BAGHDAD, 11 September 2005 — A familiar face is a rarity in Iraq’s newly installed political leadership, but at least one participant in the recent constitutional debates was recognizable to television viewers throughout the country. Sadoun Al-Zubaydi, once Saddam Hussein’s official translator and a fixture on TV screens during the strongman’s frequent meetings with foreign dignitaries, has emerged from self-imposed obscurity following the dictator’s fall, disproving rumors he had been executed, fled the country or had joined the US occupation authority.
Nearly 2 1/2 years after the US-led invasion, the articulate and urbane diplomat — considered one of Iraq’s leading foreign policy analysts — now advises Sunni negotiators in talks over Iraq’s new constitution. Although his current work as a Sunni legislator brings him into contact with US diplomats in Baghdad, he remains implacably opposed to the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq and the Middle East.
“We’re under occupation of a great power that cares not a bit about Iraq but only about its own interests,” he said. “Nobody in Iraq believes the ideological hubris that America is trying to do good here.”
He says he has no concrete plans for the future, but hopes to remain in diplomacy or at the university. “I’m a government animal, I can’t work for the private sector,” said the 57-year-old Zubaydi.
Zubaydi has returned to the limelight as an adviser to the Sunni Arab delegation at the constitutional talks, which ended recently when the charter was adopted by the majority bloc composed of Kurds and Shiite Arabs.
Although the secular Zubaydi refuses to describe himself as either a Sunni or a Shiite, he shares Sunni opposition to Kurdish and Shiite demands that Iraq — traditionally a highly centralized secular state — be transformed into a loose, heavily religious federation.
“Federalism would mean fragmentation and the eventual disintegration of Iraq,” Zubaydi said. “We would end up in civil war like former Yugoslavia.” Zubaydi, who says he was a low-ranking member of Saddam’s Baath Party, also opposes the purge of Baathists first initiated by the US occupation and now backed by the Shiites and Kurds who suffered most under Saddam’s regime.
The United States introduced the policy of “de-Baathification” soon after the 2003 invasion and it has continued under the current government. Under the policy, anyone who held a senior position in Saddam’s party is barred from government employment.
Rank-and-file members are excluded. Zubaydi maintains that the Baath was originally a secular Socialist party deformed by Saddam’s rule.
Still, Zubaydi refrains from direct criticism of Saddam, saying only that he was “shrewd and well-framed intellectually,” but that he succumbed to the influence “of a number of factors, mainly his family and the cronies who surrounded him.”
“When I met him again in early 2002, he was a changed man — much less focused,” Zubaydi said. “That’s all I will say. One day you’ll be able to read all this in detail in my book — if I actually write it.”
He says he is especially skeptical of US intentions now in Iraq because he was present at some of the most crucial talks between Saddam and US envoys during the Iran-Iraq War, in the run-up to the attack on Kuwait in 1990, the 1991 Gulf War and again in the 18 months preceding the 2003 invasion.
“The meetings were very revealing about US policy,” is his cryptic comment about what he learned. Zubaydi was present during the pivotal meeting between Saddam and US Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, 1990, just prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
Zubaydi maintains that throughout the discussion Saddam never actually told Glaspie of his intention to invade Kuwait. And when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak happened to call from Cairo during the discussion to talk about the crisis, Saddam moved the American ambassador from the conference room into a secretary’s office so she would not overhear him telling Mubarak about his plans.
That meeting later became the source of a heated controversy over whether Glaspie intentionally implied that the United States would not intervene if the dictator moved to take over his tiny, oil-rich neighbor. The Iraqi transcript of that meeting said Glaspie told Saddam Washington would not take sides in “Arab-Arab disputes like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”
But according to Zubaydi, Glaspie was in the dark about the invasion plans when she made that comment. A week later, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi troops and 300 tanks crossed the Kuwaiti border.
Zubaydi — a British-educated English literature professor at the University of Baghdad — served as Iraq’s ambassador to Indonesia from 1995 to 2001. During his tenure in Indonesia, Zubaydi was involved in two diplomatic run-ins with then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Paul Wolfowitz — who later became a chief architect of the invasion of Iraq.
The episodes — during which Zubaydi challenged the US-backed sanctions regime against Iraq that according to UN reports resulted in the deaths of thousands of children — earned him the nickname “Voice of the Arabs” in Jakarta.
