![]() In 1990, just three years after the costly Iran-Iraq war ground to a halt, Saddam, having built up one of the largest militaries in the region, decided to resolve tensions with Kuwait over oil rights and boundary lines by invading. In 1980, Saddam ordered the invasion of a southern province of Iran, sparking an eight-year war of attrition that ended in stalemate and the deaths of more than a million on both sides.Įven if Washington was happy to see Khomeini's Iran bogged down in a proxy war with Saddam's forces, the Iraqi dictator quickly disabused anyone who believed that he was the strongman to guarantee Middle East stability. When the Ayatollah became the supreme leader of Iran's Islamic revolutionary government in 1979, a clash was inevitable. Saddam did not make it a comfortable stay and Khomeini moved on to exile in Europe. But he was also an enemy of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian cleric who had fled the Shah's persecution and sought refuge in Iraq's holy Shi'a city of Najaf in 1965. Certainly, he and Assad's regime in Damascus were not friendly, despite the political genetics that linked their ruling parties. In a single day, he had 68 Baath Party members arrested for disloyalty, 22 of whom were later hanged for treason.Īs much as he knew how to manipulate power in Iraq through propaganda and government-sponsored terror, he was inept at international relations and diplomacy. ![]() Al-Bakr was thrust out of office and Saddam assumed the presidency. However, in 1979, when Al-Bakr proposed a federation with the neighboring Baathist regime of Syria, an agreement in which Syrian President Hafez Assad would become the heir apparent to a united Syria-Iraqi Baathist republic, Saddam acted. He also was instrumental in building up the Baath Party's all-pervasive network of informants to ensure loyalty and warn of coup plots. He modernized the health system and helped al-Bakr mastermind the nationalization of Iraq's oil resources, seizing petroleum rights from international companies. He launched a popular literacy campaign across Iraq and made education more accessible. When the Baath Party took power in Iraq in 1968, Saddam was named Vice President to the aging General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and spent the next 11 years mastering the way the regime worked and consolidating his own power and popular support. The American spy agency was backing the Baathists at the time. Saddam escaped Iraq with a gunshot wound in the leg and spent the next six years in exile in Cairo where he had contacts with the CIA. Two years later, at the age of 22, Saddam was part of a Baathist plot to assassinate General Abdul Karim Kassem, who had overthrown the monarchy of King Faisal II a year before. Saddam joined the pan-Arab nationalist Baath Party in 1957. It may have influenced his mother's choice of a name for the child: Saddam means "he who confronts." He was raised alternately by his mother and his uncle, a fervent Iraqi nationalist and an early supporter of the Iraqi Baath party who had an early ideological influence on the ambitious young Saddam. Saddam never knew his father, a shepherd, who disappeared six months before he was born. The man who saw himself as a modern heir to Mesopotamian kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi was born on April 28, 1937, on the banks of the Tigris in the hardscrabble village of Owja, just south of Tikrit. Webguide The Final Days of Saddam Hussein Rights Groups Concerned Over Saddam Trial ≚ Slain Saddam Trial Lawyer's Final Interview Verdict Closes a Grim Trial Full of Theatrics Saddam Is Sentenced to Death, and Iraq Shrugs ![]() The Trial and Execution of Saddam Hussein Was this the same man who had been beamed into Iraqi living rooms for hours on end, delivering speeches in a pressed uniform, his hair smartly dyed black, his mustache full and neat? Was this the man who took on Iran? The man who lobbed rockets at Israel and threatened the President of the United States? Was this the man the country's composers wrote songs for? At that moment, all the artifice and cunning Saddam had invested in his 24 years at the levers of power fell away and the shepherd's son who had his name stamped on the bricks at Babylon was shown to be that last and most pathetic thing every dictator who lives long enough inevitably becomes: a frightened old man, totally alone. It reminded him of a trader checking the teeth of a new donkey, he said. I watched these scenes unfold in Baghdad with my friend Omar, who chuckled when he saw a doctor shining a flashlight in Saddam's open mouth. There he was, shown on television, dirt smeared on his face, his beard unkempt, his thick head of hair matted and graying. No one in Iraq had ever seen him more vulnerable. forces, hiding in a hole on a relative's farm outside his hometown of Tikrit. Follow Hussein may have lost his life today. ![]()
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