Saddam Hussein

Iraqi dictator whose 24-year presidency was marked by war, violence and bloodshed

Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, soldier and politician: born Al-Awja, Iraq 28 April 1937; Vice-Chairman, Revolutionary Command Council 1969-79; President of Iraq 1979-2003; married first 1963 Sajida Kharaillah (three daughters, and two sons deceased), second Samira Shabandar (one son), third Nedhal al Hamdani, fourth Iman Huweish; died Baghdad 30 December 2006.

During nearly a quarter of a century as President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein started an eight-year war against Iran, used chemical weapons against the Kurds of his country, threatened to develop biological and atomic weapons that would kill most of the people of the Middle East, invaded Kuwait, starting the first Gulf War, and defied the United Nations, setting the stage for the second Gulf War and the destruction of Iraq. His less publicised crimes included random execution, imprisonment and torture; and allowing members of his family and his relations to steal, rape and murder.

Saddam escaped the scrutiny of the world for over two decades, from the late 1950s when he was a thug and a gun for hire, through to the 1970s period of paranoid dictatorship. We finally got to know him in 1991 after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Surrounded by tribal relations and sycophants, he had become a case study of an out-of-touch megalomaniac.

Although Saddam's legacy was nothing but a trail of blood, many inside and outside Iraq predicted that a country divided between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Kurds, Turcomans, Assyrians, Yezedis, Turks, Iranians and other ethnic and religious groups would be torn apart by dissension without him. Iraq was seen as unstable and unmanageable without a strong central government run by a dictator. All plans by his Western enemies to introduce democracy were unrealistic, because they ignored the absence of a traditional Muslim government and the failure of British attempts to impose democracy on Iraq from outside in 1917, 1941 and later.

After 1991 and Saddam's first defeat, each political group vying for power in Iraq had a different agenda for guaranteeing Iraq's survival and solving its immediate social and economic problems. But, even with hatred for Saddam binding them together, it was difficult to convince them to place the interests of the country above petty jealousies and personal ambitions. I interviewed dozens of them while writing Saddam's biography. I found them feckless, corrupt and undemocratic.

Outside powers, the Americans and their allies, and Iraq's neighbours, had vested interests in establishing a new Iraqi government. Iran wanted to install an Islamic fundamentalist regime; Saudi Arabia rejected the idea of a Shia Iraq; the West wanted a benign, friendly regime to guarantee the flow and price of oil; and other Arab countries preferred a weak Iraq with no ambitions for regional hegemony. Under Saddam, each interested party knew it could not have its way and this made him, a known quantity, everybody's second choice. But, without Saddam, none of them has enough power to overwhelm the rest. The 1925 statement of King Faisal I that "in Iraq, there are no Iraqis" supported the need for a Saddam.

Saddam Hussein was born in the village of Al-Awja in the district of Tikrit in 1937, a few weeks after his father's death. He was brought up by his mother and a poor, cruel stepfather who treated him brutally. His unhappy childhood included stealing eggs and chickens so that his family might eat. Illiterate until the age of 10, he grew up with a craving for knowledge which never left him (until the invasion of Kuwait, he spent several hours a day reading, mostly the biographies of great men). He ran away from his mother's house to live with his maternal uncle Khairallah Tulfa, whose daughter he eventually married in 1963.

Tulfa responded to his nephew's pleas and sent him to school. But his education was patchy and he was never a worldly man or an accomplished diplomat. This showed whenever Saddam was confronted with new problems outside his personal experience. He would often revert to tribal instinct rather than judgement to solve them. This meant resorting to violence, which he used successfully to eliminate personal and political enemies but which proved less effective in dealing with the rest of the world. Saddam's violent ways were an extreme expression of a national trait found in the most frequently conquered piece of global real-estate.

Saddam came to power as a member of the Baath Arab Socialist Party, which was founded in Syria in the late 1940s. The party advocated moderate socialism and Arab unity and became a magnet for the frustrated educated classes during the 1950s and 1960s. To someone of Saddam's humble background, belonging to the Baath party was an honour. First in 1963 and later in 1968, he was among the right-wing Baathists who took over Iraq.

He became the second in command of the Baathist regime in 1969, aged only 32. The new Iraqi government was headed by his fellow Tikriti and distant relation General Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. A retiring, unmilitary figure, Bakr so depended on the energetic Saddam, a one-time party tough who in October 1959 had participated in an attempt to assassinate the country's leader, General Abdel Karim Kassem, that he allowed him to pre-empt him and run the country. In addition to toughness, Saddam was a master organiser who had caught the eye of the leader of the party, Michel Aflaq, when he was an exile in Damascus after the Kassem assassination attempt.

After 1968, Saddam organised the country's security apparatus and placed it under his personal control, in a Stalinist move which he adopted from reading about the life of the Communist dictator. He used the security system to undermine the army and eventually to achieve his personal ambitions. Bakr's belief in his Tikriti relation and the presence of Saddam's three younger half-brothers, Barzan, Watban and Sabawi, in key security positions protected him against political opponents and army plots. The army, never completely comfortable with outsiders, eyed Saddam with unconcealed disdain.

From then on, Iraqi politics was dominated by Saddam. Bakr depended on him to subdue all the forces opposed to the Baath party. Methodical, hard- working, violent and cruel, Saddam began by organising the elimination of all civilian and military leaders of the Baath who stood in his way. After securing his primacy within the party, he turned his attention to the various political groupings within the country, in particular the Communists and the Kurds.

In the 1970s Saddam used carrot-and-stick tactics to bolster his position and that of the party. He enticed many political groups into joining the government in its plans to modernise Iraq, but eventually turned against them when the opportunity presented itself. In 1975, he ended a Kurdish rebellion aimed at autonomy by striking a deal (the Algiers Agreement) with the Shah of Iran who, with the United States, had been sponsoring the Kurds to undermine Saddam. The Shah and America withheld help and the rebellion collapsed. In return, Saddam ceded some border areas and exclusive rights to control the Shat al-Arab waterway, the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers which separated the two countries. Later, after inviting the Communists to join the government, he turned against them and, despite protests from the Soviet Union, executed 18 of their leaders in 1978.

Saddam's notable achievements took place in the 1970s, while he was still vice-president, nominally Bakr's second-in-command but in reality already the strongman of the country. Although he had signed a treaty of friendship and co-operation with the Soviet Union in 1974, he was committed to pulling Iraq into the 20th century through the importation of Western technology.

Using his country's oil income constructively following the first oil shock of 1973, he devoted himself to long-term economic development plans and the building of an indigenous armament industry. He initiated one of the must successful programmes for the eradication of illiteracy of modern times. His other programmes included building housing for the poor, expanding the educational system and developing the petro-chemical industry.

It was the US which helped him with his efforts towards achieving self- sufficiency in small arms and entry into the field of unconventional weapons. The design for Saddam's first chemical warfare plant was provided by an American corporation with its headquarters in Rochester, New York, and the US government approved the transaction.

Saddam emphasised the human factor - having competent people capable of doing the work. He opened Iraq's doors to hundreds of Arab scientists and engineers. He used fellow Arabs to help build an armament industry and began a programme to master unconventional weapons. His repatriation of Arab talent from all over the world was known to the West, and the Western powers made no attempt to stop him.

He created a special directorate, the Committee for Strategic Planning, to oversee his acquisition of unconventional weapons, and claimed descent from the prophet Mohamed at the same time. He became the face of both modern and ancient Iraq. It was a case of power corrupting and he held absolute power in the country.

This was a turning point for him. From then on, his dictatorial savagery exceeded his contributions. The more he controlled, the more he wanted to control, but nobody has ever been close enough to him to explain why this happened. He was too coherent for this to have been an accident or an expression of neurosis, but it was a case of self-perpetuating megalomania. Time failed to reveal its origins.

In 1979, Saddam turned against Bakr and forced him to resign. When some members of the Baath party objected to his assumption of total power, Saddam set up a revolutionary court which accused them of "plotting against the Arab nation", tried them and sentenced them to death. Saddam and his close associates personally participated in the execution of 19 members of the Baath Party Command and the Politburo, what was known as the Revolutionary Command Council.

This was the beginning of a new era in Iraq. Consolidation of power and the cult of Saddam the Invincible took priority over economic achievements and building the army. He had an insatiable appetite for titles and acquired more of them as he went along. He presided over nine different security organisations, made himself field marshal and commander-in-chief of the armed forces and headed 42 different government departments. His personal behaviour and dependence on his tribe matched his acquisition of titles. He had his own food taster, coffee maker and brand of cigars and appointed members of his extended tribe to the most senior positions in the army and government.

Saddam built presidential palaces which used Argentine marble at a cost of $4,000 a square metre. His suits were made in Geneva and he owned more than 400 of them. He created a personality cult which grew to grotesque proportions. He began dressing up in the different costumes of Iraq's many ethnic groups, complete with headgear with bullet-proof lining.

Although his wife Sajida had produced two boys and three girls, Saddam still saw fit to take a second wife, a beautiful blonde by the name of Samira Shabandar who became the mother of his youngest son, Ali. He protected himself against assassination by making extensive use of doubles and there were occasions when they showed up at two different places at the same time. Even his wives and children started having doubles for protection.

After the fall of the Shah in 1979, Saddam's grip on power was challenged by a new regime in Iran headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Iranians appealed to their Iraqi co- religionists, the Shias, who make up 60 per cent of Iraq, to topple Saddam's secular government. Saddam's response was in character. Expecting to subdue Khomeini in a short time, he invaded Iran - not without a measure of support from the US and its Arab allies, notably Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The war lasted eight years and cost over half a million casualties. The outside powers manifested little interest in settling it - and in fact contributed to prolonging the conflict by supplying both sides with arms and training.

It is worth recalling that Saddam, who was subsequently demonised by America, relied on financial and logistical support from the US (the US granted him $6bn in loans and provided him with satellite pictures showing Iranian troop concentrations). However, the background of a West happy to watch Iraq and Iran destroy each other should not be used to lessen the importance of the war. It was one of the few wars of principle of modern times. Khomeini believed religion was supreme; Saddam put his faith in the nation state.

On the surface, Saddam won. But it was a hollow victory which left Iraq broke and unable to cope with the debts it had incurred during the fighting - an estimated $80bn. No longer endangered by Iran, the oil-rich Arab countries refused to help Saddam out of his financial predicament. The West, pro-Iraq and against Khomeini during the war, began worrying about Saddam's one-million-strong military machine.

Having ignored Saddam's frequent use of chemical weapons against the Iranians and Kurds, America and other countries decided to deny him the sophisticated equipment required to continue his extensive unconventional weapons programme, in particular his plans to build an atomic bomb. Suddenly, the adopted Saddam became an embarrassing relation. Instead of saving the Iraqi regime, the West froze all lines of financial credit. Pressed and unable to provide his people with the fruits of victory, Saddam became convinced that Kuwait was spearheading a US-backed conspiracy aimed at overthrowing him. He directed his frustration towards the oil-rich sheikhdom and its oil policies.

Negotiations between Saddam and the Kuwaitis to settle the issue of oil over-production were unsuccessful. There is some evidence that America under President George Bush was encouraging Kuwait to continue its anti-Saddam oil policy. Saddam reacted to this in a tribal way - he considered it a personal affront. He became obsessed with Kuwait and determined to teach it a lesson. After Arab attempts to reconcile the two sides failed, Saddam used the old Iraqi claim to the sheikhdom and on 2 August 1990 invaded Kuwait.

The UN and the Arab League refused to accept the occupation of a sovereign state and adopted resolutions aimed at reversing it. The result was an anti-Saddam coalition which included a number of Arab countries. The Gulf War started on 15 January 1991. All attempts to settle the issue peacefully were met with Saddam's lack of diplomatic skills and Bedouin stubbornness. Iraq was defeated in three days and Saddam signed a ceasefire agreement which imposed trade sanctions on his country until UN resolutions requiring that Iraq rid itself of weapons of mass destruction were met and until it was no longer a threat to its neighbours.

The period after 1991 was marked by disagreements regarding the true meaning of the UN resolutions governing the articles of the ceasefire and whether Iraq had complied with them. Officially, the embargo on Iraq had allowed it to sell only a limited amount of oil under UN supervision to buy food and medicine. For two years, Saddam would not accept the principle of outsiders' controlling Iraq's relations with the rest of the world. He persisted in his attempts to circumvent the resolutions, continued to oppress his people, maintained his unconventional weapons capability and menaced his neighbours.

Meanwhile, the old coalition which had ejected Saddam from Kuwait fractured and there were divisions within and outside the UN as to how to handle the Iraqi problem. The number of countries refusing to subscribe to the UN embargo against Iraq increased by the day. Of overriding importance were the conditions of misery resulting from the sanctions - hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children, died of malnutrition and starvation. And the UN steadfastly refused to investigate the use of depleted uranium against Iraq while doing the opposite in the former Yugoslavia, where a much smaller tonnage was used.

Only the US and the UK and the Iraqi opposition in exile were consistent in asking for the removal of Saddam and in attributing Iraq's problems to his personal rule and behaviour. They accused him of using Iraq's reduced income to favour his security services and the Republican Guard, the two organisations which protected him. They rightly pointed out the murderous ways of his sons and relatives. They scoffed at his third marriage, which took place in 1993 at a time when the average Iraqi's calorific intake was lower than that in Bangladesh. They issued lists of Tikritis in the Iraqi army and accused some of them of using chemical weapons against Iraqi citizens.

While most of these accusations were true, the two countries did not have the mandate or the forces to invade and occupy Iraq. Moreover, the Iraqi opposition's attempts to instigate an anti-Saddam rebellion within Iraq failed to materialise. Most other countries wanted Iraq and Saddam readmitted to the international community of nations. More importantly, Saddam's popularity among non-Iraqi Arabs soared. Many saw him as another Saladin standing up to the infidel West. They did not suffer under his security system.

After he became President, Saddam's ephemeral subscription to ideology had given way to a preoccupation with survival and he had ignored the Baath party and become more and more dependent on members of his family. Incredibly this transfer of power went unanswered by Saddam's opponents and the US.

Their plans focused on replacing Saddam through undermining his position within the Baath party, when using family feuds might have led to his downfall. In 1995, tension within the family was exposed when Saddam's semi-literate sons-in-law Ali and Saddam Kamel defected to Jordan after his eldest son, Uday, threatened to kill them. They foolishly returned to Iraq after a safe-conduct promise by Saddam. Later, the brothers were executed on Saddam's personal orders; their wives, Saddam's daughters, were not seen until they reappeared in Jordan in early 2004.

His successful handling of internal opposition and army plotters encouraged Saddam to use similar methods with foreign powers and the UN. From 1991 until 1998, he conducted a remarkable on-and-off confrontation with Unscom (the UN Special Commission), the body entrusted with dismantling and eliminating his unconventional weapons in accordance with resolutions adopted in 1990-91. The face that Saddam showed Unscom, absurd and misleading, preoccupied the world while Saddam turned on his internal enemies with a vengeance. Old politicians disappeared, Shia clerics were assassinated, dozens of army officers were executed and the number of Saddam lookalikes multiplied.

But all this changed in 2000, upon the election of George W. Bush as US President. The new administration, conservative, pro-Israeli and responsive to the Christian right, committed itself to the removal of Saddam from the very start. Unable to create a crisis to justify attacking Iraq, Washington kept up the fiction that opposition groups were capable of replacing one of the most tightly organised security systems in the world.

Using the Iraqi Liberation Act, a special presidential order designed to demonise Saddam, it also allowed the US government to fund Saddam's opponents to the tune of $96m. However, according to a US State Department officer in the know, the Iraqi opposition failed to account for half of the money America gave them. Not only that, but America spent more time on keeping the Iraqi opposition united than on trying to overthrow Saddam.

It was the vileness of 11 September 2001 which gave the US and Britain the excuse they needed to confront Saddam. The government which designed modern Iraq but could not make it work and oil-thirsty America's reaction to the indignity of failing to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden came together and the two countries nominated Saddam as bin Laden's proxy. Saddam's secularism did not stand in the way. Although convincing evidence was lacking, both governments insisted on promoting the idea of Saddam-for-bin-Laden.

A UN Security Council resolution demanded the return of Unscom to Iraq and Saddam's acceptance of all previous UN resolutions. It was an open-ended mandate to corner Saddam. The Iraqi dictator accepted the new reality born out of 11 September and allowed Unscom back into Iraq, providing them with unencumbered access. The US and the UK reacted by raising their demands, accused Saddam of new crimes against humanity and violations of UN resolutions and called for an invasion of Iraq.

On 20 March 2003 American, British and 15,000 soldiers from other countries began a huge military assault on Iraq using bases in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait. The Iraqi army collapsed after token resistance and Baghdad fell on 9 April. Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed by American troops in July. Finally, in December, Saddam Hussein himself - thin, bearded and dishevelled - was captured near his home town of Tikrit.

In July 2004, Saddam was led in chains to the Iraqi Special Tribunal in Baghdad, set up to try Iraqi nationals and residents for atrocities. In a speech to the court, he denounced Kuwaiti "dogs", claimed that "everyone knows that Kuwait is part of Iraq" and declared, "This is all a theatre. The real criminal is Bush." The first of several projected trials began in 2005, and as it proceeded, lawyers, witnesses and others connected with the trial were intimidated and assassinated, and judges came and went; Saddam repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the court.

On 5 November, Saddam Hussein was convicted of charges relating to the deaths of 148 people from the Shia community in Dujail in 1982, and was sentenced to be "hanged until he is dead for crimes against humanity".

Said Aburish