Reviewed by Jeff Stein

Sunday, December 8, 2002; Page BW08

SADDAM
King of Terror
By Con Coughlin
Ecco. 350 pp. $26.95

What do you suppose Saddam Hussein was thinking this morning as he awoke from his dreams in Baghdad, as U.N. arms inspectors buzzed about his city? Was he thinking fight -- or flight? Was he drooling over the prospect of Republican Guards fighting block-to-block against the invading Americans, Blackhawks down, anthrax-tipped missiles lifting off for Israel, al Qaeda sleeper cells erupting with germ weapons and "dirty bombs" in Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Denver and Washington, D.C.? Was he looking forward to a martyr's fiery death?

Or was he considering, as recent rumors have it, taking a secret deal offered by Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush and flying off to sanctuary in Moscow with a jet full of gold? Nobody, absolutely nobody, knows but Saddam Hussein.

"If they come, we are ready," the Iraqi dictator told the Labor Party MP George Galloway, who took an elevator "so far underground" to visit Saddam last August that it made his "ears pop." "We will fight them on the streets," Saddam declared for the benefit of his British guest, "from the rooftops, from house to house. We will never surrender." Maybe. And maybe he'll commit suicide, like Hitler, rather than be dragged out of his hiding place by the Americans -- or worse, his own people -- and hanged, or summarily shot against a wall with his wife and evil sons, so much like Mussolini and the Ceausescus.

It is, of course, the $100-billion question -- the estimated key money for a U.S. entry into Iraq. (Then there's the upkeep.) A decade's worth of books by journalists and Iraqi exiles has already persuasively plumbed the personality of Saddam Hussein as a juvenile delinquent, conspirator, megalomaniac, commander, diplomat, butcher, sadist, drunk, rapist, philanderer and all-around thug. But none of them can predict what he'll do if American helicopters appear at the gates of Baghdad. Nor can Con Coughlin, a longtime Middle East hand and executive editor of London's Sunday Telegraph, for all the terrain he ably surveys in Saddam: King of Terror.

A chilling case has been made -- by the CIA most recently -- that the Butcher of Baghdad will be most dangerous when he's cornered. But a former Iraqi official who used to see Saddam regularly insisted to me last month, "Like most bullies, he's a coward. He'd take a Russian offer -- his family will make him go."

Coughlin revisits Saddam's birth into a murderous Tikriti clan in the late 1930s; his eager enlistment as a Baathist assassin in various plots against Baghdad regimes (perhaps on one occasion with the help of the CIA, which may have handed him a list of Iraqi communists to kill); his rise to power in the 1970s; his pursuit of unconventional weapons; his erratic direction of the Iran-Iraq war (where secret U.S. aid bailed him out); his blundering invasion of Kuwait, defeat in Desert Storm and, over a decade, eventual triumph over U.N. arms inspections and economic sanctions. Call him a survivor, if nothing else.

"The glory of the Arabs stems from the glory of Iraq," Coughlin has him declaring on one occasion. "Throughout history, whenever Iraq became mighty and flourished so did the Arab nation." It was for primacy among the Arabs and at least diplomatic parity with Israel that Saddam pursued an atom bomb -- and might have obtained one by 1991, had he not been forced to go underground with a uranium enrichment program when U.S. bombers and troops were deployed to evict him from Kuwait. Now estimates are that he's on track to have an indigenous atomic bomb or two by 2007, to accompany his chemical and biological weapons, stocks of which he's thought still to possess in the tens of thousands.

At the public celebration of his official birthday in his primitive hometown of Tikrit last April 28, Saddam's infamous cousin Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majid (dubbed "Chemical Ali" for murdering thousands of Iraqi Kurds with nerve gas) threatened to unleash such weapons in the United States, to "take the fight to [Americans'] own homes." A Saddam vice president chimed in that "the heroes of Iraq can become human bombs in the thousands, willing to blow up America in particular."

Saddam himself was nowhere to be seen, of course, having long avoided public appearances for fear of assassination (and employed food tasters, doubles, secret tunnels and constantly changing bedrooms, among myriad security measures). Perhaps he was off talking with a psychic, one of whom, a blind old woman, came into Saddam's favor because she told him people were trying to kill him. That doesn't seem so odd: In Washington people are staring into crystal balls, too. •

Jeff Stein is the editor of Congressional Quarterly's Homeland Security Web site, and co-author, with Khidhir Hamza, of "Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda."