‘Strong Like Saddam’

Kanan Al-Sadid was not yet 10 years old on the afternoon that his father opened the trunk of the family car and Saddam Hussein popped out. It was the early 1960s, and the future dictator was hiding out from the Iraqi authorities, who accused him of plotting to assassinate the country's then strongman, Gen. Abdul Karim Qassim. Kanan's uncle was a member of Saddam's revolutionary Baath Party clique; when the conspirators needed to lie low, they would disappear to the Sadid family estate near the Syrian border. Once, when Syrian soldiers came looking for the men, Saddam and the boy's father ducked into a linen closet. Another time, as the family Volkswagen approached an Iraqi Army checkpoint, Saddam ordered all the children in the car to blow on the windows, steaming them up to conceal the fugitives. While visiting a family home in Baghdad one afternoon, Kanan's father told his sons to get into the car; they were going to a park to play. But after driving around for a while, the car stopped, the boy's father opened the trunk and Saddam Hussein—curled up and dressed in a dishdasha—stepped out and walked off. Kanan's father drove away in silence. "When are we going to the park?" the deflated boy asked. "Keep your mouth shut," his father replied.

Almost 50 years later—and with Saddam in his grave—Kanan's hometown of Tikrit is still a nest of intrigue. As head of one of the most powerful branches of Iraq's massive Shammer tribe, Kanan, 49, can urge thousands of men to take up arms—or, with a few words, keep them at home. After the U.S. invasion, he rounded up some 1,200 loyalists and helped them enlist in the new Iraqi Army. In recent years Kanan—who wears a silver pinkie ring and snaps the lapels of his pin-striped suit coat when he's punctuating a point—has founded a satellite television station, launched a construction company and renovated a nearby sports stadium. ("Olympic pool," he says, his eyes widening.) Yet the necessary tactics for survival as a strongman in modern Iraq sometimes seem to change from hour to hour. Iraqis, he says, are once again looking for the kind of martinet he knew as a boy. "They want somebody strong like Saddam," Kanan told NEWSWEEK last week in an interview near Tikrit. "Power and money—that's how you [rule] Iraq. If I became like the Prince of Dubai, I would control Iraqis like a remote control."

The U.S. military discovered too late that Iraq's tangled network of tribal leaders is a major key to security. Yet over the past year, "government from the bottom up" has become one of Ambassador Ryan Crocker's favorite catchphrases. As violence has declined in Sunni enclaves like Ramadi and Fallujah in recent months, commanders have tried to replicate the apparent success of the region's Anbar Salvation Council elsewhere. Last summer American military commanders spent millions of dollars on "concerned local citizens" programs—essentially paying off tribal sheiks to keep their followers from planting roadside bombs. In Tikrit's Salah Ad Din province, the Army has spent more than $5 million to buy the loyalty of 26 different sheiks. (Kanan is not among them, although another sheik from the same family is.) With Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's central government weaker than ever—unable to provide basic services even to Baghdad—power brokers in the provinces are enjoying something of a renaissance. That's fine with Kanan al-Sadid. "We have to get rid of central control," he says, exhaling a cloud of French-cigarette smoke.

Yet "government from the bottom up" is not without risks. Critics say empowering regional strongmen is creating a warlord state in Iraq, with tribal and religious leaders operating increasingly independently—and often unconstitutionally. At best, the breakdown into local fiefdoms is not necessarily consistent with political reconciliation at the center, the strategic goal of U.S. diplomats. At worst, power struggles among local leaders—particularly in the southern Shiite heartland—could erupt into all-out civil war. "If nobody wins, you could end up with different groups in charge of different cities," says Vali Nasr, an Iraq expert at Tufts University. In a sense, it's happening already. Even as Iraqis furiously denounce the nonbinding U.S. Senate resolution that suggested dividing their country into three relatively autonomous parts, Iraq has splintered into a hundred pieces.

Kanan al-Sadid notes that no politician in Baghdad could rival his degree of credibility in Tikrit. His reputation, he says, depends partly on keeping his distance both from U.S. forces in the city and from the most vicious local insurgents. The strongman spends a lot of time in Syria—the better to stay above the fray, he believes. He argues that Iraqis have a right to fight U.S. troops in his country, yet he also decries the foreign "terrorists" he sees as responsible for ruining Tikrit's economy. (According to U.S. military statistics, attacks in Salah Ad Din province roughly doubled over the year ending in July, though commanders say they have come down somewhat since the "concerned citizens" program began.) When another sub-sheik from the Shammer tribe in Tikrit decided to sign up for the U.S. military's program last summer, Kanan says he had only small technical objections to the way the program was being run. Nobody can truly be a strongman in modern Tikrit without U.S. support, he says. But he also acknowledges that the alliance has caused disagreements within the family; looking like an American puppet is not necessarily good for a man's reputation among Tikritis. "They're scared to take [the money]," Kanan says. "A sheik should always have some credibility."

In other parts of Iraq, working closely with U.S. forces has clearer advantages. Consider Gen. Qais Hamza Aboud, the local police chief in the mostly Shiite city of Hillah, about 50 miles south of Baghdad. A former fighter pilot in Saddam's Air Force, Qais is now probably the most powerful individual in Babil province—more influential than either the governor or local Iraqi Army commanders. He was working as a car salesman in 2003 when U.S. military officials helped him form an elite paramilitary police unit, now known as the Scorpion Battalion. Flush with American cash and weapons, Qais's Scorpions have since swelled to roughly 800 troops. U.S. officers in Hillah refer to Qais simply as "the Godfather." Asked about the nickname during a recent visit to a U.S. military base outside Hillah, General Qais stared down a NEWSWEEK reporter for 10 seconds or so, and then replied: "Yeah, that's right."