In Death, the Two Faces of Saddam’s Top Diplomat

Tariq Aziz predicted he would die in prison, and he was right. Weeks after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the top diplomat in Saddam Hussein’s regime surrendered to U.S. forces and spent the rest of his life behind bars. He died Friday in a southern Iraqi hospital, where he was rushed after suffering a heart attack in prison. He was 79.

It was in some ways surprising Aziz lasted this long. As the highest-ranking Christian in Saddam’s almost exclusively Sunni Muslim circle, the cigar-smoking Aziz was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in 2010 by Iraq’s new Shiite-led government. Prison interviews with Aziz revealed a frail old man who had trouble walking on his own, and at one point he participated in a hunger strike to protest being barred from receiving family visits. Acquaintances remembered Aziz as somewhat sickly even when he was at his peak of his powers, serving as Iraq’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister of a dictatorship that systematically massacred hundreds of thousands of Shiite and Kurdish fighters and political opponents over more than a decade.

For the world outside Iraq, it became easy to pity Aziz in his final years as he withered away in his cell. The Vatican pleaded with Baghdad to spare him from execution, and Aziz was seen as an unlikely poster child for European opponents of the death penalty. At the time, far more Iraqis favored executing Aziz, and Baghdad’s state TV breathlessly reported not only his death sentence but also the details of his many trials and court appearances over two years. In the end, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, sidestepped the controversy by refusing to sign Aziz’s execution order, and the issue — like the man himself — faded into obscurity.

Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekéus was among those who lobbied for Aziz’s amnesty. “He was a Saddam loyalist, but he was not engaged in any of these brutal things Saddam was known for,” said Ekéus, who was director of the U.N. Special Commissions on Iraq from 1991 to 1997 and worked closely with Aziz.

“I am personally convinced he had no direct responsibility for the policy of Saddam and the killing and torture of Saddam,” Ekéus told Foreign Policy in an interview Friday.

Given Saddam’s atrocities, it is hard to reconcile Aziz as a sympathetic character. His diplomatic adversaries — Ekéus among them — described Aziz as wholly devoted to Saddam as he sought to defend Iraq against Western denouncements. Even while in prison — and before Saddam was hanged in 2006 — Aziz asked visitors about the dictator and “what does he say about me,” recalled Charles Duelfer, the U.N. special commission’s deputy chair who later led the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group that concluded in 2004 there were not enough weapons of mass destruction to justify the military invasion of a year earlier.

“He was looking for Saddam’s approval,” Duelfer told FP on Friday. “It was enlightening, because of this sense of hypnotism; of no matter how bad Saddam was, he also had a strange way of captivating people.”

Perhaps that helps explain the paradox of Tariq Aziz. Both Ekéus and Duelfer described Aziz as smart and savvy; he was an avid reader of German history, French diplomacy, and English-language politics and understood the West far better than nearly anyone in Saddam’s government. Following Saddam’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker met with Aziz in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss how to avert a U.S.-bombing campaign against Iraq in January 1991. The meetings ultimately were fruitless, but Baker afterward said Aziz did “a good job with a lousy brief,” Duelfer said.

Aziz was deft at manipulating diplomats at the U.N. and was instrumental in splitting the Security Council during the 1990s over international sanctions against Iraq, Duelfer said. He also stoutly and wholeheartedly denied that Iraq possessed any biological weapons, despite evidence that surfaced after the Gulf War that Saddam sought to develop weapons-grade anthrax and other diseases.

“He was systematically lying, I would say,” Ekéus said. “He was a very gifted, smart diplomat — he played the game against us and tried to confuse governments, and everyone who played against him…. He was an outstanding diplomat in a very terrible outfit.”

In one unguarded moment in Baghdad, Aziz offered Duelfer a glimpse of sanity in the government’s irrational insistence to occupy Kuwait. Why wouldn’t Saddam just agree to withdraw a few thousand troops from Kuwait, Duelfer said he asked Aziz, and stave off the Gulf War?

“Tariq Aziz would just shrug and point to the picture on the wall of Saddam,” Duelfer said. He also credited Aziz with trying to convince Saddam in 2002 to allow weapons inspectors into Iraq, which, in turn, could have negated the 2003 invasion that tore the country apart and gave rise to the Sunni extremist group now known as the Islamic State.

“He was shrewder than Saddam on international politics,” Duelfer said. “He was this arrogant, obnoxious, son-of-a-bitch in many ways. But he was a complicated guy … he was a very smart guy.”

Photo credit: Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty