Inside Saddam's World

The mad hatter might feel at home in the Wonderland of Iraq. The day is already growing hot as lines of ramshackle buses and black-windowed Mercedes jam the normally empty highway to Tikrit, the rural hometown of Saddam Hussein. It's April 28, Saddam's 65th birthday. Crowds of military men with fat moustaches, sheiks in flowing robes and farmers in shabby pants spill onto the expansive parade ground Saddam has built for special occasions like this. High-ranking guests fill up chairs in a large pseudohistorical reviewing stand where Mussolini would have felt at home.

As the guest of honor arrives, groups of schoolgirls, including a unit clad in the black face masks of suicide-bomber trainees, perform dances dedicated to Saddam's "pulse of life." Then an interminable line of marchers files through, maybe 10,000 strong, singing "Happy year to you, President Saddam Hussein, who brought victory to us." As a group of fist-waving farmers tramps past, one of its members, Abdullah, offers, "We volunteered to come to show how much we love our President."

Trouble is, the man standing high above on that imposing podium is not Saddam Hussein. It's Ali Hassan al-Majid, the Saddam intimate foreigners have dubbed "Chemical Ali" for his role overseeing the 1988 poison-gas attacks that killed thousands of Iraqi Kurds. Al-Majid raises his right arm with palm open in the gesture Saddam uses, smilingly acknowledging the crowd's chants as if he were the ruler. "We sacrifice our blood, our souls for you, Saddam," the mob trills.

Saddam is nowhere in sight for his Tikrit party or any of the other parades and cake cuttings orchestrated across Iraq during the six-day birthday celebration. He is, more than ever, an invisible ruler, his authority wielded from the shadows, where he hides from potential assassins. The Potemkin parties were intended to deliver a message to any Iraqi citizen feeling restive, to any foreign government contemplating his overthrow. The all-powerful puppet master can make his whole nation sing his praises as a blunt reminder: I am still here. It won't be easy to get rid of me.

The Bush Administration hopes the hollowness of that birthday scene is a symbol of the true state of the archenemy's regime: brittle and rotting from within, held together only by force and bribery. The White House has concluded that Saddam poses a clear and present danger that must be eliminated. "He is a dangerous man possessing the world's most dangerous weapons," President Bush has said. "It is incumbent upon freedom-loving nations to hold him accountable, which is precisely what the United States of America will do."

Beyond Bush's advisers, objective monitors too are convinced that Saddam possesses hidden chemical and biological weapons and is working feverishly to build a still elusive nuclear bomb. He's a serial aggressor. Sept. 11 probably opened Saddam's eyes to powerful and unorthodox methods of attack. Terrorists want weapons of mass destruction, and he has them. "The lesson of 9/11 for us," says a senior State Department official, "is you can't wait around."