Post by Bozur on Jan 11, 2007 1:24:54 GMT -5
Saddam Hussein, Defiant Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence and Fear, Dies
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By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: December 30, 2006
The hanging of Saddam Hussein ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history and negated the fiction that he himself maintained even as the gallows loomed — that he remained president of Iraq despite being toppled by the United States military and that his power and his palaces would be restored to him in time.
Pool photo by David Furst
Saddam Hussein in court as he received the death sentence on Nov. 5 for his role in the killing in 1982 of nearly 150 people in the mainly Shiite village of Dujail.
Saddam Hussein visiting the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf in 1996.
The despot, known as Saddam, had oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years, unleashing devastating regional wars and reducing his once promising, oil-rich nation to a claustrophobic police state.
For decades, it had seemed that his unflinching hold on Iraq would endure, particularly after he lasted through disastrous military adventures against first Iran and then Kuwait, where an American-led coalition routed his unexpectedly timid military in 1991.
His own conviction that he was destined by God to rule Iraq forever was such that he refused to accept that he would be overthrown in April 2003, even as American tanks penetrated the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in a war that has become a bitterly contentious, bloody occupation.
After eluding capture for eight months, Mr. Hussein became the American military’s High Value Detainee No. 1. But he heaped scorn on the Iraqi judge who referred to him as the “former” president after asking him to identify himself on the first day of his trial for crimes against humanity, which ultimately lead to his execution.
“I didn’t say ‘former president,’ I said ‘president,’ and I have rights according to the Constitution, among them immunity from prosecution,” he growled from the docket. The outburst underscored the boundless egotism and self-delusion of a man who fostered such a fierce personality cult during the decades that he ran the Middle Eastern nation that joking about him or criticizing him in public could bring a death sentence.
If a man’s life can be boiled down to one physical mark, Mr. Hussein’s right wrist was tattooed with a line of three dark blue dots, commonly given to children in rural, tribal areas. Some urbanized Iraqis removed or at least bleached theirs, but Mr. Hussein’s former confidants told The Atlantic Monthly that he never disguised his.
Ultimately, underneath all the socialist oratory, underneath the Koranic references, the tailored suits and the invocations of Iraq’s glorious history, Mr. Hussein held onto the ethos of a village peasant who believed that the strongman was everything. He was trying to be a tribal leader on a grand scale. His rule was paramount, and sustaining it was his main goal behind all the talk of developing Iraq by harnessing its considerable wealth and manpower.
Mosques, airports, neighborhoods and entire cities were named after him. A military arch erected in Baghdad in 1989 was modeled on his forearms and then enlarged 40 times to hold two giant crossed swords. In school, pupils learned songs with lyrics like “Saddam, oh Saddam, you carry the nation’s dawn in your eyes.”
Video
The entertainment at public events often consisted of outpourings of praise for Mr. Hussein. At the January 2003 inauguration of a recreational lake in Baghdad, poets spouted spontaneous verse and the official translators struggled to keep up with lines like, “We will stimulate ourselves by saying your name, Saddam Hussein, when we say Saddam Hussein, we stimulate ourselves.”
While Mr. Hussein was in power, his statue guarded the entrance to every village, his portrait watched over each government office and he peered down from at least one wall in every home. His picture was so widespread that a joke quietly circulating among his detractors in 1988 put the country’s population at 34 million — 17 million people and 17 million portraits of Saddam.
Battles and Bloodshed
Throughout his rule, he unsettled the ranks of the Baath Party with bloody purges and packed his jails with political prisoners to defuse real or imagined plots. In one of his most brutal acts, he rained poison gas on the northern Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 of his own citizens suspected of being disloyal and wounding 10,000 more.
Even at the end, he showed no remorse. When four Iraqi politicians visited him after his capture in December 2003, they asked about his more brutal acts. He called the Halabja attack Iran’s handiwork; he said that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and that the mass graves were filled with thieves who fled the battlefields, according to Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister. Mr. Hussein declared that he had been “just but firm” because Iraqis needed a tough ruler, Mr. Pachachi said.
It was a favorite theme, one even espoused in a novel attributed to Mr. Hussein called “Zabibah and the King.”
At one point, the king asks the comely Zabibah whether the people needed strict measures from their leader. “Yes, Your Majesty,” Zabibah replies. “The people need strict measures so that they can feel protected by this strictness.”
Aside from his secret police, he held power by filling the government’s upper ranks with members of his extended clan. Their Corleone-like feuds became the stuff of gory public soap operas. Mr. Hussein once sentenced his elder son, Uday, to be executed after he beat Mr. Hussein’s food taster to death in front of scores of horrified party guests, but later rescinded the order. The husbands of his two eldest daughters, whom he had promoted to important military positions, were gunned down after they defected and then inexplicably returned to Iraq.
Continual wars sapped Iraq’s wealth and decimated its people. In 1980, Mr. Hussein dragged his country into a disastrous attempt to overthrow the new Islamic government in neighboring Iran. By the time the war ended in stalemate in 1988, more than 200,000 Iraqis were dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded. Iran suffered a similar toll. Iraq’s staggering war debt, pegged around $70 billion, soon had wealthy Arab neighbors demanding repayment. Enraged, he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, only to be expelled by an American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf war seven months later.
Yet in the language of his Orwellian government, Mr. Hussein never suffered a setback. After the gulf war ended with the deaths of an estimated 150,000 Iraqis, he called “the Mother of All Battles” his biggest victory and maintained that Iraq had actually repulsed an American attack.
“Iraq has punched a hole in the myth of American superiority and rubbed the nose of the United States in the dust,” Mr. Hussein said.
His defeat in Kuwait, followed by more than a decade of tense confrontations with the West over his suspected weapons programs, ultimately led to his overthrow. The extended bloodbath that followed the invasion, with the monthly death toll of Iraqi civilians estimated roughly at 3,000 by the end of 2006, made some nostalgic for even the oppressive days of Mr. Hussein, when public security was not an issue. His repressive ways were credited with keeping the fractious population of 26 million — including 20 percent Sunni Muslims, who dominated; 55 percent Shiite Muslims; 20 percent Kurds plus several tiny minorities including Christians — from shattering along ethnic lines.
The Pathway to Politics
Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in a mud hut on stilts near the banks of the Tigris River near the village of Tikrit, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad. He was raised by a clan of landless peasants, his father apparently deserting his mother before his birth. (Government accounts said the father died.)
“His birth was not a joyful occasion, and no roses or aromatic plants bedecked his cradle,” his official biographer, Amir Iskander, wrote in “Saddam Hussein, the Fighter, the Thinker and the Man,” published in 1981.
Mr. Hussein told his biographer that he did not miss his father growing up in an extended clan. But persistent stories suggest that Mr. Hussein’s stepfather delighted in humiliating the boy and forced him to tend sheep. Eventually, he ran away to live with relatives who would let him go to school.
Mr. Hussein’s first role in the rough world of Iraqi politics came in 1959, at age 22, when the Baath Party assigned him and nine others to assassinate Abdul Karim Kassem, the despotic general ruling Iraq. Violence was a quick way for a young man who grew up fatherless in an impoverished village to get ahead; bloodshed became the major theme of his life.
During the failed assassination, Mr. Hussein suffered a bullet wound to the leg. The official version portrayed him as a hero who dug the bullet out with a penknife, while the other version suggests that the plot failed because he opened fire prematurely.
He sought asylum in Egypt, where President Gamal Abdel Nasser nurtured the region’s revolutionary movements. Soon after returning to Iraq, Mr. Hussein married his first cousin and the daughter of his political mentor, Sajida Khairallah Tulfah, on May 5, 1963. The couple had two sons, Uday and Qusay, and three daughters, Raghad, Rana and Hala. He had mistresses, including prominent Iraqi women, but never flaunted them.
His wife, three daughters and roughly a dozen grandchildren survive him. Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay’s teenage son, Mustapha, died in July 2003 during a gun battle with American forces in a villa in the northern city of Mosul. Denounced by an informant, they had been the two most wanted men in Iraq after their father.
The first years of Saddam Hussein’s marriage coincided with political tumult in Iraq, with at least six coups or attempted revolts erupting between the assassination of King Faisal II in 1958 and the July 1968 putsch that brought the Baath Party to power.
Mr. Hussein’s main role while still in his early 30s was organizing the party’s militia, the seed of the dreaded security apparatus. By November 1969, he had eliminated rivals and dissidents to the extent that President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr appointed him vice president and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, as the cabinet was known. Mr. Hussein remained head of the intelligence and internal security agencies, in effect controlling Iraq.
The Arab Baath Socialist Party, whose name means “renaissance” in Arabic, had been formed in the 1930s to push a secular, socialist creed as the ideal path to achieving Arab unity. But that dogma proved a sinister excuse for the imprisonment, exile or execution of all potential rivals.
No other Arab despot matched the savagery of Mr. Hussein as he went about bending all state institutions to his whim. His opening act, in January 1969, was hanging around 17 so-called spies for Israel in a downtown Baghdad square. Hundreds of arrests and executions followed as the civilian wing of the Baath Party gradually eclipsed the Iraqi military.
Mr. Hussein staged perhaps his most macabre purge in 1979, when at age 42 he consolidated his hold on Iraq. Having pushed aside President Bakr, he called a gathering of several hundred top Baathists.
One senior official stepped forward to confess to having been part of a widespread plot to allow a Syrian takeover. After guards dragged the man away, Mr. Hussein took to the podium, weeping at first as he began reading a list of dozens implicated. Guards dragged away each of the accused. Mr. Hussein paused from reading occasionally to light his cigar, while the room erupted in almost hysterical chanting demanding death to traitors. The entire dark spectacle, designed to leave no doubt as to who controlled Iraq, was filmed and copies distributed around the country.
Firing squads consisting of cabinet members and other top officials initially gunned down 21 men, including five ministers. Iraq’s state radio said the officials executed their colleagues while “cheering for the long life of the Party, the Revolution and the Leader, President, Struggler, Saddam Hussein.”
Mr. Hussein invariably ensured that those around him were complicit in his bloody acts, which he masqueraded as patriotism, making certain that there would be no guiltless figure to rally opposition.
In an authoritative account of Mr. Hussein’s government called “The Republic of Fear,” the self-exiled Iraqi architect Kenaan Makiya (writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil) estimated that at least 500 people died in the purge that consolidated Mr. Hussein’s power.
Mr. Hussein’s titles reflected his status as an absolute ruler modeled after one of his heroes, Josef Stalin of the former Soviet Union. They included president of the republic, commander in chief of the armed forces, field marshal and prime minister. In addition, the state-owned news media referred to him repeatedly as the Struggler, the Standard Bearer, the Knight of the Arab Nation and the Sword of the Arabs.
Mr. Hussein saw his first opportunity for Iraq to dominate the region in the turmoil that swept neighboring Iran immediately after its 1979 Islamic revolution. In September 1980, Mr. Hussein believed that by invading Iran he could both seize a disputed waterway along the border and inspire Iranians of Arab origin to revolt against their Persian rulers. Instead, they resisted fanatically. Mr. Hussein never acknowledged making a gross miscalculation; rather, he vilified the Iranian Arabs as traitors to the Arab cause.
Iraq fared badly in the war, not least because Mr. Hussein interfered in the battle plans despite a complete lack of military training, even issuing orders based on dreams. When strategies urged by Mr. Hussein failed, he often accused the commanders of betrayal, cowardice and incompetence and had them executed.
The Field Marshal
Mr. Hussein adored the macho trappings of the armed forces, appointing himself field marshal and dressing his ministers in olive-green fatigues. If he was a poor military strategist, he was fortunate in his first choice of enemy. The fear that an Islamic revolution would spread to an oil producer with estimated reserves second only to Saudi Arabia tipped the United States and its allies toward Baghdad and they provided weapons, technology and, most important, secret satellite images of Iran’s military positions and intercepted communications.
The war lasted for eight years until Iran accepted a cease-fire in July 1988, with both sides terrorizing each other’s civilian populations by rocketing major cities. But the March 1988 mustard gas attack on the Iraqi village of Halabja by its own government was perhaps the most gruesome incident.
Mr. Hussein waged war while investing in massive development that markedly improved daily life. Rural villages were electrified and linked by modern highways. Iraq boasted some of the best universities and hospitals in the Arab world — all free. Its painters, musicians and other artists, helped by government subsidies, were also the most accomplished in the region. Mr. Hussein had his own development methods. Anyone who avoided mandatory adult literacy classes in rural areas faced three years in jail.
Official corruption was unknown in Iraq in the 1980s, and religious worship somewhat free. Mr. Hussein occasionally took populist measures to underscore the importance of the public welfare. Once, for example, he decided that his ministers were too fat and he demanded that they diet, publishing their real weights and their target weights in the news media. Mr. Hussein’s own weight could fluctuate from chubby to relatively trim, although well tailored suits hid his paunch. Around six feet tall, he was stocky and wore a trademark moustache.
In keeping with a ruler who used violence to achieve and sustain power, Mr. Hussein’s most widespread investments were in his military. He ended the Iran-Iraq war with one million men under arms.
By then Iraq had embarked on extensive projects to acquire a homegrown arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Iraq had also become a regional power, and Mr. Hussein expected to dominate the Arab world. In March 1990, he threatened to “burn half of Israel” if it ever acted against Iraq, even though the Israeli Air Force had humiliated the Iraqi leader by destroying his country’s nuclear research center at Osirik in June 1981.
Mr. Hussein’s next target was another neighbor, Kuwait, which Iraq had long considered part of Iraq and coveted for its deep-water port. On Aug. 2, 1990, his army swiftly occupied the tiny, immensely wealthy emirate, provoking an international crisis. Mr. Hussein declared the country Iraq’s 19th province, installing a puppet government. Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab states were shaken and outraged, while the United States and other Western countries feared for the oil fields ringing the Persian Gulf. The United Nations imposed a trade embargo and economic sanctions.
The United States and eventually 33 other nations deployed forces to the region and warned of a wider war if Mr. Hussein did not withdraw. He held onto Kuwait despite repeated threats from the United States, which dominated the military coalition by dispatching some 500,000 American soldiers. Mr. Hussein portrayed the invasion as the start of an Islamic holy war to liberate Jerusalem. He declared that the “throne dwarfs” of the gulf must be overthrown so their wealth could finance the Arab cause.
His public aims resonated among many Arabs in Jordan, Yemen and elsewhere, particularly because the brutality of Mr. Hussein’s government had never been detailed by the state-controlled media of other Arab states. In addition, Mr. Hussein’s Scud missiles crashing into Tel Aviv, however ineffective, created a stir in the Arab world.
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By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: December 30, 2006
The hanging of Saddam Hussein ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history and negated the fiction that he himself maintained even as the gallows loomed — that he remained president of Iraq despite being toppled by the United States military and that his power and his palaces would be restored to him in time.
Pool photo by David Furst
Saddam Hussein in court as he received the death sentence on Nov. 5 for his role in the killing in 1982 of nearly 150 people in the mainly Shiite village of Dujail.
Saddam Hussein visiting the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf in 1996.
The despot, known as Saddam, had oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years, unleashing devastating regional wars and reducing his once promising, oil-rich nation to a claustrophobic police state.
For decades, it had seemed that his unflinching hold on Iraq would endure, particularly after he lasted through disastrous military adventures against first Iran and then Kuwait, where an American-led coalition routed his unexpectedly timid military in 1991.
His own conviction that he was destined by God to rule Iraq forever was such that he refused to accept that he would be overthrown in April 2003, even as American tanks penetrated the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in a war that has become a bitterly contentious, bloody occupation.
After eluding capture for eight months, Mr. Hussein became the American military’s High Value Detainee No. 1. But he heaped scorn on the Iraqi judge who referred to him as the “former” president after asking him to identify himself on the first day of his trial for crimes against humanity, which ultimately lead to his execution.
“I didn’t say ‘former president,’ I said ‘president,’ and I have rights according to the Constitution, among them immunity from prosecution,” he growled from the docket. The outburst underscored the boundless egotism and self-delusion of a man who fostered such a fierce personality cult during the decades that he ran the Middle Eastern nation that joking about him or criticizing him in public could bring a death sentence.
If a man’s life can be boiled down to one physical mark, Mr. Hussein’s right wrist was tattooed with a line of three dark blue dots, commonly given to children in rural, tribal areas. Some urbanized Iraqis removed or at least bleached theirs, but Mr. Hussein’s former confidants told The Atlantic Monthly that he never disguised his.
Ultimately, underneath all the socialist oratory, underneath the Koranic references, the tailored suits and the invocations of Iraq’s glorious history, Mr. Hussein held onto the ethos of a village peasant who believed that the strongman was everything. He was trying to be a tribal leader on a grand scale. His rule was paramount, and sustaining it was his main goal behind all the talk of developing Iraq by harnessing its considerable wealth and manpower.
Mosques, airports, neighborhoods and entire cities were named after him. A military arch erected in Baghdad in 1989 was modeled on his forearms and then enlarged 40 times to hold two giant crossed swords. In school, pupils learned songs with lyrics like “Saddam, oh Saddam, you carry the nation’s dawn in your eyes.”
Video
The entertainment at public events often consisted of outpourings of praise for Mr. Hussein. At the January 2003 inauguration of a recreational lake in Baghdad, poets spouted spontaneous verse and the official translators struggled to keep up with lines like, “We will stimulate ourselves by saying your name, Saddam Hussein, when we say Saddam Hussein, we stimulate ourselves.”
While Mr. Hussein was in power, his statue guarded the entrance to every village, his portrait watched over each government office and he peered down from at least one wall in every home. His picture was so widespread that a joke quietly circulating among his detractors in 1988 put the country’s population at 34 million — 17 million people and 17 million portraits of Saddam.
Battles and Bloodshed
Throughout his rule, he unsettled the ranks of the Baath Party with bloody purges and packed his jails with political prisoners to defuse real or imagined plots. In one of his most brutal acts, he rained poison gas on the northern Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 of his own citizens suspected of being disloyal and wounding 10,000 more.
Even at the end, he showed no remorse. When four Iraqi politicians visited him after his capture in December 2003, they asked about his more brutal acts. He called the Halabja attack Iran’s handiwork; he said that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and that the mass graves were filled with thieves who fled the battlefields, according to Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister. Mr. Hussein declared that he had been “just but firm” because Iraqis needed a tough ruler, Mr. Pachachi said.
It was a favorite theme, one even espoused in a novel attributed to Mr. Hussein called “Zabibah and the King.”
At one point, the king asks the comely Zabibah whether the people needed strict measures from their leader. “Yes, Your Majesty,” Zabibah replies. “The people need strict measures so that they can feel protected by this strictness.”
Aside from his secret police, he held power by filling the government’s upper ranks with members of his extended clan. Their Corleone-like feuds became the stuff of gory public soap operas. Mr. Hussein once sentenced his elder son, Uday, to be executed after he beat Mr. Hussein’s food taster to death in front of scores of horrified party guests, but later rescinded the order. The husbands of his two eldest daughters, whom he had promoted to important military positions, were gunned down after they defected and then inexplicably returned to Iraq.
Continual wars sapped Iraq’s wealth and decimated its people. In 1980, Mr. Hussein dragged his country into a disastrous attempt to overthrow the new Islamic government in neighboring Iran. By the time the war ended in stalemate in 1988, more than 200,000 Iraqis were dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded. Iran suffered a similar toll. Iraq’s staggering war debt, pegged around $70 billion, soon had wealthy Arab neighbors demanding repayment. Enraged, he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, only to be expelled by an American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf war seven months later.
Yet in the language of his Orwellian government, Mr. Hussein never suffered a setback. After the gulf war ended with the deaths of an estimated 150,000 Iraqis, he called “the Mother of All Battles” his biggest victory and maintained that Iraq had actually repulsed an American attack.
“Iraq has punched a hole in the myth of American superiority and rubbed the nose of the United States in the dust,” Mr. Hussein said.
His defeat in Kuwait, followed by more than a decade of tense confrontations with the West over his suspected weapons programs, ultimately led to his overthrow. The extended bloodbath that followed the invasion, with the monthly death toll of Iraqi civilians estimated roughly at 3,000 by the end of 2006, made some nostalgic for even the oppressive days of Mr. Hussein, when public security was not an issue. His repressive ways were credited with keeping the fractious population of 26 million — including 20 percent Sunni Muslims, who dominated; 55 percent Shiite Muslims; 20 percent Kurds plus several tiny minorities including Christians — from shattering along ethnic lines.
The Pathway to Politics
Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in a mud hut on stilts near the banks of the Tigris River near the village of Tikrit, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad. He was raised by a clan of landless peasants, his father apparently deserting his mother before his birth. (Government accounts said the father died.)
“His birth was not a joyful occasion, and no roses or aromatic plants bedecked his cradle,” his official biographer, Amir Iskander, wrote in “Saddam Hussein, the Fighter, the Thinker and the Man,” published in 1981.
Mr. Hussein told his biographer that he did not miss his father growing up in an extended clan. But persistent stories suggest that Mr. Hussein’s stepfather delighted in humiliating the boy and forced him to tend sheep. Eventually, he ran away to live with relatives who would let him go to school.
Mr. Hussein’s first role in the rough world of Iraqi politics came in 1959, at age 22, when the Baath Party assigned him and nine others to assassinate Abdul Karim Kassem, the despotic general ruling Iraq. Violence was a quick way for a young man who grew up fatherless in an impoverished village to get ahead; bloodshed became the major theme of his life.
During the failed assassination, Mr. Hussein suffered a bullet wound to the leg. The official version portrayed him as a hero who dug the bullet out with a penknife, while the other version suggests that the plot failed because he opened fire prematurely.
He sought asylum in Egypt, where President Gamal Abdel Nasser nurtured the region’s revolutionary movements. Soon after returning to Iraq, Mr. Hussein married his first cousin and the daughter of his political mentor, Sajida Khairallah Tulfah, on May 5, 1963. The couple had two sons, Uday and Qusay, and three daughters, Raghad, Rana and Hala. He had mistresses, including prominent Iraqi women, but never flaunted them.
His wife, three daughters and roughly a dozen grandchildren survive him. Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay’s teenage son, Mustapha, died in July 2003 during a gun battle with American forces in a villa in the northern city of Mosul. Denounced by an informant, they had been the two most wanted men in Iraq after their father.
The first years of Saddam Hussein’s marriage coincided with political tumult in Iraq, with at least six coups or attempted revolts erupting between the assassination of King Faisal II in 1958 and the July 1968 putsch that brought the Baath Party to power.
Mr. Hussein’s main role while still in his early 30s was organizing the party’s militia, the seed of the dreaded security apparatus. By November 1969, he had eliminated rivals and dissidents to the extent that President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr appointed him vice president and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, as the cabinet was known. Mr. Hussein remained head of the intelligence and internal security agencies, in effect controlling Iraq.
The Arab Baath Socialist Party, whose name means “renaissance” in Arabic, had been formed in the 1930s to push a secular, socialist creed as the ideal path to achieving Arab unity. But that dogma proved a sinister excuse for the imprisonment, exile or execution of all potential rivals.
No other Arab despot matched the savagery of Mr. Hussein as he went about bending all state institutions to his whim. His opening act, in January 1969, was hanging around 17 so-called spies for Israel in a downtown Baghdad square. Hundreds of arrests and executions followed as the civilian wing of the Baath Party gradually eclipsed the Iraqi military.
Mr. Hussein staged perhaps his most macabre purge in 1979, when at age 42 he consolidated his hold on Iraq. Having pushed aside President Bakr, he called a gathering of several hundred top Baathists.
One senior official stepped forward to confess to having been part of a widespread plot to allow a Syrian takeover. After guards dragged the man away, Mr. Hussein took to the podium, weeping at first as he began reading a list of dozens implicated. Guards dragged away each of the accused. Mr. Hussein paused from reading occasionally to light his cigar, while the room erupted in almost hysterical chanting demanding death to traitors. The entire dark spectacle, designed to leave no doubt as to who controlled Iraq, was filmed and copies distributed around the country.
Firing squads consisting of cabinet members and other top officials initially gunned down 21 men, including five ministers. Iraq’s state radio said the officials executed their colleagues while “cheering for the long life of the Party, the Revolution and the Leader, President, Struggler, Saddam Hussein.”
Mr. Hussein invariably ensured that those around him were complicit in his bloody acts, which he masqueraded as patriotism, making certain that there would be no guiltless figure to rally opposition.
In an authoritative account of Mr. Hussein’s government called “The Republic of Fear,” the self-exiled Iraqi architect Kenaan Makiya (writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil) estimated that at least 500 people died in the purge that consolidated Mr. Hussein’s power.
Mr. Hussein’s titles reflected his status as an absolute ruler modeled after one of his heroes, Josef Stalin of the former Soviet Union. They included president of the republic, commander in chief of the armed forces, field marshal and prime minister. In addition, the state-owned news media referred to him repeatedly as the Struggler, the Standard Bearer, the Knight of the Arab Nation and the Sword of the Arabs.
Mr. Hussein saw his first opportunity for Iraq to dominate the region in the turmoil that swept neighboring Iran immediately after its 1979 Islamic revolution. In September 1980, Mr. Hussein believed that by invading Iran he could both seize a disputed waterway along the border and inspire Iranians of Arab origin to revolt against their Persian rulers. Instead, they resisted fanatically. Mr. Hussein never acknowledged making a gross miscalculation; rather, he vilified the Iranian Arabs as traitors to the Arab cause.
Iraq fared badly in the war, not least because Mr. Hussein interfered in the battle plans despite a complete lack of military training, even issuing orders based on dreams. When strategies urged by Mr. Hussein failed, he often accused the commanders of betrayal, cowardice and incompetence and had them executed.
The Field Marshal
Mr. Hussein adored the macho trappings of the armed forces, appointing himself field marshal and dressing his ministers in olive-green fatigues. If he was a poor military strategist, he was fortunate in his first choice of enemy. The fear that an Islamic revolution would spread to an oil producer with estimated reserves second only to Saudi Arabia tipped the United States and its allies toward Baghdad and they provided weapons, technology and, most important, secret satellite images of Iran’s military positions and intercepted communications.
The war lasted for eight years until Iran accepted a cease-fire in July 1988, with both sides terrorizing each other’s civilian populations by rocketing major cities. But the March 1988 mustard gas attack on the Iraqi village of Halabja by its own government was perhaps the most gruesome incident.
Mr. Hussein waged war while investing in massive development that markedly improved daily life. Rural villages were electrified and linked by modern highways. Iraq boasted some of the best universities and hospitals in the Arab world — all free. Its painters, musicians and other artists, helped by government subsidies, were also the most accomplished in the region. Mr. Hussein had his own development methods. Anyone who avoided mandatory adult literacy classes in rural areas faced three years in jail.
Official corruption was unknown in Iraq in the 1980s, and religious worship somewhat free. Mr. Hussein occasionally took populist measures to underscore the importance of the public welfare. Once, for example, he decided that his ministers were too fat and he demanded that they diet, publishing their real weights and their target weights in the news media. Mr. Hussein’s own weight could fluctuate from chubby to relatively trim, although well tailored suits hid his paunch. Around six feet tall, he was stocky and wore a trademark moustache.
In keeping with a ruler who used violence to achieve and sustain power, Mr. Hussein’s most widespread investments were in his military. He ended the Iran-Iraq war with one million men under arms.
By then Iraq had embarked on extensive projects to acquire a homegrown arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Iraq had also become a regional power, and Mr. Hussein expected to dominate the Arab world. In March 1990, he threatened to “burn half of Israel” if it ever acted against Iraq, even though the Israeli Air Force had humiliated the Iraqi leader by destroying his country’s nuclear research center at Osirik in June 1981.
Mr. Hussein’s next target was another neighbor, Kuwait, which Iraq had long considered part of Iraq and coveted for its deep-water port. On Aug. 2, 1990, his army swiftly occupied the tiny, immensely wealthy emirate, provoking an international crisis. Mr. Hussein declared the country Iraq’s 19th province, installing a puppet government. Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab states were shaken and outraged, while the United States and other Western countries feared for the oil fields ringing the Persian Gulf. The United Nations imposed a trade embargo and economic sanctions.
The United States and eventually 33 other nations deployed forces to the region and warned of a wider war if Mr. Hussein did not withdraw. He held onto Kuwait despite repeated threats from the United States, which dominated the military coalition by dispatching some 500,000 American soldiers. Mr. Hussein portrayed the invasion as the start of an Islamic holy war to liberate Jerusalem. He declared that the “throne dwarfs” of the gulf must be overthrown so their wealth could finance the Arab cause.
His public aims resonated among many Arabs in Jordan, Yemen and elsewhere, particularly because the brutality of Mr. Hussein’s government had never been detailed by the state-controlled media of other Arab states. In addition, Mr. Hussein’s Scud missiles crashing into Tel Aviv, however ineffective, created a stir in the Arab world.