Titans of History

SADDAM HUSSEIN

1937–2006

What has befallen us of defeat, shame and humiliation, Saddam, is the result of your follies, your miscalculations and your irresponsible actions.

Shia Iraqi army commander in 1991, inaugurating

the uprising against Saddam’s rule that was subsequently

crushed by the dictator’s forces

Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, aspired to be an Arab hero and conqueror, but his long reign of ruthless oppression, sadistic cruelty, gangsterish corruption, unnecessary wars, mass murder and a ludicrous personality cult led to a series of political miscalculations that brought about the destruction of his regime and his own death on the scaffold.

Saddam was born in a small Sunni village close to the town of Tikrit. His father died before he was born so he was brought up in his stepfather’s house—repeatedly beaten and spending much of his youth as a street kid. In 1947 he went to live with his mother’s brother, from whom, at the age of ten, he received his first schooling.

In the early 1950s Saddam moved with his uncle to Baghdad and tried to get into military college but failed the exams. Meanwhile, he imbibed from his uncle a hatred of British influence in the kingdom of Iraq, became a regular participant in anti-government demonstrations, and formed his own street gang to attack political opponents. In time he became drawn toward the Ba’ath Party, which combined socialism with anti-Western, pan-Arab nationalism, and in 1958 he participated in the army coup led by Brigadier Abdel Karim Kassem that overthrew and murdered King Faisal II. Many, especially the Ba’athists, were disappointed that Kassem failed to lead Iraq into a union with neighboring Arab countries, and in 1959 Saddam was involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Kassem, after which he went into exile in Syria and Egypt.

A Ba’athist-dominated coup in 1963 induced Saddam to return, but the new ruler of Iraq, Abdul Salam Arif, soon fell out with his Ba’athist allies, and Saddam was imprisoned for several years before escaping in 1967. He went on to become the right-hand man of the Ba’ath Party leader, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, and after the party seized power in 1968, he emerged as the strong man of the regime, becoming vice-president, as well as head of Iraq’s security apparatus and general secretary of the Ba’ath Party. He deliberately fashioned his regime on that of Stalin, whom he studied.

From his new position Saddam oversaw the nationalization of the Western-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company, using the funds accrued to develop the country’s welfare state (especially its health system). He also initiated a major drive against illiteracy, made improvements to Iraqi infrastructure and generally sought to encourage modernization and industrialization. At the same time, however, he also worked assiduously to accumulate power to himself, moving loyal lieutenants into key positions, building up a brutal secret police and strengthening his grip on levers of state.

In mid-1979 Saddam pressured the ailing al-Bakr to resign, and assumed the presidency himself. He immediately summoned the Revolutionary Council, comprising the senior Ba’ath Party leadership, and announced that “Zionism and the forces of darkness” were engaged in a conspiracy against Iraq. Then, to the horror of his audience, he announced that those involved were present in the room. While Saddam sat smoking a huge cigar, a series of names were read out, and, one by one, sixty-six people were led away. Subsequently twenty-two of these men were found guilty, and Saddam personally supervised their killing, requiring senior figures in the Iraqi leadership to carry out the death sentences.

Saddam set about transforming Iraq into what one dissident labeled the “Republic of Fear.” His notorious secret police, the Mukhabarat, together with the state internal security department the Amn, established a fierce grip over the entire country. Regular massacres were carried out of Jews, Freemasons, communists, economic saboteurs or merely people who crossed Saddam or his greedy, pitiless family, all of whom served in his government. Purge followed upon purge, attended by show trials and televised confessions. Over the subsequent two decades Saddam Hussein killed at least 400,000 Iraqis—many of whom endured all manner of torture. His psychopathic sons, particularly the sadistic, demented heir apparent Uday, conducted their own struggles for power and brutal reigns of terror, personally torturing their enemies. At one point, Saddam’s two sons-in-law, fearing murder by Uday, fled to Jordan, but were tricked into returning and then slaughtered by Uday.

Not content with dominating Iraq, Saddam was also determined to assert regional hegemony. He invaded Iran in 1980, using Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979 as a pretext to seize Iran’s oilfields, and thus sparked a disastrous eight-year war that ended in stalemate and cost over a million lives. Adept at playing off the great powers against one another, he was significantly aided by the West, which regarded Iran as the greater of two evils.

During the war, Iran had encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to mount an uprising against Ba’athist rule. Saddam responded in merciless fashion, deploying mustard and nerve gas against the civilian population—most notoriously at the town of Halabja, where some 5000 Kurds died in a single attack in March 1988. Four thousand villages were destroyed and 100,000 Kurds slaughtered.

The end of the Iranian war left Iraq exhausted despite huge oil revenues. In August 1990 Saddam invaded and occupied Kuwait. It proved to be a catastrophic miscalculation. The United Nations authorized a massive US-led military coalition to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, which they swiftly achieved in 1991. Iraqi Kurds and Shiites—encouraged by the coalition—rebelled against Saddam, but without Western military support they were brutally put down.

By the terms of the ceasefire agreement, Iraq had agreed to abandon nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Yet Saddam failed to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, barred them entirely from 1998, and engaged in constant military brinkmanship and diplomatic chicanery.

Saddam’s situation was transformed by the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001. President George W. Bush—confident after overthrowing Al-Qaeda’s backers, the Taliban, in Afghanistan—advocated “regime change” in Iraq and the creation of Iraqi democracy to encourage freedom in the Arab world, citing as justification Saddam’s dictatorship, continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorist groups. Ironically, there were no weapons of mass destruction, but fearing that the truth might expose his regime’s weakness to Iran, Saddam miscalculated (for the second time) that America would not dare invade. In March 2003, US-led coalition forces invaded and overthrew Saddam, who was finally captured, tried and sentenced to death. His execution, embarrassingly bungled, symbolized the incompetence and lack of preparation of the well-intentioned US/UK invasion and the subsequent military quagmire. Nonetheless the sentence was richly deserved.