, told me seems to be a reference to the quarters formerly occupied by Mr. Hussein himself.
And I read on this board how “sanctions” were the cause of the depolarable condition suffered by the Iraqi people! So, we should have lifted the sanctions and given more aid so Saddam and his cronies could have the good life? Last time I give any modicum of credit to those posters on GS prattling on about sanctions!
Peace To All Who Read This…
Let the dictator claim whatever he wants to - let him claim he is God’s chosen one for all i care - i couldn’t care less what Saddam Hussein claims as a diplomatic coup. Why are we so obsessed with one petty dictator’s claims - is it not more significant, surely, that 5000 civilians are dying each month as a result of this embargo ?