From Arcanum Media Group.

Limited edition, signed, personalised copy of The Devil's Double by Latif Yahia.

Signed, personalised copy.

Due to an overwhelming demand for signed copies of Latif Yahia's book The Devil's Double, we have arranged with Mr. Yahia himself to sign a limited amount of copies for you. Each copy you purchase will be signed by Latif Yahia and made out to your name or the name you give us, if you are not buying the book for yourself please send us an email immediately or fill out the comment box in "contact us' on our website telling us who you would like the book made out to.


You may or may not be aware that Mr. Yahia is donating his royalties from all sales of the book, to the Iraqi children Orphaned by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent war.
Best regards,
The AMG team

www.arcanummediagroup.com

Iraq War Lessons Learned? Keep Rumsfeld Away From All Things Defense.

by: Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions

Last week, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld strolled into town to advise the Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee on how to prevent more cuts in the Department of Defense (DoD). The members of the committee lapped it up because they, according to the National Journal, "are on a crusade to protect the military's accounts from further budget cuts." There have been numerous other writers who have gone into great detail about the damage Rumsfeld did to our country in selling the Iraq war and in allowing torture and other outrages in the war, but many don't know how badly he messed up the invasion of Iraq and the logistics of the war. He had a grossly unworkable plan for the Iraq war which overrode much of the planned logistics. And personnel gave us the debacle of KBR's $45 billion and still growing logistics contract and a new war service industry whose excesses will plague the military and suck the US Treasury dry every time we have troops overseas in the future. 

I saw much of the damage done by Rumsfeld's theories and plans when I was researching my book, "Betraying Our Troops," on how the private contractors were used in the Iraq war in a way and number that was never done before. Profiles of troops and contractor employees showed how the troops suffered and the military mission was compromised. Many of these contractors, especially KBR, which was, at the time, a division of Halliburton, did not have the same urgency to keep the troops supplied on the edge of the battlefield and later in fighting the insurgency, while running up costs and charging for work not done. This resulted in troops away from the safe bases without the basics of food and water and vital parts to keep their equipment going.

This was not a short-term problem. One unit that was parked at the border between Iraq and Iran was so isolated because KBR would not go out and supply them that they didn't even know that President George W. Bush had landed on an aircraft carrier and declared, "mission accomplished" until three months after the event. They were living on scarce food and water, and part of their daily routine was to try to keep their trucks working so they could go out and scrounge food from the local villages while many of their general officers were being treated by KBR to desserts made by expensive pastry chiefs at the major bases, including former palaces of Saddam Hussein.

The roots of how the military ended up with this expensive but broken logistics disaster can be placed directly on Rumsfeld and his build up before the war. For my book, I interviewed the two generals, Gen. Paul Kern and Gen. Wade McManus, who were responsible for the logistics during the build up of the Iraq war. Logistics is not as exciting as strategy, planes and tanks in war, but can be the most decisive and important to our troops for their mission and their lives. Rumsfeld's actions during the build up of the invasion guaranteed that there would not be enough logistical supplies and would set a politically connected company loose in the battlefield to run up costs and drain the money for the war effort, no matter how much money the Congress threw at the war.

Rumsfeld did two things that laid the groundwork for this debacle. First, he decided to limit the number of troops that could be used in the invasion to a level that was 200,000 troops fewer than the military asked for and relieved the commander who said that we needed more. This didn't just mean that we had to have fewer troops who were actually fighting, but also meant that there were not enough troops to do the heavy laden logistics of our modern Army. When Gen. Paul Kern was presented with the fact that he did not have enough troops for the logistics in the war, he, in desperation, pulled out a small contract the Army had with KBR to supply bases around the world and exploded it. KBR's contract, called LOGCAP, was around $60 million a year to take care of the logistical needs of 25,000-50,000 troops in a non-combat setting around the world. General Kern was forced to explode the contract to cover over 200,000 troops in dangerous warfront areas in just a few months before the invasion. The Army also didn't have the personnel to do oversight on this new contingency contract with open-ended funding, and KBR moved in and took advantage of the situation to run up costs as fast as they could while not delivering the necessary logistic to the troops in dangerous areas.

They did that because they didn't have to produce. In past wars, when the Army controlled its own logistics with its own people, troops would be put in jail if they refused to run supplies to the troops near the front line. Because KBR was a civilian company with civilian workers, they could refuse to do the work if they thought it was dangerous, and their workers could quit anytime and go home. The commanders, who never had to deal with so many contractors in a danger zone didn't know what to do because they had little power over this contractor other than filing breach of contract in an administrative action back in the US. KBR was in the driver's seat and they took full advantage of it.

When the insurgents began to blow up large KBR truck convoys and kidnapped an American truck driver who was seen captured on television, many of the KBR civilian truck drivers just quit and went home. The supplies piled up on the Kuwaiti border to such an extent that even the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that was set up by the US to try to govern chaotic Iraq were forced to ration their food in Baghdad, while the Army desperately tried to find troops who had driven trucks in civilian life to replace the missing KBR drivers. That was just one example of how using a contractor this close to a war area was one of Rumsfeld's big failures in the war. My book outlines many more.

The second mess that Rumsfeld directly caused in the initial run up to the war was to throw out the carefully laid logistics plans of the Army to put in a better "business" model. The Army, knowing that logistics during a war can be very chaotic, had a logistics plan that would requisition supplies and parts and have redundant supply backups in what was known as "just in case" type planning. Rumsfeld thought this was wasteful and changed the system just months before the invasion. He decided to do the "just in time" style of logistics that many companies used in the US where they did not have warehouses full of products, but used Federal Express and other delivery services to get their products or parts just in time. In what seems an obvious hitch to this idea was that wars are chaotic and it is very unrealistic to believe that you could use a civilian delivery system to deliver the supplies far away from the battlefield and expect that KBR, with their civilian truck drivers, could get this vital equipment to the troops.

By changing the logistics system right before the war, Rumsfeld guaranteed more chaos because, in the rush to war, some of the commanders were not aware of how the new system worked. They were assured that everything was in control and supplies would be pushed to the troops "just in time." It quickly became apparent that this business model that works in peacetime was a logistical nightmare during the war.

What made this a longer-term problem was that Iraq did not "welcome us as liberators" and the insurgency made most of the country unsafe to deliver supplies. So, between a new and dysfunctional logistics system and using civilian contractors to drive the trucks through fluid and dangerous areas, the situation was dire for much of the first part of the war. Rumsfeld's "business acumen" and mantra that private contractors could do anything better than the military helped fuel the years of quagmire in Iraq. Rumsfeld, as early as 2003, wrote a memorandum to Paul Wolfowitz, Gen. Peter Pace and Doug Feith, his fellow travelers who promised a quick and efficient war, that it "is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long hard slog." We are still in that slog, eight and ten years later because of his policies and his theories on how wars should be fought, while the troops were let down by the Pentagon and had to drink polluted water and even face electrocution because he set KBR loose with little oversight.

Besides the danger to the troops, this long slog has caused this KBR contract to explode to over $40 billion to date with unscrubbed and bloated costs promising to be the new baseline of what it takes to support our troops in the future. And the soaking of the taxpayers is not over for this KBR contract. As we transition troops out of Iraq as required by treaty with the Iraqi government at the end of this year (we hope!), KBR's LOGCAP contract will be turned over to the State Department to supply the new Vatican-size embassy and the 5,000 private military contractors that the State Department plans to have as the troops leave. With these bloated costs becoming the base for all logistics in the future, KBR promises to continue to soak us under the State's umbrella for years to come.

The long term consequences of these policy disasters will be seen in the future, because having as many or more contractors as troops has caused a new war service industry to get entrenched with political power. The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is happy to make weapons and let them rust because they know that we will continue to build weapons whether we have a war or not. In fact, the MIC is not particularly fond of these messy, low-technology wars because the logistics and increase in troops takes away from the weapons procurement budget.

However, this new war service industry, because they don't manufacture anything but instead service the troops in war, need a hot war or occupation to continue to rake in the money. So, now we have a new and powerful military industry, which hires many officers and troops when they retire and has billions of dollars of contracts to help fund the lobbyists to keep them in contracts. This is an industry with an incentive to keep us in war or long-term occupation for their growth and even existence and is a scary new paradigm on our foreign policy.

The solution? It is not an easy one, but we can start by making sure that every time that Rumsfeld comes into town to advise anyone connected to the military, that the press and advocacy groups remind the public that he didn't just fail at the foreign policy and torture aspects of the war, but that he massively failed at running the basics of the war. He has been away for a decent interval, but is trying to come back, hoping that people forget that he didn't know what he was doing and cost us lives and money.

As for the long-term aspects of the war service industry, as we wind down in Iraq and hopefully in Afghanistan, we need to dismantle the contractors' model of doing logistics in war zones and draw a line in the sand where contractors cannot be used. We also need to go back to the KBR and other contractor bills for these two wars and scrub the numbers so that their running up costs to justify bloated new contracts will not work and that we don't get beholden to them in the future. This war service industry will try hard to keep their place with the US military and encourage us to police the world to keep their money flow, but they aren't as entrenched as the MIC, so we still have a chance to do something about it.

Uday Hussein's body double

 As the body double for Saddam Hussein's son, Latif Yahia suffered several assassination attempts. Having escaped to Offaly, the controversial figure is now seriously at odds with his adopted country.

This article was first published on 26th of April 2007 in HOT PRESS, the journalist Jason O'Toole is one of the handful of Irish journalists that I have found to be fair and balanced. The rest all write for their editors or owners political agenda.
I am posting this so that you can read what I was saying four years ago about Ireland and ask "what has changed?" The answer is nothing, the government has changed but the civil service stays the same, same shit different ass, as they say. The system is still corrupt, Government, Garda (Irish police) and justice system ask any Irish person and they will tell you the same. So after all my years trying, I have finally found a lawyer with enough balls to bring the state of Ireland to the European court, I have said many times over the years that Ireland doesn't have an European government, it has an Iraqi one just with Blond hair and Blue eyes.
As you may or may not be aware I lodged my third and last application for Irish citizenship in September 2007, it is now September 2011 and I have yet to receive a decision on my case. In the past four years I have written over 105 emails and letters to the various Ministers for Justice and their office asking for status updates and any other news as to the progression or processing of my case, the answer is standard " your case is being processed" so no matter which political party the Minister for justice belongs to or how New he is to the job the response to my case is the same. Nothing. I wonder how long they can process it for?   According to the Dept of Justice website the average processing time is 23 months, but then I'm anything but average!

By: Jason O'Toole, 26 Apr 2007

The former body double of Saddam Hussein’s sadistic son, Uday, is now living in (of all places) Offaly. Latif Yahia’s account of his time serving as the dictator’s son’s double would make a Hollywood screenwriter salivate.

Indeed, the 42-year-old recently sold the rights to his two autobiographies, I Was Saddam’s Son and The Devil’s Double, to the film company Pâté, with pre-production work already underway on what will certainly make for a fascinating insight into the demi-monde of Saddam’s regime.

Latif came to notice as a possible double, or ‘Fidai’ as they are referred to in Iraq, when he first met Uday in school.

He insists that he only agreed, reluctantly, to undertake what was a deadly dangerous role when the regime’s cronies arrested him and threatened to rape his younger sisters. Latif suffered several assassination attempts and was shot 11 times, with the last bullet lodged in his right shoulder coming from the gun of Uday himself. He states categorically that Uday – who he describes as “pure evil” – murdered his father.

Perhaps there’s an even better film in how Latif managed to abscond from Saddam’s clutches to a suburban housing estate in Daingean, County Offaly. He tells it like this.

Aided by the CIA, he was transported to Austria. Placed in a refugee camp there, he became incensed by conditions and took a policeman hostage to negotiate better living conditions. He alleges that the CIA then kept him incarcerated illegally for 10 months, as they attempted to pump him for confidential information about Saddam. Later, in Norway, Latif was so upset by the conditions in another refugee camp that he threatened to burn the place down.

Eventually, Latif, who has a PhD in international law, opted to come here. He relished the thought, he says, of settling down and living a mundane life in rural Ireland. But this dream has since been shattered by, he alleges, sinister CIA agents who vowed to crush him for refusing to co-operate and become a spy. 

Since he rejected their offer, Latif says that his request for Irish citizenship was rejected – despite the fact that his is married to a Dublin woman, with whom he has a child.

Recently, a fabricated story alleging that he was an international arms dealer appeared in the tabloid press, and he successfully sued one Sunday paper for printing this story. Latif is adamant that both situations can be traced back to his refusal to cooperate with the CIA.

Throughout our conversation, he speaks passionately. You can sense that he is volatile, and much of what he says may be deemed to have the ring of the fantasiscal about it. But that may be a misreading. Latif Yahia has some deadly serious things to say… 

He admits to arriving in Ireland under a bogus passport…

“I was in Austria with my real name and I had two assassination attempts. I went to London and I had an assassination attempt. At this time, Saddam was still strong,” he says. “In the end, I found out that my ex-partner was passing on information to the intelligence service. I left her and I came here and applied under a false name – not because I am doing fraud, not because I want to do something wrong, just so nobody knows where Latif Yahia is. Just to disappear. Because there was no Iraqi embassy here. I am safe here.” 

Alleges he was beaten up by a Gardaí

“There is no justice in this country,” he states. “If I do this to you (shows photograph of his badly beaten face), what happens to you, do you go to court? I was beaten up by a Garda. They (the Gardaí) wrote to the Department of Justice, saying, ‘(We) believe that Latif Yahia is a terrorist.’ To cover themselves. I wrote and complained to the Commissioner of Police and he is not going to trust Latif Yahia, a foreign piece of shit who came in hunger from his country. But I am not hungry. My father was the third (richest) millionaire in Iraq. I come for political reasons. They think each one coming to this country is hungry, and is coming to take the Irish money. In the end, after two months, I received a letter from the head commissioner, saying I was harassing the Gardaí.

Why would the Gardaí pick on him?

“This Garda, I don’t want to mention his name, was the boyfriend of my ex and one day I came down and I saw him with my ex, and they did this job to me (points to photograph). He holds me and she puts a glass in my face. I get 46 or 47 stitches. You can see the scar on my face. After that I went to the Garda to make a complaint, but they didn’t want to take it. They said, ‘You are going to lose your citizenship.’ They used exactly these words: ‘We are going to fuck you. We are going to deport you back to where you came from if you open your mouth.’ I am not the kind of person to take a threat. I fought Saddam Hussein.” 

On plans to leave Ireland…

Michael McDowell the Saddam Hussein of Ireland

“I applied for citizenship in 2001. I was the longest case in this country to be processed. In the end they make an excuse, after five years of waiting, because I started talking in the media. Michael McDowell – I call him Michael McFool – will refuse citizenship even if you have a parking ticket. I don’t even have a parking ticket. I am not staying in this country. I 

left my country because I couldn’t find justice, and I came into another Iraq! Michael McDowell is the biggest racist in this country. I have been refused citizenship in this country which, I am sorry to say, is a shame on Ireland. There are four European countries that all offer me citizenship. I am leaving to go to Germany for a couple of reasons. I have a son there and I think Germany is a country of law, no no matter what colour you are.” 

On Shannon Airport…

“America doesn’t need Shannon,” he argues, “but they want to show the world that there is a lot of countries supporting them. I am taking these words straight out of a big politician in this country, who is my friend for eight years. He told me when he met George Bush, Bush threatened him and said: ‘We have 24,000 Irish persons living in the US that don’t have green cards. We can deport them back to Ireland.’”

Ireland is now a legitimate target in the eyes of Islamic extremists…

“Ireland is not neutral,” he says. “Ireland is one of the big targets. Irish people are going to have a hard time, like the American people. If you go to Shannon, I don’t think you will see one Irish civilian there, it is an American base. Even if Islamic extremists don’t attack Shannon, Ireland is still going to be targeted – by even America! They are going to make something to blame on Islamic terrorists. The have got to do something to make believe that Islamic terrorists are coming to Ireland.”

Iran has suicide bombers, or “sleepers”, living in Ireland.

“A long time ago Iran trained suicide bombers to come into the West,” he states. “Since 1988, the Iranians have been building themselves up in the West. They send over refugees, which are the intelligence service for Islamic jihad. They have been told to claim asylum and get citizenship in these countries. There are a lot of them in Ireland. They are going to harm Irish citizens. They are going to blow up any part of Ireland that can hurt the Irish and damage the economy of Ireland. They are going to put a bad name on Ireland to not bring any more investors.” 

He informed the Special Branch about the possibility of attacks within Ireland. 

“I told the Special Branch that something is going on in this country,” he recounts. “They didn’t believe it, they said I was talking bullshit. I talked to the Special Branch, you know what his answer to me was? ‘I don’t give a fuck. In eight months time, I’m retired.’ I don’t want to see this country harmed, because this country is a beautiful country. I am Irish more than the Irish!”

On the CIA operating in Ireland

“The CIA have a small prison in Shannon,” he claims. “This is how they exchange the prisoners to Guantanamo Bay. A lot of innocent people have been exchanged through Shannon. The Special Branch don’t have a clue. Any intelligent Irish person realises that Ireland is a state of America. Last December, the CIA contacted me and said, ‘Look, Latif, we can give you citizenship in Ireland. We control a lot of things here. We can make you happy and a multimillionaire again. Or, we can,’ – they said exactly these words – ‘we are going to fuck you and fuck your mother.’ I tell them, ‘I don’t work for you and fuck Bush. And get out of this house.’ After three weeks, I received a letter from Michael McFool and he refused my citizenship. Before that they had sent me a letter saying don’t contact this office until the middle of 2008 – three weeks after kicking out the CIA, I got the letter.”

He is calling on the Irish government to stop the usage of Shannon by the American military and to apologise to the Arab world. Only this, he says, will prevent the deaths of innocent Irish citizens.

“There is no chance,” he observes, “that Ireland would have been targeted (if Shannon was not used by American military). Now, when you say Ireland, the Arab world thinks, ‘American arse, or American state’. This is the picture now. If they close Shannon (to the US army), they still have time to apologise and make this country become neutral again. I don’t think the government here have a clue about what is going on. Plus, they don’t care about Irish people, they care about their pockets. They don’t care about the next generation.” 

On allegations of him being an international arms dealer…

“One of the articles said I was a weapons dealer,” he laughs. “I don’t think a weapons dealer would live my life. Weapon dealers have six/seven citizenships around the world. If I am a weapons dealer, how come I don’t have any citizenship?”

On censorship in Ireland…

“My new book is not available in Ireland,” he complains. “It sold 24,000 copies around the world, but it is ‘banned’ in Ireland because I talk about the CIA. I am writing something against America and the CIA. When I say America, I mean American government and foreign policy. They don’t want it read here. This is why, I say to you, the Irish media wasn’t fair to me, because I think the government controls the papers here. I was never humiliated by the media, except here (in Ireland). I would be absolutely shocked if this interview is published accurately.” 

On Osama Bin Laden.

“After September 11, one newspaper wrote a small article on the front page that the double of Saddam’s son is the right hand of Bin Laden in Ireland!” he recalls. “I don’t know how they come up with that! Bin Laden, he drink Guinness? I never met Bin Laden. I don’t believe (in) Bin Laden. Bin Laden is the son of America. I don’t believe (in) Al Qaeda. If a freedom fighter in Iraq hits an American (solider) he is a freedom fighter. To hit any civilian is a terrorist. This is what I want to pass to the media but they don’t want to listen.”

Corruption in Ireland...

“The Irish government say this is a free country, but I don’t think Ireland is a free country,” he says. “At Christmas, somebody called me from the Department of Justice, and he said to me, ‘You hand me €50,000 and you have your citizenship, because we deal with these things here. I can write the report to give you citizenship, or I can write the report that you never get it.’ If you go to the Gardaí (about this), the Gardaí is full of corruption. Where do you go?” 

On Latif Yahai, peacemaker…

“In the Irish media, they never talk about Latif Yahai as a peacemaker,” he says bitterly. “I have a title and I am recognised by the United Nation as an ambassador of peace. The last peace mission I did was a 5,800 walk from Jerusalem to Tripoli, in 32 days. The UN was behind that. With the last tsunami in Asia, I helped; why do they not mention that? I donated money and I donated medication. I never did fundraising, (it was) always my money. With all my books, I never put a cent in my pocket. This (new) book, the profits go to the children’s hospital here. Not one paper has mentioned my peace missions, not one paper.”

On Saddam Hussein…

“I met Saddam nearly once a week for four-and-a-half years,” he discloses. “He was a great President and suitable for the Iraqi people because, look at America, they can’t even control a small area of Iraq now. I am not pro-Saddam. I fight for 15 years against his government, but I never had a problem with Saddam Hussein as a person. I met him, I sit with him, we even exchanged jokes. He was a funny guy. I tell him joke about what the people say outside about him, and he laughing. Plus, he was very religious, but the people here don’t know that. He would pray. The problem was the people around Saddam fed him with false information. It is exactly like Michael McFool. The people around him – the Gardaí, the Special Branch – feed him with wrong information. The problem with Saddam was that he trusted the people around him. I was against his regime…”

On Saddam’s son, Uday.

“Absolutely evil,” he spits. “Uday tortured me. He shaved off all my moustache and eyebrows with his own hands. This is how I left Iraq. When I left Iraq, he shot me himself in my right shoulder. I had 11 assassination attempts. I have a couple of bullets in my body. He killed my father. They poisoned him. I can’t forget or forgive myself (about that).”

George Bush Jr and war crimes…

“He is a murderer and he must be brought to justice,” he argues. “He must be hanged. I am against the death penalty because I am a member of Amnesty International. But I want to see George Bush hanged in the same place as Saddam Hussein.

How his mother was refused asylum in Ireland.

“I paid $22,000 to smuggle my mother and my niece and nephew out of Iraq, to Ireland,” he confesses. “They were refused straightaway as asylum seekers. I don’t know who gets asylum here if my mother doesn’t! Again – Michael McFool. After two weeks – this was one-and-a-half year ago – they refused her, before even the immigration Gardaí do their investigation. She was refused and we went to a tribunal and the tribunal says, ‘Who’ll prove this is your mother?’ Do you think I would bring a 67-years-old woman and two children and pretend they are my family? They sent me for a DNA test. I paid (for it) from my own pocket in Blackrock Clinic and the result came in 99.7 she is my mother. Nobody is educated in the civil service. They sent me a letter asking why isn’t the DNA 100%! I showed it to my solicitor and he laughed. Is anybody 100% in this world? In an Irish court, 99.4 is acceptable. This is why I am leaving, because there is no chance here for my mother to stay. A tribunal should give you an answer within a maximum of eight weeks, but this is seven months I am waiting. I call them and they make excuses.” 

Plans for legal action against Irish state. 

“I am bringing Ireland, as a state, to the European Court,” he announces. “I have two files against the state of Ireland – human rights and about my case. Because I can’t get justice here, I think I will get it in the European Court. The government here are the losers, I am moving.”

Why he is being discriminated against in Ireland. 

“If I say tomorrow that I agree with Michael McDowell,” he believes, “and Ireland must open Shannon for America because they are going to liberate Iraq, and if I say George Bush is a great man and Tony Blair is doing a great job – if I say all this, I guarantee you next week I get Irish citizenship – if not an American passport. If I shut my mouth I get everything. My problem is that I won’t shut my mouth. This world is not for honest people anymore.”

Latif Yahai’s latest book, The Black Hole, is available from
www.acanum-publishing.com

Hussein Wanted Soviets to Head Off U.S. in 1991

By: Michael R. Gordon
Published: January 19,2011

WASHINGTON — As the American-led ground offensive in the first war with Iraq got under way on Feb. 24, 1991, Saddam Hussein directed his frustration at an unlikely target: the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Mr. Hussein had dispatched his foreign minister to Moscow in an 11th-hour bid to head off a ground war.

After prodding by Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Hussein had offered to withdraw Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 21 days. But the United States appeared to be moving ahead with its land campaign.

“The situation is now is getting worse,” Mr. Hussein had written the previous night in an emotional letter to the Soviet leader. “Our nation and army are confused. We are asking ourselves which one is more significant: the Soviet Union’s proposal or the Americans’ threats?”

Speaking to trusted aides, Mr. Hussein was less diplomatic, denouncing Mr. Gorbachev as a “scoundrel” who lacked the will or influence to stay the first President George Bush’s hand. “He tricked us,” Mr. Hussein said. “I knew he would betray us!”

The disclosures about Mr. Hussein’s closed-door deliberations that first day of the Persian Gulf land war are documented in an extraordinary Iraqi archive, which includes 2,300 hours of recorded meetings and millions of pages of documents, that was captured by United States forces after the 2003 invasion.

On the 20th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm (the air campaign began on Jan. 17, 1991), three transcripts of Mr. Hussein’s fateful decisions are being released to coincide with a symposium in Texas on Thursday with Mr. Bush and members of his war cabinet. Only a small portion of the archive, stored in digital form at the National Defense University, has been declassified and opened to outside researchers. (A 2008 government report drew on the three Feb. 24 transcripts, but until now they have not been available in their entirety.)

The war’s history has been well documented, but the three transcripts provide gripping new details of what went on inside the Iraqi command, including Mr. Hussein’s anger at Mr. Gorbachev and his misinterpretation of the United States’ military actions.

With only fragments of information coming from the battlefield and a room full of subordinates eager to applaud the faintest glimmer of success, Mr. Hussein was convinced that the United States lacked the resolve to wage a grinding ground war, the transcripts show.

Even if the Americans suffered just one casualty for every four Iraqi casualties, he boldly predicted, the United States would falter. He lectured his aides that igniting Kuwait’s oil fields to hinder the allied warplanes was a valid military tactic that would not enrage the world. And he and his aides kept misreading the signals about whether the ground assault had even begun.

Studied along with a parallel archive of declassified transcripts at the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A & M University, the captured Iraqi records depict Mr. Gorbachev as eager to engineer a solution that would protect the Soviet Union’s former Iraqi client and make the Soviets an equal partner with the United States in international diplomacy, but unwilling to jeopardize his relations with the Bush administration.

Mr. Bush emerges as a leader who sought to mollify Mr. Gorbachev even as the United States stuck to its demand for the unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

“It is your neighborhood, and some of them are your friends,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Gorbachev in a phone call on Feb. 22, 1991. “We recognize Soviet interests in the area. I want to get our forces out of there as soon as possible. I know how the Iranians and others feel.”

Jeffrey A. Engel, a professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A & M, noted that the exchanges showed that “despite heated discussions at the height of war with Iraq, Bush and Gorbachev were fundamentally concerned with safeguarding the future of Soviet-American relations.”

Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, were followed by months of demands that Iraqi forces leave the Persian Gulf nation, resolutions in the United Nations Security Council and a buildup of military might by the Americans and their allies in the region.

After the air campaign began in January, preparations for a possible ground attack in Iraq were stepped up. With the ground war just days away, Mr. Gorbachev mounted a peacemaking effort. Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, arrived in Moscow on Feb. 21. Later that day, Mr. Gorbachev told Mr. Bush in a phone call that he sensed a “serious shift” in Iraq’s position, according to a transcript in the Bush Library.

Iraq, Mr. Gorbachev said, was no longer demanding that resolution of the gulf crisis be linked to other issues in the Middle East. And although the Iraqis had initially demanded that they be given six weeks to leave Kuwait, the Soviets had insisted that the schedule be shortened to 21 days. That timetable still fell short of Mr. Bush’s demands that Mr. Hussein unconditionally remove his troops and pay reparations to Kuwait and that a plan be worked out to deal with Iraq’s poison gas, biological weapons and nuclear arms programs.

Mr. Gorbachev’s diplomatic efforts were undermined on Feb. 22 when the Kuwaiti oil well fires that Mr. Hussein had ordered set — and which he saw as a defensive measure — were described by Mr. Bush in his conversation with the Soviet leader as a “scorched-earth policy” and a reason to not delay military action. Mr. Bush said it should take the Iraqis no more than seven days to pull out of Kuwait, and he issued them an ultimatum to take action before noon the following day.

On Feb. 23, just minutes before the noon deadline, Mr. Bush and the Soviet leader spoke by telephone. Mr. Gorbachev argued that joint American-Soviet action through the United Nations would establish a model for dealing with other crises.

“George, let’s keep cool,” Mr. Gorbachev said. “Saddam wants to stall, but we are not simpletons.”

But Mr. Bush’s patience had been exhausted. “Mikhail,” he said, “I appreciate that spirit, but I don’t want to leave a false impression there is any more time.” If the Iraqis intended to comply with the withdrawal demand, he said, it would need to happen “in the next few minutes.”

In Baghdad the next morning, Mr. Hussein waited anxiously for word from his foreign minister, who had left Moscow. “When will Comrade Tariq arrive?” the Iraqi leader asked. Told that Mr. Aziz had yet to return to Baghdad, Mr. Hussein demanded: “What do you mean he has not arrived?” He read aloud a headline: “Tariq Aziz Arrives in Baghdad.”

As he waited for the minister to show up, Mr. Hussein instructed his subordinates to read a letter he had sent to Mr. Gorbachev the night before, asking the Soviet president why he was not doing more to oppose Mr. Bush’s decision to start the ground war. “We trusted you,” Mr. Hussein wrote.

The conspiracy-minded Iraqi leader seemed both baffled and angry.

“In typical fashion, he suspected that Iraq had been stabbed in the back, this time by disingenuous Soviet mediation efforts,” said David Palkki, the deputy director of the research center that houses the declassified Hussein archives.

Mr. Gorbachev’s reply was not reassuring. He wrote that Mr. Bush did not agree with the Soviet proposal, and that if Mr. Hussein wanted to avoid a ground war, he should immediately issue a statement saying that Iraq would withdraw its forces within 9 to 10 days, which was close to Mr. Bush’s seven-day timeline.

When Mr. Aziz finally arrived to see Mr. Hussein, the Iraqi leader greeted him with a laugh: “Are you up to surprises like Bush?”

To elude American warplanes, Mr. Aziz had returned via Jordan and traveled by road to Baghdad. Like two teenagers discussing the latest muscle car, Mr. Hussein and his foreign minister talked about how fast it was possible to drive on Iraq’s roads.

“We were going 220 on the highway,” Mr. Aziz said, referring to kilometers. That translates to more than 130 miles per hour.

Neither official put much hope in getting help from Iraq’s neighbors. One aide asked about Iran, whose eight-year war with Iraq had ended in 1988. “We are done dealing with the Iranians this time,” Mr. Aziz said. Added Mr. Hussein: “Like all new revolutions, they talk too much.”

With little accurate intelligence, Mr. Hussein and his command failed to grasp their adversary’s strategy. The Iraqis believed an American amphibious landing — a giant feint intended to distract Iraqi troops — was likely.

And Mr. Hussein initially mistook some probing actions by the American military as signs that a major attack had been mounted and contained. “If this is the initial shock,” Mr. Hussein said, “then the attack has failed.”

But as the day wore on, the seriousness of the predicament became more apparent. Frustrated at their inability to negotiate a compromise on their terms, the Iraqi officials speculated that casualties that the United States would suffer in a ground attack would lead Mr. Bush to soften his demands.

“Let us pray to God to grant us success to slaughter any number of them,” Mr. Aziz said. “That is what is going to help us get results.”

“Let them come to Karbala city,” Mr. Hussein said confidently. “It will become their cemetery.”

Bring Tony Blair to Trial for War Crime.

Tony Blair, would have us believe that he made the decision to go to war based on the best intelligence available at the time, and in his own words at the Hutton inquiry said he had “no doubt” that Saddam had WMD’s and that he was an imminent threat to the safety of the USA and the UK.

We have since seen the evidence put before us to go to war turn to ash, but Mr. Blair stands by his decision ‘til this day. Has he no remorse for the loss of Iraqi people and British troops? I understand the need for Mr. Blair to believe that he was right, but really, as a Labour Party leader his decisions flung in the face of his party’s policies, he became more Conservative than the Conservatives!

It all leads to many questions, have all the political parties melded into one? Have the rights of the individual been sold for the rights of the corporations? How much power have we handed to our governments under the illusion of protection from terrorists? Who are the real ‘terrorists’? How can we regain our power from the government? And possibly the hardest question of all, how can we stop this happening again?

If George Walker Bush and Tony Blair are allowed to continue on with their lives without any culpability what is there to deter any future leader from taking the same actions against another Sovereign Nation?

These men have to be held accountable for their actions, because if the are not then the lives of those who died count for nothing and we cannot call ourselves democratic nor inspirational.

Best regards,
Dr.Latif Yahia.☮
Ph.D International Law
Global Human Rights Activist.