Saddam Hussein: Iraq's Dictator
The story behind the Ba'athist leader of Iraq.
Saddam Hussein, the notorious dictator of Iraq, ruled his country with a harsh iron fist. A vicious sadist, he oversaw a regime that violently repressed all opposition. Yet at the same time, the Iraqi despot had an impressive string of accomplishments, especially in his early reign. Under Saddam, Iraq was transformed from a backwater dump into a modern nation-state.
Was he a necessary lid on Iraq’s bloody religious sectarianism, or was he a brutal fascist tyrant who deployed chemical weapons on his own people?
Rise of the Ba’athist Party
Saddam was born on April 28, 1937 in a small village near Tikrit, just northwest of Baghdad. His name means “one who confronts.” Rejected by his mother, Saddam was sent to live with an uncle, a Nazi sympathizer with a venomous hatred of Iranians and Jews.
Not long after WWII, Iraq, an oil-rich country long under British sovereignty, fell into a civil war. Led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim, a military coup overthrew the British puppet monarchy in 1958. Saddam was part of this revolutionary movement, and made a failed attempt to assassinate Iraq’s leader.
As part of the July 14 Revolution, the Ba’athist Party came to power in Iraq. Israel had defeated its Arab neighbors, including Iraq, Egypt, and Syria, in the Six Day War. Iraq was humiliated, and the hatred for the Jews was extreme. Saddam’s regime cracked down on Iraq’s intelligentsia, clearly indicating that a new era of repression and fear had arrived.
Although Saddam was Iraq’s de facto ruler behind the scenes, he maneuvered his way into the spotlight in July of 1979. Hussein forced the Iraqi president to resign, and put him under house arrest. At age 42, Saddam was left as Iraq’s new president. To consolidate his iron-fisted reign, Hussein led a public purge of high-profile Ba’athist officials.
Iran-Iraq War
Now in total control, Saddam waged an invasion against Iran. The secular regime of Ba’athist Iraq was infinitely preferable to Iran’s Shia theocracy, so the West begrudgingly allied itself with Saddam. In this protracted, nearly decade-long conflict, Saddam’s Iraq was unable to win a decisive victory against the Iranians. But his ruthlessness knew no bounds, and Saddam deployed the painful nerve agent tabun on his Iranian enemies. Even Hitler had refused to use tabun on the battlefield.
Over a million people died in the war, and it was nothing more than a stalemate! Regardless, Saddam declared victory. Casting himself as a new Nebuchadnezzar, Saddam rebuilt the ancient city of Babylon. Every tenth brick was inscribed with Saddam’s name. His name and face filled the country. Every birthday, Saddam had yet another statue built of himself.
Gulf War
Saddam turned his attention to another neighbor, Kuwait. Kuwait, an oil-rich country, had loaned Saddam $10 billion for his invasion of Iran. Hussein was unable to pay his debts, and the Kuwaitis were unhappy. Iraq’s dictator suspected that Kuwait was deliberately overproducing oil to deflate prices and harm Iraq’s economy.
With the largest Arab army in the Middle East, Saddam was ready to impose his will by force. In August of 1990, Saddam’s Iraq sent over 100,000 troops to invade Kuwait. It was a colossal mistake. President George H.W. Bush was outraged. “This aggression will not stand,” the American leader declared.
Saddam’s invasion was highly unpopular, even among the other Gulf states. Even Syria, Egypt, and Russia joined the US-led coalition to expel Hussein from Kuwait. The coalition was even larger than the one that fought Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan. In just 100 hours, the US forces, led by General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr, overran Saddam’s army. Kuwait was liberated.
Having achieved the goal, the American-led coalition did not march on Baghdad. They left Saddam in power. For the first time, Hussein’s regime faced powerful internal dissension. Kurds, Shiites, and Marsh Arabs all rose up against Saddam. Hundreds of thousands were violently massacred by the Iraqi despot. Chemical weapons were again deployed, to horrifying effect. In just two months, two million Kurds fled out of Iraq into refugee camps.
Emboldened by these developments, Saddam glorified his supposed “victory” with a mosque, which he called the Mother of All Battles. Filled with anti-American symbols, the four minarets were shaped like Scud missiles. According to Ba’athist propaganda, the mosque contained a copy of the Quran written in Saddam’s own blood. Religious delusions of grandeur brought his megalomania to unprecedented new levels.
Bush’s War in Iraq
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration was desperate for answers. Although Saddam’s regime had been in low-scale war against the United States for over a decade, the Bush administration was simply not willing to take any chances. “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” President Bush told Congress in his 2002 State of the Union Address.
Bush and his team began to focus global attention on Hussein’s rogue regime, demanding that he allow UN inspectors to search out his weapons of mass destruction. Saddam’s refusal to cooperate with international authorities was now taken as a serious threat to the US.
In March of 2003, the US began its invasion of Iraq, known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. By April, after a mere three weeks, the US-led coalition marched triumphantly into Baghdad. In a famous video, Saddam’s statue was literally pulled down to the ground with a rope.
Initially, the American troops were greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people. Iraqis kissed each other, and kissed the soldiers as well. Saddam’s statue was dragged and publicly humiliated in the streets. This would rapidly change as Ba’athist loyalists, as well as various Sunni and Shiite militants, waged an insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq. But for the time being, the US appeared to be the undisputed victor.
After the Fall of Baghdad, Saddam was still on the run. The Iraqi dictator was finally found and apprehended by US troops as part of Operation Red Dawn in December of 2003. Saddam was found on a farm a few miles from where he was born. After being tried and convicted for crimes against humanity, the Iraqi tyrant was executed by hanging in 2006.
Ba’athism
Saddam’s ideology is known as Ba'athism, which is Arabic for “renaissance.” Ba’athism was developed by a Syrian Christian intellectual named Michel Aflaq. It is a form of pan-Arab nationalism, which calls for the creation of a unified Arab state. This process is believed to require the one-party socialist dictatorship of a vanguard party.
Economically, the Ba’athists favored centrally-planned socialism, which included state ownership of natural resources, protectionism, and the redistribution of land to poor peasants. In Saddam’s Iraq, this was seen in the ambitious modernization and public works projects of the 1970s, which greatly improved the country. This positive aspect of his legacy cannot be denied.
Ba’athism is a secular political system. Loosely influenced by Western Marxism and socialism, it saw religion as an oppressive tool of Iraq’s traditional elites to prevent radical reforms of society. Furthermore, this ideology sought to subordinate religious sectarianism to the ethnic and nationalist concerns of the Arabs as a whole. Although Saddam was a despotic ruler, he did achieve one function: curbing the sectarian violence between Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite Muslims. After Hussein’s overthrow in 2003, Iraq descended into a bloody war of apostasy between those two rival religious sects.
Iraq’s future
The utter instability of a post-Saddam Iraq raises important questions about US interventions in the Middle East. Was he a fascist dictator who threatened the global balance of power? And if so, why has Iraq been so unable to promote peace and cooperation between the country’s competing religious factions?
By studying Saddam’s life and beliefs, Western policy analysts can gain a better appreciation and understanding of how the Middle East actually works, rather than making inaccurate assumptions and costly errors.