REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Saddam Ceausescu?
Maybe regime change won't require war.
The mind readers of the media have spent two days interpreting a few words from Colin Powell to suggest that President Bush is "softening" his views on Saddam Hussein. We'd suggest that maybe the real news is what Saddam has been doing in Baghdad.
Fresh from an "election" triumph worthy of New Jersey, the dictator decided to open Iraq's jails and release thousands of prisoners. His henchmen more or less ordered the Western press to observe the spectacle, which turned into a small riot. You can read too much into any single event, but this one has the strange, desperate air of a regime that knows its days may be numbered.
No doubt Saddam intends this as one more bizarre ploy. A friend of ours suggests that the dictator is engaging in a tradition that dates back to the caliphs, who would release everyone from jail every so often to ensure their popularity. The prisoners will enjoy their freedom for a while, and Saddam's secret police will watch their movements and meetings before rounding them up again.
Secretary of State Powell dismissed the release on these grounds on Sunday, noting that the prisoners "better watch out where the next door is that puts them right back in jail." Spokesmen for Iraq's political opposition in exile also say that members of their movements don't seem to be among the released. That may be because they are already dead.
The State Department's 2002 human rights report notes that Iraq "continued to execute summarily alleged political opponents and leaders in the Shia religious community." Prison conditions are worse than those in the movie "Midnight Express," and Iraq "has conducted 'prison cleansing' campaigns to kill inmates in order to relieve overcrowding in the prisons." Democrats David Bonior and Jim McDermott must have missed that detail during their recent goodwill tour of Iraq.
The same report notes that "according to former prisoners, torture techniques included branding, electric shocks administered to the genitals . . . beating, pulling out of fingernails, burning with hot irons and blowtorches, suspension from rotating ceiling fans, dripping acid on the skin," well, you get the idea. "Evidence of such torture often was apparent when security forces returned the mutilated bodies of torture victims to their families," the report adds. No wonder the prisoners were so elated to be released.
And yet the sudden, frantic nature of this exercise suggests that Saddam knows he is trouble. He really seems to believe that his recent re-election will make the world think better of him, having invited in the Western media to report the results. The prisoner ploy looks like a similar effort, designed to show he is a popular, compassionate leader. Instead both reveal how out of touch with reality he is. His recent, weird combination of defiance and conciliation toward the United Nations reveals a similar lunatic desperation.
It all reminds us of the final days of other dictators. Under real pressure for the first time, they try something to appease their citizens and gull the world. But the moves are merely signs of weakness. In Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu was thought to be the least vulnerable of all Eastern Europe's Communists right up until the time he and his wife were shot on Christmas Day by their own people.
We suspect this could end up being Saddam's fate, too. The last time he was vulnerable, after the Gulf War, thousands of Iraqis spontaneously revolted only to be murdered by the helicopters that American generals had let him keep. Once Iraqis understand that this time the U.S. intends to finish the job, they may rise again before the American military even makes it to Baghdad.
The recent U.S. decision to train several thousand Iraqis for the coming war is a welcome recognition of this possibility. Like hundreds of thousands of other Iraqi exiles, those trainees have friends and associates inside their home country. As word spreads that their liberation is coming, the willingness to challenge the regime will grow.
We aren't saying that Saddam will go easily, or without violence. Our point is that history has shown that dictators are often more vulnerable than they seem. What their people need to depose them is the belief that they can succeed, and that someone will support an uprising. That support is precisely what President Bush has been asking the United Nations to give the Iraqi people.
