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As a new war approached, Saddam appeared each night on national TV, puffing on a Havana cigar as he assured his people over and over that Iraq would emerge victorious. He exuded confidence. That might seem crazy, given the firepower ranged against him. Yet Saddam was lucid enough to know his military was no match for U.S. might. His emphasis was always on symbolic victory, on winning wars in political terms. Never mind that his forces were routed in Kuwait in 1991. He still deemed what he called the "mother of battles" a great Iraqi victory because he heroically resisted the attack by 40 nations and stayed in power. He got away with the brutal suppression of a postwar rebellion that flared in 14 of 18 Iraqi provinces while the first Bush Administration stood back. He made defiance a pillar of his power. "Saddam sees himself as a lone figure, battling the greatest power on earth," says Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist who has profiled the Iraqi leader for the CIA. Saddam felt, as did many others in the Arab world, that he had "won" the first Gulf War by not losing everything.
So Saddam may well have thought he could win in similar terms again. "He always thinks he has a chance of beating the odds," says one of Russia's longtime official Iraq watchers. His long tenure has meant decades of overcoming formidable obstacles, including his own blunders. During Saddam's February interview with Dan Rather, the CBS anchorman said he presumed it was the last time the two would meet. Saddam replied that Rather had said the same thing before the first Gulf War.
Even in fighting the U.S. a second time, Saddam may have sensed an opportunity for survival. He apparently was convinced, just as he had been a decade ago, that the U.S. could not stomach casualties, so his strategy was the same--betting that a heavy body count of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians would drive Western public opinion to demand a cease-fire. Not that he has shown concern about the deaths of his people. The Pentagon claims Saddam had tailors stitch up 15,000 British and American uniforms so that disguised Iraqi troops could attack Iraqi civilians, allowing Saddam to blame the allies. The enormous antiwar demonstrations in the West prior to the fighting may have emboldened Saddam into thinking the Americans could be made to fold.
Saddam long ago learned how to keep power, no matter what the cost. It wasn't just ferocious ambition that drove him from shepherd to dictator by age 42. His Darwinian outlook took root among the clan machinations of his native Tikrit, during the years when Arab nationalism began to flower. Freud would have had a field day with Saddam's tortured relationships with his family, including, Post says, a suicidal mother who tried to abort him. Saddam's father died before he was born, and after his mother married a man who brutalized Saddam, the illiterate 10-year-old went to live with his maternal uncle Khairallah Talfah, an ardent nationalist and embittered former army officer who came out on the losing side during a 1941 struggle for power in Baghdad. It was then that Saddam's formative education began. Talfah spoon-fed the impressionable youth with his grudge against the West and his dreams of Arab glory.