BAGHDAD, 15 December 2003 — Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was an unscrupulous and brutal leader, who had virtually no friends. Those with access to leadership circles in Baghdad spoke of his tendency to delusions of power and a burning desire to go down in history as a leader of great moment. His notion of “honor” was much more important to him than the prosperity of his own people.
Saddam rarely left Iraq and spent his last years in a world of unreality. He surrounded himself with submissive military leaders and politicians who did not dare utter the least criticism of his cruel leadership.
Anyone who brought the despotic head of state bad news ran the risk of paying for it with his life. As a result, no one in Iraq ever publicly questioned his decision to take on the military might of the coalition forces assembled against him by the United States.
Perpetual fear of assassination led Saddam to recruit several doubles to stand in for him at public engagements. The state-managed personality cult around him took on increasingly grotesque proportions as the years passed. His idealized portrait hung in front of every public building, and state-funded artists provided a never-ending supply of Saddam busts, statues and eulogies.
Iraqis stood in such fear of their leader and had absorbed the personality cult over decades to such an extent, that some of them paused to salute his statues even when they believed they were not being watched.
Born on May 28, 1937 in a village near the town of Tikrit, from where the great Islamic hero Saladin also hailed, Saddam was inclined to identify with this Kurdish leader who drove the Crusaders out of Jerusalem.
Born to a lowly farming family, Saddam, whose name means “the one who confronts” endured bullying as a boy and joined the then illegal Socialist Baath Party while still at school.
He is said to have carried out his first contract murder as a young man, and in 1959 he was part of a failed assassination attempt on Iraqi strongman Gen. Abdul-Karim Qassim.
When the Baath Party took power in the 1960s, he began his steady rise to power, eliminating his political rivals mercilessly. On occasion he would order the execution of fellow party members merely on suspicion of disloyalty. Initially he and the Socialist Baath Party maintained good relations with the Soviet Union, acquiring most of Iraq’s arms from that source. But during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War he sought and secured the increasing support of Washington.
Everything changed with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The West, which had barely protested at the use of poison gas on the Kurds in Halabja in northern Iraq, now referred to Saddam as the “Madman of Baghdad” and assembled a coalition to drive him out of Kuwait the following year.
The allies baulked at the thought of fighting all the way to Baghdad and held back from supporting the ensuing uprisings, fearing the country could fragment. Saddam was able to regroup his forces and put down the uprisings.
Throughout the 1990s, Iraqis lived under strict UN sanctions, but Saddam was able to increase his grip on power, making use of an intricate network of spies and overlapping secret services that kept the military under close surveillance. Under US-led pressure, he agreed to allow UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq in the autumn of last year, but when it became clear that the US and Britain were bent on toppling his regime he called for a “Holy War” to be fought by the army and all paramilitary forces against “the Mongols of our day”.
