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Saddam Hussein0
Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, (Arabic
صدام
حسين عبد
المجيد
التكريتي), born April
28, 1937 1,
was the President
of Iraq from 1979
until he was captured by the military
of the United States on December
13th, 2003,
following the 2003
invasion of Iraq.
A leading member of the
Iraqi Ba'ath
Party, which espoused secular
pan-Arabism,
economic modernization,
and socialism,
Saddam (see 2
regarding names) played a key role in the 1968
coup
that brought the party
to long-term power.
As vice president under
his cousin, the frail General
Ahmed Bakr, Saddam tightly controlled conflict between the government
and the armed
forces by creating repressive security forces and cementing his own
firm authority over the apparatuses of government.
As president, Saddam ran
an authoritarian
government and maintained power through the Iran-Iraq
War (1980–1988) and the Persian
Gulf War (1991). Saddam's government repressed movements that it
deemed threatening, particularly those from ethnic or religious groups
that sought independence
or autonomy.
While he remained a popular hero among many Arabs for standing up to his
opponents in the West,
such as the United
States, some members of the international community continued to view
Saddam with deep suspicion following the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Saddam was
deposed by the United States and its allies during the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. Captured by U.S. forces on December 13, 2003, he is standing trial
charged with crimes
against humanity and genocide
before the Iraq
Special Tribunal, established by the Iraqi
Interim Government.
Youth
Saddam Hussein was born
in the village of Al-Awja,
5 miles from the town of Tikrit
in Iraq, to a
family of shepherds. His mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat, named her
newborn son "Saddam," which in Arabic means "one who
confronts." He never knew his father, Hussein
'Abd al-Majid, who died or disappeared five months before Saddam was
born. Shortly afterwards, Saddam's twelve-year-old brother died of cancer,
leaving his mother severely depressed in the final months of the pregnancy.
Saddam's mother also tried to abort the baby by attempting suicide.
The infant Saddam was sent to the family of his maternal uncle, Khairallah
Talfah, until he was three. 5
His mother remarried, and
Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. His stepfather,
Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam Hussein harshly after his return. He was
abusive and forced the young boy to steal chickens and sheep for resale.
At about the age of ten,
Saddam fled the family to return to live with his uncle, who was a devout Sunni
Muslim, in Baghdad.
Later in his life, relatives from his native Tikrit
would become some of his most influential and powerful advisors and
supporters. According to Saddam, he learned many things from his uncle,
especially the lesson that he should never back down from his enemies, no
matter how superior their numbers or capabilities. Under the guidance of
his uncle, he attended a nationalistic
secondary school in Baghdad. In 1957, at age 20, Saddam joined the
revolutionary pan-Arab
Ba'ath
Party, of which his uncle was a supporter.
Revolutionary sentiment
was characteristic of the era in Iraq and throughout the Middle
East. The stranglehold of the old elites (the conservative monarchists,
established families, and merchants) was breaking down in Iraq. Moreover,
the populist pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal
Abdel Nasser in Egypt
would profoundly influence the young Ba'athist, even up to the present
day. The rise of Nasser foreshadowed the wave of revolutions throughout
the Middle East in the fifties and sixties, which would see the collapse
of the monarchies of Iraq,
Egypt, and Libya.
Nasser challenged the British
and French,
nationalized the Suez
Canal, and strove to modernize Egypt and unite the Arab world
politically.
A year after Saddam had
joined the Ba'ath party, army officers led by General
Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew Faisal
II of Iraq. The Ba'athists opposed the new government,
and in 1959, Saddam was involved in the attempted assassination
of Prime Minister Qassim. Saddam was shot in the leg, but managed to flee
to Syria,
from where he later moved to Egypt.
He was sentenced to death, in
absentia. According to the Brookings
Institution Washington D.C., Saddam studied law at the Cairo
University during his exile.
Army officers, including
some aligned with the Ba'ath party, came to power in Iraq in a military
coup in 1963. However, torn by rife factionalism, the new government was
ousted within seven to eight months. Saddam returned to Iraq, but was
imprisoned in 1964 when an anti-Ba'ath group led by Abdul
Rahman Arif took power. He escaped from jail in 1967 and quickly
became one of the leading members of the party. According to many
biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba'athist
government, which prompted his measures to promote party unity as well as
his ruthless resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social
stability.
In July 1968 a second
coup brought the Ba'athists back to power under General
Ahmed
Hassan al-Bakr, a Tikriti and a relative of Saddam, who by this time
had become an interrogator
and torturer
at the infamous "Palace of the End," the cellar of the former
palace of King Faisal
II. The Ba'ath's ruling clique
named Saddam vice-chairman
of the Iraqi
Revolutionary Command Council and vice president of Iraq.
Consolidation of power
In 1976, Saddam rose to
the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces. He rapidly became the strongman
of the government. At the time Saddam was considered an enemy of communism
and radical islamism,
and at one point Donald
Rumsfeld, special envoy of President Ronald
Reagan at the time, met with him. Saddam was integral to US policy in
the region which tried to weaken the influence of Iran and the Soviet
Union. As Iraq's weak and elderly President Ahmed
Hassan al-Bakr became increasingly unable to execute the duties of his
office, Saddam began to take an increasingly prominent role as the face of
the Iraqi government, both internally and externally. He soon became the
architect of Iraq's foreign policy and represented the nation in all
diplomatic situations. He was the de facto ruler of Iraq some years before
he formally came to power in 1979. He slowly began to consolidate his
power over Iraq's government and the Ba'ath party. Relationships with
fellow party members were carefully cultivated, and Saddam soon gained a
powerful circle of support within the party.
Modernization
Saddam consolidated power
in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had
been split along social, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic
fault lines: Sunni
versus Shi'ite,
Arab versus Kurd,
tribal chief
versus urban
merchant, nomad
versus peasant.
Stable rule in a country torn by political factionalism and conflict
required the improvement of living standards. Saddam moved up the ranks in
the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba'ath
party and taking a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic
problems and expanding the party's following.
Saddam actively fostered
the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong
security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and
insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of
support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass
support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and
development programs.
At the center of this
strategy was Iraq's oil.
On June 1,
1972, Saddam
Hussein led the process of expropriating Western
oil companies, which, at the time, had a monopoly
on the country's oil. A year later, world oil prices rose dramatically as
a result of the 1973
world oil shock, and Saddam was able to pursue an all-the-more
ambitious agenda through skyrocketing oil revenues.
Within a period of just a
few years, the state provided social services to Iraqi people that were
unprecedented in other Middle Eastern countries. Saddam initiated and
controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy"
and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and
largely under his auspices, the government established universal free
schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands
learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The
government also supported families of soldiers, granted free
hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created
one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East,
earning Saddam an award from the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). [1]
[2]
In order to diversify the
oil-dependent
economy,
Saddam oversaw and advocated a national infrastructure campaign that made
great progress in building roads,
promoting mining,
and development of other industries.
The campaign effected a comprehensive revolution in energy industries.
Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, including many
communities in the countryside and far outlying areas.
Before the early 1970s,
the majority of the population resided in the countryside, where Saddam
himself was born and raised; and peasants
accounted for roughly two thirds of the populace. This number would
decrease dramatically, though, during the rapid industrialization
and urbanization
of Iraq in the 1970s, which was propelled by Saddam's channeling of oil
revenues into the rapidly growing Iraqi industrial sector and the new Ba'athist
welfare programs.
Nevertheless, Saddam
focused intensely on fostering loyalty to the Ba'athist government in the
rural areas. After nationalizing
foreign oil interests, Saddam supervised the modernization of the Iraqi
countryside, the mechanization of agriculture
on a large scale, and the distribution of land to farmers.6
He broke up the large holdings of the landowners and gave land to peasant
farmers. The Ba'athists established farm co-operatives,
in which profits were distributed in accordance with the labors of the
individual peasant and the unskilled were trained. The government's
commitment to agrarian reform was demonstrated by the doubling of
expenditures for agriculture development in 1974 — 1975, a policy
that Saddam largely spearheaded. Moreover, agrarian reform in Iraq
improved the living standards of the broad strata of the peasantry and
increased production, though not to the levels for which Saddam had hoped.
Saddam became personally
associated with Ba'athist welfare and economic development programs in the
eyes of many Iraqis, thus widening his original popular base of support
while co-opting new sectors of the Iraqi population. Part of a combination
of "carrot and stick" tactics, expanding government services
forged patron-client ties between Saddam and his support base among the
working class and the peasantry and within the party and the government
bureaucracy.
Saddam's ruthless
organizational prowess was credited with Iraq's rapid pace of development
in the 1970s; development went forward at such a fevered pitch that two
million persons from other Arab countries and Yugoslavia worked in Iraq to
meet the growing demand
for labor.
Succession
In 1979 President al-Bakr
began to make treaties with Syria,
also under Ba'athist leadership, that would lead to unification between
the two countries. Syrian President Hafez
al-Assad would become deputy leader in a union, and this would drive
Saddam to obscurity. Saddam, the Vice President and de-facto ruler of
Iraq, had to act to secure his grip on power. He forced the ailing al-Bakr
to resign on July
16, 1979.
Saddam formally assumed the presidency.
Shortly afterwards, he
convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on July
22, 1979.
During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped, Saddam claimed to have
found spies and conspirators within the Ba'ath Party and read out the
names of members who he thought could oppose him. These members were
labeled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one by one to
face a firing
squad. After the list was read, Saddam congratulated those still
seated in the room for their past and future loyalty.
Saddam Hussein as a
secular leader
Saddam saw himself as a
social revolutionary and a modernizer, following the model of Nasser,
President of Egypt. To the consternation of Islamic conservatives, his
government gave women added freedoms and offered them high-level
government and industry jobs. Saddam also created a Western-style legal
system, making Iraq the only country in the Persian
Gulf region not ruled according to traditional Islamic law (Sharia).
Saddam abolished the Sharia law courts, except for personal injury claims.
Domestic conflict impeded
Saddam's modernizing projects. Iraqi society is divided along lines of
language, religion and ethnicity; Saddam's government rested on the
support of the 20 percent minority of largely working-class,
peasant, and lower middle class Sunni
Muslims, continuing a pattern that dates back at least to the British
mandate authority's reliance on them as administrators.
The Shi'a
majority were long a source of opposition to the government due to its
secular policies, and the Ba'ath Party was increasingly concerned about
potential Sh'ia Islamist
influence following the Iranian
Revolution of 1979. The Kurds
of northern Iraq (who are Sunni Muslims but not Arabs) were also
permanently hostile to the Ba'athist party's Arabizing tendencies. To
maintain his regime Saddam Hussein tended either to provide them with
benefits so as to co-opt them into the regime, or to take repressive
measures against them. The major instruments for accomplishing this
control were the paramilitary
and police
organizations. Beginning in 1974, Taha
Yassin Ramadan, a close associate of Saddam, commanded the People's
Army, which was responsible for internal security. As the Ba'ath Party's
paramilitary, the People's Army acted as a counterweight against any coup
attempts by the regular armed forces. In addition to the People's Army,
the Department of General Intelligence (Mukhabarat)
was the most notorious arm of the state security system, feared for its
use of torture
and assassination. It was commanded by Barzan
Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's younger half-brother. Since 1982, foreign
observers believed that this department operated both at home and abroad
in their mission to seek out and eliminate perceived opponents of Saddam
Hussein. [3]
Saddam's internal
security regime achieved notoriety for its extreme ruthlessness. In 1982,
during a visit to Dujail,
Saddam was to address and praise the city's residents for their support
and contributions in the Iran conflict, when an assassination attempt was
mounted against him. The town of Dujail lies 40 km (25 miles) north of
Baghdad; Saddam's security forces in return attacked the city, killing and
executing up to 137 of its inhabitants, including a number of children.
Around 1,500 townspeople were sent to prison and tortured. The entire town
was also punished by having 1,000 square kilometres (250,000 acres) of
farmland destroyed; replanting was only permitted 10 years later. The
events in Dujail became the subject of criminal charges following Saddam's
overthrow in 2003. [4]
Saddam justified Iraqi
nationalism by claiming a unique role of Iraq in the history of the Arab
world. As president, Saddam made frequent references to the Abbasid
period, when Baghdad was the political, cultural, and economic capital of
the Arab world. He also promoted Iraq's pre-Islamic role as the ancient
cradle of civilization Mesopotamia,
alluding to such historical figures as Nebuchadrezzar
and Hammurabi.
He devoted resources to archaeological explorations. In effect, Saddam
sought to combine pan-Arabism and Iraqi nationalism, by promoting the
vision of an Arab world united and led by Iraq.
As a sign of his
consolidation of power, Saddam's personality
cult pervaded Iraqi society. Thousands of portraits, posters, statues
and murals were erected in his honor all over Iraq. His face could be seen
on the sides of office buildings, schools, airports, and shops, as well as
on Iraqi currency. Saddam's personality cult reflected his efforts to
appeal to the various elements in Iraqi society. He appeared in the
costumes of the Bedouin,
the traditional clothes of the Iraqi peasant (which he essentially wore
during his childhood), and even Kurdish clothing, but also appeared in
Western suits, projecting the image of an urbane and modern leader.
Sometimes he would also be portrayed as a devout Muslim, wearing full
headdress and robe, praying toward Mecca.
Foreign affairs
In foreign affairs,
Saddam sought to have Iraq play a leading role in the Middle East. Iraq
signed an aid pact with the Soviet
Union in 1972, and arms were sent along with several thousand advisers.
However, the 1978 executions of Iraqi Communists and a shift of trade
toward the West strained Iraqi relations with the Soviet
Union, which took on a more Western orientation from then until the Persian
Gulf War in 1991.
He made a state visit to France
in 1976, cementing close ties with some French business and conservative
political circles. Saddam led Arab opposition to the Camp
David Accords between Egypt
and Israel
(1979). In 1975 he negotiated an accord with Iran
that contained Iraqi concessions on border disputes. In return, Iran
agreed to stop supporting opposition Kurds in Iraq.
Saddam initiated Iraq's
nuclear enrichment project in the 1980s, with French assistance. The first
Iraqi nuclear reactor was named by the French Osiraq,
after the Egyptian God of the dead. It was destroyed by an Israeli air
strike, because Israel suspected it was going to start producing weapons
grade nuclear material.
After Saddam had
negotiated the 1975 treaty with Iran, Shah
Pahlavi withdrew support for the Kurds, who suffered a total defeat.
Nearly from its founding as a modern state in 1920, Iraq has had to deal
with Kurdish separatists
in the northern part of the country. Saddam did negotiate an agreement in
1970 with separatist Kurdish leaders, giving them autonomy, but the
agreement broke down. The result was brutal fighting between the
government and Kurdish groups and even Iraqi bombing of Kurdish villages
in Iran, which caused Iraqi relations with Iran to deteriorate.
The Iran-Iraq War
(1980–1988)
-
Main article: Iran-Iraq
War
In 1979 Iran's Shah
Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic
Revolution, thus giving way to an Islamic
republic led by the Ayatollah
Khomeini. The influence of revolutionary Shi'ite Islam grew apace in
the region, particularly in countries with large Shi'ite populations,
especially Iraq. Saddam feared that radical Islamic ideas — hostile
to his secular rule — were rapidly spreading inside his country
among the majority Shi'ite population.
There had also been
bitter enmity between Saddam and Khomeini since the 1970s. Khomeini,
having been exiled
from Iran in 1964, took up residence in Iraq, at the Shi'ite holy city of An
Najaf. There he involved himself with Iraqi Shi'ites and developed a
strong, worldwide religious and political following. Under pressure from
the Shah, who had agreed to a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran in 1975,
Saddam agreed to expel Khomeini in 1978.
After Khomeini gained
power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten
months over the sovereignty of the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which
divides the two countries. Iraq invaded Iran by attacking Mehrabad
Airport of Tehran
and entering the oil-rich Iranian land of Khuzestan
on September
22, 1980.
Saddam declared Khuzestan a new province of Iraq.
In the first days of the
war, there was heavy ground fighting around strategic ports as Iraq
launched an attack on Iran's oil-rich, partly Arab-populated province of Khuzestan.
After making some initial gains, Iraq's troops began to suffer losses from
human
wave attacks by Iran. By 1982 Iraq was on the defensive and looking
for ways to end the war.
Iraq quickly found itself
bogged down in one of the longest and most destructive wars
of attrition of the twentieth century. During the war, Iraq used chemical
weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish separatists. Many of these
chemical weapons, along with Iraq's nuclear
program, were developed with the help of companies from East and West
Germany.([5])
On March
16, 1988,
the Kurdish town of Halabja
was attacked with a mix of mustard
gas and nerve
agents, killing 5,000 civilians,
and maiming, disfiguring, or seriously debilitating 10,000 more. (see
Halabja
poison gas attack)[6].
The attack occurred in conjuction with the 1988 al-Anfal
campaign designed to reassert central control of the mostly Kurdish
population of areas of northern Iraq and defeat the Kurdish peshmerga
rebel forces. The United States maintains that Saddam ordered the attack
to terrorize the Kurdish population in northern Iraq ([7]),
but Saddam's regime claimed at the time that Iran was responsible for the
attack, a claim that former CIA analyst Stephen C. Pelletiere says is
supported by a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency classified report.14
Former senior DIA
officers have said that the U.S. intelligence community was so "desperate
to make sure that Iraq did not lose" that the U.S. aided Iraq in the
war despite knowledge about Saddam's use of chemical weapons. According to
former DIA officer W.
Patrick Lang, "The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis
was not a matter of deep strategic concern." He adds that his agency
"would have never accepted the use of chemical weapons against
civilians, but the use against military objectives was seen as inevitable
in the Iraqi struggle for survival." Another officer who was involved
noted that the Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas. It
was just another way of killing people — whether with a bullet or phosgene,
it didn't make any difference."[8]
The above statement attributed to an anonymous member of the intelligence
community was made in reference to the Iran-Iraq war, not the attack on
Kurdish civilians.
Saddam reached out to
other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war,
particularly after its oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the
Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf. Iraq successfully gained some military
and financial aid from the United States, the Soviet Union, and France,
which together feared the prospects of the expansion of revolutionary
Iran's influence in the region. The Iranians, claiming that the
international community should force Iraq to pay the casualty of the war
to Iran, refused any suggestions for a cease-fire. They continued the war
until 1988, hoping to bring down Saddam's secular regime and instigate a
Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq.
The bloody eight-year war
ended in a stalemate. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Perhaps upwards of 1.7 million died on both sides. Both economies,
previously healthy and expanding, were left in ruins.
Saddam borrowed a
tremendous amount of money from other Arab states during the 1980s to
fight Iran and was stuck with a war debt of roughly $75 billion. Faced
with rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, Saddam desperately sought out cash
once again, this time for postwar reconstruction. The desperate search for
foreign credit would eventually humiliate the strongman who had long
sought to dominate Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East.
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