Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein al-Majid al-Tikriti (born April 28, 1937) was the President of Iraq from 1979 - 2003 and Prime Minister of Iraq from 1979 - 1991 and 1994 - 2003. While largely viewed as an autocratic despot in the West, in the Arab World he is viewed with mixed emotions; on the one hand he is favorably regarded for his support and espousal of nationalistic pan-Arabism, his steadfast refusal to submit to American-led international pressure, and for his role in the economic modernization in Iraq while on the other hand he is widely despised for particular tactics he is responsible for in the treatment of his own people.
Early years
He was born in the village of Al-Auja, in the Tikrit District of Iraq, to a family of sheep-herders. His mother tried to abort her pregnancy but failed and named her newborn "Saddam" which means "one who confronts" in Arabic. Later in his life, relatives from his hometown would be some of his most influential and powerful advisors and supporters, and would gain the nickname "Tikriti mafia" as a result.
He never knew his father, Hussein al-Magid, who died or disappeared before Saddam was born. His mother, Subha Tulfan al-Mussallat, remarried, and Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly, and forced young Saddam to steal for him.
At the age of 10, Hussein moved to Baghdad to live with his uncle, Khayrallah Tulfah, a devout Sunni. Hussein learned from his uncle, and took to heart, the lesson of never backing down to his enemies, no matter how superior their force or capabilities. In 1955, he attended the nationalist secondary school in Baghdad and joined the Ba'ath Party quickly earning a reputation for brutality; he committed his first murder at age 18. 1956 saw him take part in an unsuccessful coup attempt against King Faysal II. In 1958, a non-Baathist group led by General Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew the king. In 1959, following an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Qassim, Hussein fled to Egypt by way of Syria and was sentenced to death in absentia.
He received some of his higher education at the University of Cairo law school. On his return to Iraq following the 14th of Ramadhan revolution (February 8, 1963) he was imprisoned in 1964 following a change in power, but escaped from jail in 1967. In 1968 he helped lead the successful and non-violent Ba'athist coup. He also gained a degree in law from the University of Baghdad in 1968. He was vice-chairman of the Revolution Command Council from 1968 and was appointed a General in the Iraqi armed forces in 1973.
Rise to power
In 1979 the President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr announced his retirement (aged 66) and Saddam Hussein gained the posts of Chairman and President.
One of his first acts as President was to convene an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders and have one of them read out the names of members that Hussein thought could oppose him. These members were labled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one-by-one to face a firing squad. After the list was read, Hussein congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty. The room erupted in applause and shouting in support of Hussein.
A Baathist who dreams of unifying the Arab World as a single modern state, Hussein, on June 1, 1972, led the process of nationalizing western oil companies which had had a monopoly on Iraq's oil. Hussein actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy, urging the construction of various developed industries and following their administration and execution. He also supervised the modernization of the Iraqi countryside, the mechanization of agriculture and the distribution of land to farmers. He effected a comprehensive revolution in energy industries as well as in public services such as transport and education. He also initiated and led the National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy and the implementation of Compulsory Free Education in Iraq. At the same time he was securing his position by purging members of the Baath party that could possibly oppose him.
Under Hussein's Ba'ath Party government, the state provided social services to Iraqi people unprecedented in other Middle Eastern countries. Under Hussein's auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels, supported families of soldiers killed in war; granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Earlier, Hussein's government had broken up the large landholdings in the first place and redistributed land to peasant farmers.
According to some official reports, Hussein appears to have enjoyed great popularity within Iraq. A 2002 referendum, asking whether he should continue to lead Iraq, claimed 100% of voters thought he should, and that the turnout was 100%, with international media releasing pictures of Iraqi women voting in their own blood. However, he was the only presidential candidate on the ballot and voting was mandatory.
Ba'athist revolution
Aside from landownership, the Hussein era has overseen other examples of a social revolution. Hussein, to the consternation of Islamic fundamentalists and the Islamic Republic of Iran, gave women added freedoms and offered them high level government and industry jobs. Hussein provided both Arab and Western style banking systems to give the people a choice between these interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing accounts, created a western style legal system (Iraq is the only country in the Persian Gulf region which is not ruled according to Islamic law), and abolished the old Mosaic law courts except for personal injury, small court claims. At the same time, human rights groups have documented cases of state-sponsored rapes of women and systemic acts of torture for political ends.[1]
However, domestic and international conflict has long been an impediment to his modernizing aims. Iraq is a highly fragmented society; according to some, it is tantamount to a Middle Eastern Yugoslavia (an analogy used often by Thomas Friedman). Over the past three decades, however, Hussein's authoritarian rule has kept the lid on pervasive tribal, class, religious, factional, and ethnic conflicts, and destabilizing forces externally, such as hostile powers like Iran and the United States. The cost, though, has been one of the more autocratic of the Middle East's many autocracies. Islamic fundamentalists, suppressed through classic carrot and stick tactics, and won over eventually by and co-optation and coercion, tended to reject the direction in which Hussein has been leading the country. And the region's traditional aristocracies, both Sunni and Shiite (the kinds of aristocracies that still rule the other Arab Persian Gulf states with an iron grip), rejected the populist nature of his policies which have undermined and largely eroded aristocratic privilege. In short, large segments of Iraq's population tended to reject modernization even though it has dramatically raised living standards in the aggregate.
Iraqi society is an ethnic and religious polyglot divided between often hostile Arab Sunni, Kurdish Sunni, and Arab Shiite camps. Tribal conflicts, conflict between secular nationalists and religious fundamentalists, class conflict, and conflict between the rural tribes and the popular urban sectors had also been pervasive. Hussein's government draws its support base form middle-to-working class Arab Sunnis from the center of the country, especially the urban popular sectors, who are nationalistic and modern in their outlooks. This segment of Iraqi society, however, accounts for around a fifth of the population. In response, his efforts to construct mosques and portray himself as a devout Muslim have been seen as measures to co-opt more religious segments of society. These measures have seemed to worked, considering that Iraq has avoided the bloody fundamentalist insurgencies seen in other secular states, such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria.
Iraq has, nearly from its founding, had to deal with Kurdish separatists in the northern part of the country. Saddam Hussein's answer to this ethnic conflict has been seen as brutal to many observers and have included the systematic use of chemical weapons on Kurdish troops and population centers. The worst such single incident occurred on March 16, 1988 when Iraqi troops, on orders from Hussein to stop a Kurdish uprising, attacked the Kurdish town of Halabjah with mix of poison gas and nerve agents killing 5000 mostly women and children. Also, according to anti-Hussein opposition groups, around 100,000 other Kurds have been exiled since 1991.
The modernizing, socialistic nature of his government also explains Iraq's progressive development, at least before the Iraq-Iran War, the Gulf War, and the ensuing 12 years of United Nations-imposed economic santions. Since the nationalization of oil fields and refineries, electricity has been brought to nearly every city in Iraq, including many communities in far outlying areas. The government has made great progress in building roads, establishing mechanized agriculture on a large scale, promoting mining and other industries to diversify the oil-dependent economy.
Iran-Iraq war
The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran threatened to divert Iraq from this progressive path of development. In addition, Shiites, many of whom were sympathetic to Iran's Ayatollahs, accounted for the majority of Iraq's population. The pretext for the bloody, protracted Iran-Iraq War was a territorial dispute, but most attribute the war as an attempt by Hussein, supported by both the US and the USSR, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansionism of radical Iranian-style revolution. During the war Hussein received international condemnation after he ordered the use of chemical weapons on Iranian troops. The war ended in a bloody stalemate with no gain to either side. The people of Iran and Iraq both lost heavily, with a total death toll of about 1.7 million. Both economies, previously healthy and expanding, were left in ruins.
The war with Iran left Iraq bankrupt. Faced with rebuilding its infrastructure destroyed in the war, Iraq needed money. No country would lend it money except the United States and borrowing money from the US made Iraq its client state. According to some, the costs of the Iran-Iraq War would later explain Iraq's confrontation with Kuwait and the United States.
Conflict with Kuwait, Persian Gulf War
Iraq had borrowed a tremendous amount of money from other Arab states, including Kuwait, during the 1980s to fight its war with Iran. Saddam Hussein felt that the war had been fought for the benefit of the other Gulf Arab states as much as for Iraq, and so all debts should be forgiven. Kuwait, however, did not forgive its debt and further provoked Saddam by slant-drilling oil out of wells that Iraq considered within its disputed border with Kuwait.
In 1990 Saddam Hussein complained to the US State Department about Kuwaiti slant-drilling. This had continued for years, but now Iraq needed oil money to pay off its war debts and avert an economic crisis. Hussein ordered troops to the Iraq-Kuwait border, creating alarm over the prospect of an invasion. After talks with April Glaspie, the United States ambassador to Iraq, assured him that the US considered the Iraq-Kuwait dispute an internal Arab matter, Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait.
According to many historians, Iraq has always been hostile to Kuwait, because Kuwait was created by the British from land that was originally part of Iraq and Hussein needed the seaport Kuwait occupied. Kuwait had already offered the use of its seaport to Iraq, and it was using Iraq's fleet of oil tankers to transport its own oil abroad, as were many other oil countries. This gave them an indigenous industry, independent of outside European and American tankers which demanded higher fees. Thus Kuwait and Iraq were in the oil tanker business together, Iraq furnishing the tankers, Kuwait furnishing the port.
The US and Britain, two of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, convinced the Security Council to give Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait. The US and Britain, major members of the UN Security Council of five, stirred a reluctant Security Council into declaring war on Iraq, which President George Bush declared was "for the New World Order." Hussein ignored the deadline and by the end of the Gulf War Iraq had lost an estimated 20,000 troops and had had been expeled from Kuwait.
Prior to that point, however, Iraq's stance in the international community had alarmed Western powers. Iraq was the leading country in forming the Arab League similar to the European Economic Community, an alliance of European countries. All oil nations would share and work together and plan their own army that would include no Europeans. Iraq at the time had compiled a huge foreign debt and was striving to pay off the debts accumulated during the Iraq-Iran War. Perhaps in response, Hussein was pushing oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices and cutback production. Westerners, however, remember the very destabilizing effects of the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s.
Following the war popular uprisings erupted in the north and south parts of the nation but were quelled by the use of Iraqi air ships. A United Nations trade embargo was placed on Iraq following the war and since then Hussein has been tightening his control over Iraq.
The 2003 war
By April 9, 2003 Hussein was not in the public eye, with some reports indicating he had been killed or wounded in air strikes in a restaurant where he reportedly had been holding a meeting. By this date, coalition (American and British) forces occupied much of Iraq, and several presidential palaces were in coalition hands. The large bronze statue of Hussein in a roundabout in central Baghdad had been torn down to the cheers of a a crowd of around 200 Iraqi citizens, mostly Kurds, many of which went on to remove or deface many posters and other likenesses of Hussein. Icons and other Hussein bearing articles were beaten with shoes and slippers - an action that is a grave insult in the Arab culture.
From all this, it appears that Hussein had lost control of Iraq and was at the least in hiding. The population did not rise up in response to his repeated calls to do so; shedding more doubts on the accuracy of his popularity as represented by government run Iraqi news and radio. However the sudden loss of all Iraqi governmental controls on April 9th left a power vacuum that was followed by widespread looting of governmental buildings including Iraq's Olympic headquarters, which dissidents allege was used by Hussein's eldest son, Uday to torture athletes and others that displeased him. The looting quickly spread to civilian properties and many observers feared a looming humanitarian crisis as a result of the toppling of Hussein's government. "Embedded reporters" interviewed many Iraqis in the capital and other parts of the nation and found that the general mood expressed by many was one of relief that the Hussein government was gone but this was tempered by distrust over the possibility of a prolonged American occupation.
Personal
Hussein has been married three times. His first marriage to his first cousin Sajida Talfah, a former teacher, occured in 1963. This union with the eldest daughter of Khairallah Talfah, the uncle who raised Saddam, produced two sons, (Uday Saddam Hussein and Qusai Hussein) and three daughters. Sajidah was put under house arrest in early 1997, along with daughters Raghad and Rana, because of suspicions of their involvement in an attempted assasination on Uday in December 12, 1996. He also married two other women: Samira Shahander, whom he married in 1986 after forcing her husband to divorce her (she is rumoured to be his favourite wife), and Nidal al-Hamdani, the general manager of the Solar Energy Research Center in the Council of Scientific Research, whose husband apparently was also persuaded to divorce his wife. There apparently have been no political issues from these latter two marriages.
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Above: A Lebanese demonstrator condemns the attack by the United States during the 2003 invasion of Iraq while holding up a portrait of Hussein.
See also: Saddam International Airport, Saddam's Dirty Dozen, Possible death of Saddam Hussein