Papers From Iraqi Archive Reveal Conspiratorial Mind-Set of Hussein

 WASHINGTON — On Nov. 15, 1986, Saddam Hussein gathered his most senior aides for an important strategy session. Two days earlier, President Ronald Reagan had acknowledged in a televised address that his administration had sent weapons and spare parts to Iran.

“It can only be a conspiracy against Iraq,” said Mr. Hussein, who inferred darkly that the United States was trying to prolong the Iran-Iraq war, already in its sixth year, and increase Iraq’s enormous casualties.

In truth, the Reagan administration had arranged the arms shipment for a variety of reasons that had little to do with Iraq: to secure the release of American hostages in Lebanon, to open a private channel to the new leadership in Tehran and to generate secret profits that could be sent to Nicaraguan rebels.

But Mr. Hussein would not be moved from his conspiratorial view. He mentioned the arms sales again in his fateful meeting on July 25, 1990, with April Glaspie, the American ambassador in Baghdad, when he again misread Washington and assumed it would stand aside when his army invaded Kuwait a week later.

The deliberations within Mr. Hussein’s inner sanctum are chronicled in a voluminous archive of documents and recorded meetings that American forces captured after they invaded Iraq in 2003.  Much of the collection, housed in digital form at the National Defense University, has not been made public. But a small portion of it has been opened to outside researchers, and 20 transcripts and documents were released Tuesday in conjunction with a conference on the Iran-Iraq War at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Even in an age of WikiLeaks, such a detailed record of a foreign leader’s private ruminations — one that reveals his calculations and perceptions of American policy — rarely becomes public. It is the Iraqi version of the Oval Office tapes that helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon, and have given historians a window into the White House from 1940 to 1973, when a recording system was in place.

In the case of Mr. Hussein, the transcripts depict a leader who was inclined to see enemies everywhere, who often displayed a shallow understanding of diplomacy outside the Middle East, and who harbored grand ambitions for his country but was prone to epic miscalculations.

Mr. Hussein so grievously underestimated Iran’s military that he wrongly assumed Iran’s initial airstrikes in the war had actually been carried out by Israeli warplanes. He personally selected the rockets to use on one attack against an Iranian city, and he boasted that Iraq had a chemical weapons arsenal that “exterminates by the thousands.” He felt threatened enough by the rise of fundamentalist Islamic groups that he discussed his desire to “trick” the public, into thinking that his government, too, endorsed Islamic values.

From a historical perspective, Mr. Hussein’s decision to take on Iran and his reaction to the Iran-contra affair are two of the most intriguing areas in the papers.

Mr. Hussein set the stage for war with Iran by repudiating a 1975 agreement that had settled a disputed over the Shatt al Arab, the strategic waterway along their border. According to Amatzia Baram, an Israeli expert on Iraq who has studied the archive, the pivotal decision appears have been made in a meeting on Sept. 16, 1980, when Mr. Hussein took the optimistic view that the Iranians, fearing the Iraqi forces massed near the border, would give in without much of a fight.

A top secret report from the Iraqi General Military Intelligence Directorate supported Mr. Hussein’s assessment. “It is clear that, at present, Iran has no power to launch wide offensive operations against Iraq or to defend on a large scale,” the report noted. It also predicted “more deterioration of the general situation of Iran’s fighting capability.”

But the war, which ultimately lasted eight years and resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties, turned out to be far more difficult than Mr. Hussein had expected. Soon after it began, Iranian aircraft bombed a series of targets, including Iraqi oil refineries and the Osirak nuclear plant south of Baghdad. The feat so surprised the Iraqis that they assumed the attack could not have emanated from Iran.

“This is Israel,” Mr. Hussein exclaimed in an Oct. 1, 1980, meeting. He then complained that Iraqi officials had not followed his suggestion to bury the nuclear facility under the Hamrin Mountains north of Baghdad, before approving a plan to fortify the complex with millions of sandbags. But those sandbags proved to be of little use when Israeli warplanes actually did strike the site, in June 1981.

Later, Mr. Hussein said he was not surprised that Israel felt threatened by Iraq, which he asserted would defeat Iran and emerge with a military that was stronger than ever. “Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel,” he said in a 1982 conversation. “Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq.”

As Iraq’s war with Iran proceeded, Mr. Hussein did not hesitate to give battlefield advice, despite his shaky knowledge of weapons and tactics. “Do you have cannons that shell air bursts to fall on them while they are in the streets?” he said in the meeting on Oct. 1, 1980, which discussed the bombardment of Abadan, in southern Iran. “We want their casualties to be high.”

He was often cordial to his largely sycophantic inner circle, but was capable of coldhearted calculations about the forces he had sent to war. Early in the conflict, Mr. Hussein was frustrated with Iraqi bomber pilots who, hobbled by poor intelligence, had returned from missions over Iran after failing to strike their targets. Deciding that he needed to make an example of the airmen, Mr. Hussein demanded that the pilots be executed, a practice that former Iraqi commanders say was common during the war.

The Iran-contra affair proved to be particularly bitter for Mr. Hussein and his aides, and they struggled for weeks to comprehend it.  Among other things, they could not understand why the Reagan administration had taken military action against Libya in 1986 but was reaching out to Iran, since, Mr. Hussein said, Iran “plays a greater role in terrorism.”

“I am trying to understand exactly what happened here,” he said. Tariq Aziz, his foreign minister and Iraq’s face to the world for years, noted, perhaps in jest, that Iraq had supported independence for Puerto Rico.

But Mr. Hussein said that something more important than Puerto Rico was at stake: the struggle for influence in the volatile Middle East. “They like Iranians more than us,” Mr. Hussein said. “They do not like them because they are nicer than us or because they are better than we are. They only like them because they can be pulled from the street into a car easily, unlike us,” he added, comparing the Iranians to willing prostitutes on the street.

For all his distrust of the United States, Mr. Hussein also feared that the Soviet Union wanted to keep the Iran-Iraq war going, to distract Iran from helping Muslim fighters in Afghanistan and the Soviet republics, the documents show. In an undated recording from the 1980s, Mr. Aziz dismissed Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, a longtime secretary general of the United Nations, as an American tool. “I mean, he has been living in New York for the last 15 to 20 years, maybe,” he said, “which is a Jewish city.”

Hal Brands, an assistant professor at Duke University who has studied the archive, said that Mr. Hussein’s own ascent to power, the product of years of Baathist plotting and brutal infighting, probably influenced his view of other countries. “He came to power through conspiratorial means, and tended to assume that everybody operated that way,” Mr. Brands said.

The notion that Israel and the West had joined forces to undermine his government persisted well after the Iran-Iraq war ended. In 1990, Mr. Hussein himself intervened to ensure the execution of Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born journalist working for The Observer, a British newspaper. Mr. Bazoft was investigating a mysterious explosion at a military complex south of Baghdad when he was arrested and charged with spying for Israel. The Bazoft case drew worldwide attention, and the British government appealed for clemency. Mr. Hussein was unmoved. Told that it would take a month for the Iraqi legal process to be completed, he took charge of the matter.

“A whole month?” he exclaimed.  “I say we execute him in Ramadan, and this will be the punishment for Margaret Thatcher.”

Mr. Bazoft was hanged on March 15, 1990, six months after his arrest and shortly before Ramadan began. In response, Britain recalled its ambassador. Less than five months later, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait.