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Why
Baghdad Fell Without a Fight -- Does Saddam's General Have the
Answer?
Commentary, Peter Dale Scott,
Pacific News Service, May 28,
2003
Making headlines around the world -- but not in U.S.
media -- are reports that a notorious Republican Guard
commander mysteriously left off the U.S. card deck of 55
most-wanted Iraqis was bribed by the United States to ensure
the quick fall of Baghdad.
One of Saddam Hussein's
top generals was not included in the U.S. card deck of 55
most-wanted Iraqis. Now stories are circulating in European,
Middle Eastern and other foreign press that he was paid off to
ensure the quick fall of Baghdad.
On May 25, the French
paper Le Journal du Dimanche, citing an unnamed Iraqi source,
claimed that General Maher Sufian al-Tikriti, Saddam's cousin
and a Republican Guard commander, made a deal with U.S. troops
before leaving Iraq on a U.S. military aircraft. Allegedly the
deal had been secured in advance by the CIA, but by
prearrangement was implemented only after U.S. troops reached
Baghdad's airport on April 4. Sufian was said to have left
Iraq, along with a 20-man entourage, on April 8 -- the day
before U.S. forces captured Baghdad without
resistance.
An Arab diplomat told Le Journal that the
CIA had hatched the plot more than a year before. "Many
suitcases filled with dollars were floating around," the
diplomat said.
This story has been picked up by
newspapers around the world, including the London Times and
the Sydney Morning Herald. But the only recent reference to
Gen. Sufian in the U.S. press was in early May, when it was
reported that his home was now a base where survivors searched
for records on the fate of missing loved ones.
Other
Arab sources have added details. Reportedly Sufian ordered the
Republican Guard out of the city to fight in the countryside,
where they were easily picked off. Gen. Sufian may also have
betrayed the location of the house where Saddam Hussein met
with his family on April 7, and where Saddam may or may not
have been killed. A further report from Agence France Presse
alleges that Saddam was betrayed by not one but three of his
cousins, as well as other senior military officers, and a
former Cabinet minister.
The Egyptian weekly Al-Usbua
claimed that Gen. Sufian had betrayed his cousin in exchange
for $25 million, the guarantee to move to the United States
and the promise of a future high position in Iraq. (One hopes
that this last claim is not true, as Sufian was notorious as
Saddam's partner in terroristic oppression.)
The
Lebanese newspaper Sawt al-Urouba has alleged that some of the
"human shields" who had traveled to Baghdad before the war in
the name of protecting civilian targets were in fact U.S.
agents who bribed Iraqi generals while in the city.
In
a May 19 article in the Defense News, retiring Chief of U.S.
Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks, is quoted as telling a
Defense News reporter on May 10 that, before the U.S. invasion
of Iraq, U.S. Special Forces had gone in and bribed Iraqi
generals not to fight. Franks told the reporter, "I had
letters from Iraqi generals saying, 'I now work for
you.'"
If so, the U.S. plans for occupying Iraq
followed the model of the invasion of Afghanistan. There too,
key warlords were bought off by liberal dispensations of CIA
dollars, making military operations far easier than many had
anticipated. The downside of these deals was to restore parts
of Afghanistan to warlords whose traditional source of income
has been the drug traffic.
Whatever the details, it
would appear that refinements in military strategy and
high-tech materiel were not, as the Pentagon has suggested,
the key to quick U.S. victory in Iraq.
On April 24, the
U.S.-based online news site World Tribune.com noted that Gen.
Sufian, the commander of several Republican Guard units
defending Baghdad, did not appear on the U.S. list of 55 most
wanted Iraqis. It cited Arab diplomatic sources as saying that
Sufian was believed to have ordered his units to abandon their
weapons and return home. But U.S. officials, it reported, had
denied any deal with Sufian.
On April 8, at the time of
the alleged deal, U.S. Marines announced that Gen. Sufian had
been shot at a roadblock outside Baghdad. On April 9, Knight
Ridder newspapers carried a report from Marine headquarters on
how Gen. Sufian met his death in a white Toyota sedan,
uniformed and alone except for his chauffeur.
The fate
of Gen. Maher Sufian al-Takriti is key to a central mystery
surrounding this poorly reported war: Why did Baghdad fall
without a fight?
PNS contributor Peter Dale Scott
(pdscott@socrates.berkeley.edu) is a former Canadian diplomat
and professor of English at UC Berkeley. His most recent book
is ?Drugs, Oil and War: The United States in Afghanistan,
Colombia, and Indochina? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). His
Web site is >socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott.
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