Saddam Hussein

A Time article two months before the invasion of Kuwait quoted Philip Robins, head of Middle East programs at the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, in his considered assessment of Saddam Hussein. Robins was respectful and studied in his judgment: “He is not driven by ideology or whim,” he stated. “He coldly calculates every move.”

A writer in The Economist after the invasion had a more graphic—and in the final analysis more accurate—opinion:

Mr. Hussein strides straight out of the 1930s, an old-fashioned dictator with old-fashioned instincts. He wields absolute personal power over a country of 17 million people. His formidable war machine, one million strong, has 6,000 tanks — more than twice as many as Britain and France put together — along with hundreds of modern aircraft and advanced chemical weapons. What he has, he uses. During the Gulf war he pounded Teheran... with ballistic missiles. He dropped cyanide gas on Iranian soldiers and also, at Halabja, on his own Kurdish dissidents. At home he murders political opponents, including over-successful generals. To break the spirit of Iraq’s 3.7 million Kurds he has systematically demolished thousands of villages and exiled their inhabitants to remote desert camps.

Saddam Hussein was 53 years old when he invaded Kuwait. He was born to what was described as a poor, landless peasant family near the town of Tikrit, on the Tigris River. His father, Hussein al-Majid, either died about the time Saddam was born or deserted his wife and children. His mother, Subha, married Ibrahim Hassan, with whom the boy’s relationship was marked by mutual dislike. His was a prototypical troubled childhood, but any animosities do not appear to have carried over from his youth. The Iraqi regime is a family business, with key positions of power held by members of the Hussein, Hassan and al-Majid clans and their allies — the "Tikrit Mafia."

Saddam did not start school until 1947, at age ten, when he went to live with a maternal uncle in Baghdad. The uncle, Kayrallah Tulfah, would later become mayor of Baghdad. He was a greedy, profoundly ignorant and xenophobic man. He had a few years previously been cashiered from the Iraqi army for participating in an attempted pro-Nazi coup attempt. This had been put down by the British, leaving him with an abiding hatred for “Imperialism” and other forms of interference with his violent instincts. He had a significant influence on the emotional and attitudinal development of his young charge. In 1981 the Iraqi government publishing house distributed a scholarly work written by Uncle Kayrallah entitled Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies.

Finishing middle school, Saddam’s grades weren’t good enough to get him into a military academy. Senator John Warner, of Virginia, in an interview shortly before the war reached the boiling point, wondered why Saddam, “a military man,” could not seem to comprehend the significance of the forces arrayed against him. But he wasn’t, in the final analysis, a military man; he was the Lord High Executioner, come to power.

Saddam’s official biography notes fondly his love of guns from the age of ten. But his military honors were self-conferred: in 1976 he had himself appointed lieutenant general, and in 1979 he had himself appointed field marshal. In this respect his career resembles more those of Uganda’s Idi Amin and Liberia’s Samuel Doe than that of a more respectable dictator such as, say, Francisco Franco. Emulating Hitler and Stalin, when war began with Iran he discovered he was a military genius and set about planning offensives that lost lives in droves. In common with most Presidents for Life, he confused carrying a gun with being a soldier.

Instead of the tedium and discipline of a military academy, Saddam entered the fascinating world of political intrigue, where his lack of hard skills was not a point against him. In 1956 he participated in an abortive coup against the monarchy in Baghdad. The next year, at the age of 20, he joined the Ba’ath Party, whose membership consisted of about 300 people in those days, many of them his relatives.

The Ba’ath have been described as similar to the Nazis, but lacking their warmth and human compassion. Their ideology is a form of fascism, born in the 1930s as an amalgam of ideas—some Nietzschean nihilism, a dash of the racism of H.S. Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg, a bit of Soviet-style statism, and a healthy dose of rabid nationalism. Ba’athism’s emphasis is not on the man but on the masses. In truly Orwellian style, its terminology is convoluted and in some cases semantically meaningless. Its Newspeak presents oppression as justice, tyranny as freedom, and death as the most valid expression of life. The ideal of “justice” is that of justice for the “Arab nation” over its “oppressors,” not for the individual inhabitants of its monolithic state; “freedom” translates into freedom of action for the state, not for the individual. Death itself becomes martyrdom in the cause of the advancement of Arab power, with the individual reduced to the status of a member of a faceless herd, the sacrifice of life a duty imposed.

Ba’athism is rather worse than the corporate states of Italy and post-Civil War Spain, perhaps not quite so horrible as Naziism itself. In common with all of these, it emphasizes a Leader who embodies the mystical spirit of the Nation, (in this case the Arab nation), a combination of race and culture. The Leader’s legitimacy was not dependent on any sort of popular vote or consent of the governed, but on “the forces of history.” Elections — if any — are held not to choose, but to confirm.

In 1958 a non-Ba’ath nationalist group led by General Abdul Karim Qassim finally did manage to overthrow King Faisal II. A year after that attempt the Ba’ath tried to seize power by machine-gunning Qassim’s car in broad daylight. Saddam was a member of the hit team. He had gained experience in such things by killing his brother-in-law, a Communist supporter of Qassim in Tikrit. Uncle Kayrallah had arranged the hit.

The way the official story goes, Saddam was seriously wounded in the attack on Qassim. Bleeding profusely, he ordered a comrade to dig the bullet out of his leg with a razor blade. He then disguised himself as a Bedouin, swam across the Tigris, and made his way to safety by crossing the desert to Syria. There is even a picture of him wearing his Bedouin costume.

The truth was rather less glamorous. According to Iraqi sources present at the time, Saddam’s role in the assassination attempt was minor. He was only lightly wounded, and that was inadvertently inflicted by his comrades. A sympathetic doctor treated him and others who were wounded at a safe house. The doctor was rewarded when the Party finally came to power in 1968 by being made dean of the Baghdad University Medical College.

Saddam did get to Syria, and from there to Egypt. Supported by a government stipend, he resumed his political activities. He married his uncle’s daughter, and somehow found time to finish high school by age 24. He was arrested twice by the indulgent Egyptians, but released both times. In one incident he threatened to kill a fellow Iraqi over political differences. In the other, he chased a terrified fellow Ba’ath member through the streets with a knife. He entered Cairo University’s law school in 1961, but again did not finish. He settled for an honorary degree in Baghdad in 1970, after the Party was in power.

When he was 26, Saddam returned to Iraq, to begin his rise in the Ba’ath Party ranks. The party had finally succeeded in overthrowing Qassim; they demonstrated the fact by abusing his corpse on television for several days. Saddam’s peculiar talents were needed. He began his rise to the top as an interrogator and torturer in a jail that had come to be referred to as Qasr-al-Nihayyah, the “Palace of the End.”

Family, and particularly dynastic marriage, was the mechanism by which Saddam Hussein rose to the top. General Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, the Party’s most respected military figure, was a cousin. Bakr’s son had married Saddam’s sister-in-law, and two of the general’s daughters married two of Saddam’s brothers-in-law. In 1965, when Bakr became secretary-general of the Party, Saddam was named his deputy.

Not all was smooth and effortless, however. The Ba’ath were driven from power in 1963, only nine months after seizing it, by Abdul Salem Aref, who had been the new regime’s figurehead president. Saddam was jailed in 1964, to escape in 1966. There he had time to brood on the mistakes of the Party and to plan. Emulating Uncle Kayrallah’s idol, he also wrote a book, called Our Struggle — in German the title would be Unser Kampf.

Upon Saddam’s escape, he set about building the internal security apparatus of the Ba’ath, making it answerable personally to himself. Aref suffered an untimely death in a helicopter crash — a common affliction of Iraqi politicians — and his brother Abdul Rahman Aref took over power. Aref lacked the inate viciousness needed to maintain his position in Iraqi politics. Two years later, in 1968, the Ba’ath again seized, and this time kept, power, apparently forever.

Uncle Bakr became president of the nation and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, the Iraqi version of a politburo. Saddam again became his uncle’s deputy, and was given charge of internal security, his particular field of expertise. A series of half-brothers, cousins, and other relatives became the backbone of the security apparatus.

Saddam rapidly and ruthlessly set about making himself indispensable. “Spies,” many of them Jewish, were rooted out and hanged in public. Dozens of people were executed as he personally put down a plot led by General Abdul-Hadi al-Rami. 44 people were hanged when another conspiracy was uncovered in 1970. At the same time, his family, immediate and extended, amassed wealth, as did their supporters. Uncle Kayrallah became so greedy as mayor of Baghdad that even Saddam was eventually forced to remove him.

In 1979, Uncle Bakr resigned as president, for reasons of health — he wanted to keep it. At the time, Syria and Iraq were in the midst of negotiations on unification, and the draft agreement would have made Uncle Bakr president of the united Arab country, Syria’s Hafez el-Assad vice president, and Saddam Hussein Number Three. Not demoting his nephew seemed to Uncle Bakr to be a good way to avoid helicopter accidents. Saddam took over and the union with Syria was quietly dropped in the massacres that followed.

On July 22nd, a week after assuming his new offices as president, party secretary-general, commander in chief, head of the government, and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Saddam met in congress with a thousand top Party cadres. The session was marked by dramatic, Stalinist-style public confessions and followed by a dramatic, Stalinist-style blood purge. Saddam is said to have wept openly at the confessions were read, which did nothing to deter the finality of the punishments handed out. The gathered party members formed the firing squads that did away with the first batch. At least 500 others, including a third of the Revolutionary Command Council, were executed in the days that followed, many of them by Saddam personally, no doubt weeping copiously.

Saddam Hussein as dictator saw Iraq both as a great country and as an extension of himself. He was very conscious that the Tigris and Euphrates valleys were the cradle of civilization, and he saw himself as the successor to Nebuchadnezzar, the Sargons, of Gilgamesh. “Our nation has a message,” he once proclaimed. “That is why it can never be an average nation. Throughout history our nation has either soared to the heights or fallen into the abyss through the envy, conspiracy and enmity of others.”  There was no room in such a view for reasons to be found in envy, machinations, or ineptitude of Iraqi leaders.

Saddam also saw the Iraqi treasury as an extension of his own. When the Gulf War started, the Kuwaitis commissioned an investigation into Iraq’s assets by Kroll Associates, a New York firm. Kroll detected $2.4 billion in Iraqi-controlled deposits, spread among some 50 banks, under the control of the Hussein family. These funds were administered by Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan. Between 1980 and 1990, around $10 billion had either been salted away in banks or used to buy shares of western companies. The funds controlled by Saddam account for about a tenth of that total, quite a substantial retirement account. The money came from skimming five percent of Iraq’s $200 billion annual oil earnings, from a 2.5 percent kickback on contracts with Japanese companies, and from a double-shuffle worked on letters of credit with other foreign contractors.

Saddam worked assiduously to build a cult of personality around himself. His picture and his statue are to be found everywhere in Iraq. His name is associated with hundreds of public works projects. There are Saddam housing complexes, for example, and eventually there was the “Saddam Line.”  When he took Kuwait, he named a part of it after himself. People clap, cheer, and kiss his hand or shoulders when he appears in public. They pour out their adulation in printed matter. Not to show enthusiasm or love for the Great Leader is to take one’s life into one’s own hands. Those disagreeable or disloyal could, depending on their station in life, die of poison, in helicopter crashes, or simply be arrested and tortured to death, their bodies returned to their families in sealed coffins.  Helping in the process was the secret police, and propping up the Leader was the Republican Guard.

It should be added in fairness that Saddam did proceed with the modernization of the country. Housing standards were improved, new roads were built, food was brought to the peoples’ tables, and illiteracy was cut to 11 percent, from 50 percent when he achieved power according to official estimates. Muslim strictures were relaxed and women were guaranteed equal pay for equal work. Like Mussolini before him, the dictator decreed modernization and it was done. The Iraqi street life we saw on television was more understandable to western eyes than was the strict religious society of the Saudis.

Such of Iraq’s oil money that didn’t flow into his pockets allowed Saddam to assemble the largest and best-equipped military machine in the Arab world. Much of its equipment and training was Soviet, some was French, some from other countries. A lot of it was first-rate.  In 1990 the Iraqi regime had an annual military budget of $12.9 billion, an average of $721 per Iraqi citizen— in a country where the average annual income is $1,950.

In 1980, Saddam decided to use his army to upset the regional balance of power by attacking Iran. After initial successes, the war settled down to grind on for eight long years. It eventually produced an estimated 120,000 Iraqi dead and 300,000 wounded. Militarily it achieved little, and Saddam in the end gave up his gains in exchange for Iranian neutrality when he invaded Kuwait. But the war did leave the Iranian army crippled and unable to contribute to fundamentalist expansion. It also left Iraq — meaning Saddam Hussein — with the largest and most experienced armed forces in the region, and with a reputation as a swashbuckler. Saddam “awakened the desire in every Arab soul for a glorious Arab stand,” as the Jordanian newspaper ad-Dustour admiringly put it.

The Saddam Hussein who emerges to western eyes is malevolent, but not particularly complicated. There is little subtlety, but there is a cold cunning behind his actions. To us he appears to be a boaster and a braggart. He demonstrated time and again his willingness to lie, quite baldly. His ruthlessness we found appalling — not only the cruelty of the totalitarian state, but cruelty for its own sake, for fun, the leadership style of Vlad the Impaler. Rounding it out was stupidity. The boasts could easily be proven hollow. The lies were proven false quickly, sometimes because the facts that were being stated were so absolutely opposite the conclusions. And the ruthlessness had the effect of cutting the heart out of his armed forces.

Overlaying all of these unpleasant characteristics was Saddam Hussein’s insularity. The dictator’s travels had been confined almost exclusively to the Arab world. His knowledge of the world beyond was superficial, and it was colored by his xenophobia and his own Ba’ath ideology. Saddam’s pride was rigid and overweening, the pride of a potentate rather than that of a statesman. His was the kind of pride of which the Greeks warned, which the early Church rightly defined as one of the deadly sins. It was an Achilles heel.

Saddam read the allies’ reactions as he would have read Arab reactions, but not all the allies were Arabs, and the center of the alliance was not Arab. Once he crossed the boundary of what was even remotely acceptable, even those which were Arabs saw immediate danger to themselves. Regardless of Pan-Arab rhetoric, they deferred to the heavier artillery simply as a matter of self-preservation. By consistently underestimating or misjudging the western nations at every turn, by viewing his own hatred as a virtue rather than as something to be controlled or overcome, Saddam Hussein managed to coldly miscalculate, as we shall see, his every move.