The Unfinished War: A Decade Since Desert Storm

This is a text adaptation of CNN's Special Report, "The Unfinished War: A Decade Since Desert Storm," hosted by Brent Sadler, which debuted on Tuesday, January 16, 2001, on CNN and CNN International.

Hussein's image can be found painted on several buildings in Baghdad

(CNN) -- Ten years ago, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein pledged his troops to the "Mother of all Battles," but Operation Desert Storm then quickly drove his armies from Kuwait. Yet, despite Iraq's crushing military collapse and a decade of crippling sanctions, Hussein still holds power in Iraq, seemingly unshaken by plots to eliminate him.

In the decade since the end of Desert Storm, much has changed. Iraq, once an outcast on the world stage, is now coming in from the cold. The once-united Western alliance has given way to a divided United Nations.

Hussein has ruled Iraq for almost 25 years. Some say with an iron hand.

"I think Saddam as a person represents one of the darkest forces in modern Arab history," says U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch. "Here is a person who, for the sake of his own grasp for power and ambition, has been willing to execute hundreds, thousands, of his own citizens.

Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft believes that Hussein is "one of the most ruthless people that the world has ever seen."

"One of the reasons he has been so successful," Scowcroft says, "is that he terrifies everyone who works for him -- like personally executing people in front of his colleagues, or having somebody execute his best friend to show his loyalty."

Said K. Aburish, author of "Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge," calls the Iraqi leader "a thug."

"But a thug who is the most methodical Arab leader of this century," he adds.

Aburish says Hussein is tribal in his thinking.

"You can look at him as two people -- a man who operates out of the 17th century. And a man whose foot is in the 20th century and he's marching very fast into the 21st century," Aburish explains.

During the war, Baghdad's skies were often illuminated with anti-aircraft fire

And time and again, his ambitions for himself and for his nation have led him into conflict.

In 1980, Iraq started an eight-year war with neighboring Iran. That prolonged battle left Iraq in dire economic straits. So Hussein borrowed money from his Arab neighbors, including Kuwait. When Kuwait began to call in those debts and pump oil from a disputed border field, Hussein responded by flexing his muscles, again.

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops crossed the border into Kuwait.

"What was at work at that particular time was the fact that he's insulted by people who are not entitled to insult him," Aburish explains.

So when he felt insulted by the Kuwaitis, Aburish says, he went in to teach them a lesson.

"World politics overall, the reaction of the West, he didn't think of that one single bit," says Aburish. "His tribal mind superseded his modern mind in that case."

In fact, Hussein's squabble with Kuwait triggered the world's largest military operation since World War II. In response to the Iraqi aggression, a military coalition of 34 countries was formed. The United States, Great Britain, France and Russia, with the crucial support of Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt, drew up their forces in the deserts to the south and west of Iraq and Kuwait.

The entire Middle East appeared to be at risk from Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He had an active nuclear weapons program, hundreds of short- and medium-range missiles and an arsenal of chemical munitions.

Plus, Iraq's military had used poison gas against the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War (Iran also used chemical weapons during the conflict). Hussein has also used mustard gas against his own people in the Kurdish town of Halabja, where hundreds died. According to Physicians for Human Rights, trace elements of the nerve agent sarin were discovered after an assault on the village of Birjinni.

As the Gulf War began, there was widespread fear that Hussein would try to escalate the conflict by using non-conventional weapons. Over the course of the war, more than 70 SCUD missiles would strike targets in Israel and the Gulf states. But in the end, Hussein never did launch, as many had feared he might, a non-conventional warhead.

Nevertheless, the fears and suspicions of the international community did not go away after Iraq succumbed to Desert Storm. They led the United Nations Security Council to adopt Resolution 687, empowering a unique team of U.N. inspectors to destroy Iraq's capacity to use or make such weapons. The strict economic sanctions imposed on Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait were to remain in place until full compliance was assured.

An international group of scientists, engineers and weapons specialists assembled to ensure Iraq complied with U.N. Security Council demands to disclose, destroy or render harmless all weapons of mass destruction. The team was called the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM).

In 1991, the first UNSCOM weapons inspectors began work in Iraq. Former U.S. Marine intelligence specialist Scott Ritter was one of them.

"The inspection I was involved in was a no-notice, intrusive, on-site inspection, designed to uncover evidence of how Iraq was hiding their weapons," explains Ritter. "We didn't expect them to cooperate. We knew it would be confrontational."

UNSCOM inspectors found proof of conventional and biological weapons

Ritter adds, "But we're like the proverbial camel. Once you let her nose in under the tent, we're coming in. You're not going to stop us. And once the Iraqis started admitting a lie, we were on them."

UNSCOM's detective work revealed indisputable evidence of both chemical and biological weapons.

As the U.N. inspectors worked alongside their Iraqi counterparts, the level of cooperation and tolerance varied.

But by 1993, at the chemical weapons decommissioning site of Al-Muthana, the very scientists who had overseen the manufacture of Hussein's chemical weapons were overseeing their destruction.

Thousands of artillery shells loaded with toxic chemicals, as well as tons of bombs and rockets, went up in smoke.

Perhaps the most accepted measure of UNSCOM's success is the fact that it destroyed more of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction than were eliminated by the combined forces of Desert Storm.

Despite all the progress being made, however, the weapons inspectors knew they were at work on a giant jigsaw puzzle and that many of the key pieces were still missing.

"We [had] come to an interesting problem. Because the Iraqis didn't fully cooperate from the beginning, there's always going to be this level of mistrust," says Ritter. "UNSCOM's never going to fully believe what the Iraqis are putting on the table."

The UNSCOM team became convinced that Iraq was still concealing parts of its arsenal. Iraq strenuously denied the accusations.

When UNSCOM did eventually find its smoking gun, it came from a most unexpected source: the family of President Saddam Hussein.

In August of 1995, Saddam Hussein's two sons-in-law -- together with his daughters -- defected. One of them, Hussein Kamel, had been in charge of Iraq's secret weapons concealment operations. He started to reveal the inner workings of the Iraqi armaments program as soon as he arrived in Jordan.

"We were ordered to hide everything from the beginning. And indeed a lot of information was hidden and many files were destroyed in the nuclear chemical and biological programs," Kamel told CNN after his defection. "These were not individual acts of concealment, but they were the result of direct orders from the Iraqi head of state."

Baghdad moved quickly to defuse the situation. They turned over a hoard of documents, claiming that Kamel had stashed them away on a chicken farm, without the authority of the leadership. The boxes contained a treasure trove of information on every aspect of Iraq's weapons programs.

"It is generally believed that the Iraqi government feared that he would reveal a number of things from Jordan and that they decided that they would preempt this, that they would discover the files in the chicken farm and place the blame on him," explains Dr. Hans Blix, executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring and Verification Commission.

UNSCOM now had a detailed roadmap of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons concealment program.

After the disclosures, Kamel hoped he would find a new life outside Iraq. But Kamel's hope turned to despair. After weeks languishing in Jordan as guests of the late King Hussein, the two brothers allowed themselves to be lured back home with promises of mercy. It was a fatal mistake. They died in a shootout in Baghdad. The incident was later described in Iraq as a family matter.