Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein: The Tyrant Who First Built Iraq

In the 1970s the strongman of Baghdad ran electricity to nearly every city in Iraq, pushed literacy campaigns across the countryside, and collected an award from UNESCO for the regime's gains in public health. In March 1988 the same man's government dropped mustard gas and nerve agents on the Kurdish town of Halabja and killed between 3,200 and 5,000 civilians in a day. Both facts belong to one career, and any honest account of Saddam Hussein has to hold them at the same time.

The Fatherless Boy from al-Awja

He was born on 28 April 1937 in the village of al-Awja near Tikrit, into a Sunni Arab family and into immediate hardship. His father died before his birth; his mother sank into depression; the child was passed to an uncle. He eventually came to Baghdad to live with his uncle Khairallah Talfah, who became the father figure of his life and fed him a diet of anti-British nationalist stories that shaped everything afterwards.

Saddam attended a nationalist high school in the capital and started law, dropping out at twenty in 1957 to join the Ba'ath Party. Two years later he took part in the failed attempt to assassinate Iraq's leader Abdul-Karim Qasim and fled the country, spending the years from 1960 to 1963 in exile in Cairo, where he resumed his legal studies. He returned a trained conspirator with a law student's grasp of how institutions can be captured from inside.

The Strongman Who Built

The Ba'athist coup of 1968 put Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr in the presidency and Saddam in the vice-presidency, and it was quickly obvious which of the two ran the country. Through the 1970s he was the regime's operating system: the man who managed the security services, the party and the money.

In June 1972 he oversaw the nationalisation of Iraq's foreign-owned oil interests, putting the country's single great revenue source under state control. He spent the proceeds on the state. Electrification reached nearly every Iraqi city. Mass literacy programmes went into the villages. Public health improved enough for UNESCO to recognise it. For a decade Iraq looked like the Arab world's most convincing modernisation project, and the man building it was not yet president.

July 1979

That changed on 16 July 1979, when Saddam forced al-Bakr to resign and took the presidency himself. What followed was a purge of the Ba'ath Party's own leadership: twenty-two members were executed. It was a demonstration rather than a defensive measure — the point was to establish that proximity to Saddam conferred no protection whatever. It worked for twenty-four years.

Eight Years of War

In September 1980 he invaded Iran, casting himself as the shield of the Arabs against a revolutionary Shia state next door. The war ran until 1988 and consumed both economies. Total casualty estimates run from a million to twice that. Iraq emerged from it with no territorial gain and a mountain of foreign debt — the direct cause of everything that followed.

Anfal

The war's final year produced the crime that defines him. From 23 February to 6 September 1988, in eight distinct stages, the Iraqi state ran the Anfal campaign against its own Kurdish population — the name taken from the eighth chapter of the Quran. Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam's cousin, held near-presidential authority over northern Iraq from March 1987 to April 1989 and ran the operation through the combined military, intelligence and security apparatus.

Human Rights Watch documented the methods in its 1993 report: chemical weapons, mustard gas and nerve agents, used against civilians in dozens of villages; ground forces burning and demolishing some 2,000 villages afterwards; mass arrests and summary executions of non-combatants. Halabja, on 16 March 1988, was the single worst day. HRW's conservative estimate for Anfal as a whole was 50,000 Kurdish dead, and it noted the real figure might be double that. The organisation's legal conclusion was unambiguous: this was genocide, meeting the definition of intent to destroy a national or ethnic group as such.

Kuwait, Sanctions, and the End

Broke and cornered by war debt, Saddam invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990 and declared it Iraq's nineteenth governorate. A US-led coalition threw him out in February 1991. The Kurdish and Shia uprisings that followed the defeat were crushed with between 100,000 and 180,000 deaths.

Then came the long strangulation. UN sanctions cut Iraqi GDP from $44.36 billion in 1990 to $9 billion by 1995. Saddam answered with the 1993 Faith Campaign, grafting Islamic language and symbolism onto a nominally secular Ba'athist state to shore up his base. The US-led invasion of March 2003 ended the regime; he was captured that December, tried for crimes against humanity, convicted, and hanged on 30 December 2006.

Why Saddam Is Called a Genius

He was not one, and the word should be used about him only with the sharpest possible qualification. His reputation rests on conquest, terror and inherited advantage — the advantage of arriving at the top of a party that controlled a country floating on oil — rather than on intellect, and no serious historian has proposed otherwise. He wrote nothing of consequence. He founded no school of thought. His two great strategic decisions, the invasion of Iran in 1980 and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, were catastrophic misreadings that between them destroyed his country twice.

What he did possess, at a genuinely exceptional level, was a technical mastery of internal power: how to build a security apparatus, how to distribute fear so that no faction could coordinate against him, how to survive. He read Iraq's tribal and sectarian fault lines with precision and used them. The 1979 purge is the model — an act of calculated public terror aimed not at eliminating a threat but at pre-empting the possibility of one. Very few rulers in the twentieth century held absolute power for twenty-four years through two catastrophic wars, a crushing sanctions regime and repeated internal revolt. *The Economist* called him "one of the last of the 20th century's great dictators," and the word doing the work in that phrase is *dictators*.

There is a defensible case for calling the 1972 oil nationalisation and the development programme that followed a real feat of statecraft, and his Arab admirers still credit him with standing against Western and Israeli power. But it must be set against Human Rights Watch's estimate that his regime killed or disappeared between 250,000 and 290,000 Iraqis. Skill in seizing and holding power is not genius; it is a craft, and he was a master of the worst version of it.

Legacy

He took a country with electricity, rising literacy and the largest oil reserves in the Arab world, and left it with an economy reduced to a fifth of its 1990 size, a destroyed Kurdish countryside, and a body count Human Rights Watch counts in the hundreds of thousands. Historians classify him as authoritarian and, with some qualifications, totalitarian. Kurds mark Halabja every March. His name still functions in parts of the Arab world as shorthand for defiance of Western and Israeli power, and elsewhere as shorthand for what a modern police state can do to the people it governs. Both usages are drawing on the same man.

Achievements

• Prime Minister of Iraq (1994–2003)
• President of Iraq (1979–2003)
• Prime Minister of Iraq (1979–1991)
• Regional Secretary of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party (1989–2006)
• Order of Stara Planina
• Order of José Martí — 1978
• Order of Mubarak the Great
• Order of the Yugoslav Star
• Educated at Cairo University