Your ABC to understanding Saddam Hussain

Saddam Hussein is the most methodical Arab leader of the 20the century. He's organized, a daydreamer and had the following. He was popular.

Saddam spent 20 years creating a personality, an image for himself. The real Saddam has no ideology whatsoever. He is into realpolitik. He wanted to take Iraq into the 20the century. But if that meant eliminating 50 percent of the population of Iraq, he was willing to do it.

Saddam wanted to lead Iraq, make it a model for the Arab countries and then attract the rest of the Arab countries and become the sole Arab leader of modern times.

Saddam borrowed from Stalinism. He had his security people trained in Eastern Europe then brought them back to Iraq and taught them how to use the tribal linkage to eliminate people.

Therefore they used Stalinist methods to discover people who were opposed to the regime. After that came the tribal factor, when Saddam said "Don't get rid of Abdullah, get rid of his whole family, because one member of his family might assassinate us." That made it a perfect system for Iraq. It is practically foolproof.

He has a full library of books about Stalin. He reads about him, and when he was a young man, even before he attained any measure of power, he used to wander around the offices of the Baath Party telling people "Wait until I take over this country. I will make a Stalinist state out of it yet." People used to laugh him off. They shouldn't have. It was a very serious proposition indeed.

Saddam came from a very poor family, in a village called Al Awja, which is next to the town of Tikrit. As a young boy he had to steal so his family could eat. He stole eggs, and he stole chicken, things like that. He was illiterate until the age of 10. He heard that his cousin could read and write and demanded that he be afforded the same opportunity. After that he became a gunman with the Baath Party and he participated in the assassination attempt on late president Abdel-Karim Qassem, in 1959.

Whatever Saddam Hussein is, he is above all an organizer in a part of the world which hasn't seen much of that. This is why he actually shone when you compare him with other Arab leaders.

The great game played in the Middle East in 1959 was Arab nationalism under late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser who wanted to unite the Arab countries into one great nation, capable of being completely independent. Most of the Western powers were opposed to that. The Baath Party, to which Saddam belonged, believed in Arab unity as well.

The man who ran Iraq back then, the man Saddam tried to assassinate, Qassem, did not believe in that. Therefore Saddam and his crew tried to kill him. That was also why once Saddam escaped after the assassination attempt, he found refuge in Cairo, under Nasser's patronage.

That was the situation: The Arabs trying to unite while the West, the United States and Britain in particular, were opposed to this unity.

While he was in Cairo, there is some belief that he may have had contact with Americans, with the Central Intelligence Agency.

This should not be strange, because alliances of convenience were taking place every day, and the United States was afraid that Iraq, under Qassem, might be going communist. So was the Baath Party. So they had a common enemy, a common target, the possibility of a communist take-over of Iraq.

So there is a record of Saddam visiting the American embassy in Cairo frequently, and there is a record of the Egyptian security people telling him not to do that. However, one must remember that at that time, Saddam was a minor official of the Baath Party.

Saddam's visits to the American embassy had one purpose: to cooperate with the Americans towards the overthrow of Qassem who was slightly pro-communist.

Allen Dulles described Iraq as the most dangerous part of the earth in a congressional committee hearings. Yet Baath and the US did not have an alliance of permanent nature.

The US involvement in the coup against Qassem in Iraq in 1963 was substantial and evident in CIA contacts with army officers who were involved in the coup.

The coup took place in April, Saddam did not return to Iraq until May. But he went to work immediately. He became an interrogator in the communist Fellaheen (farmers) and Muthaqafeen (intellectuals) detention camps. In interrogating people in those camps, he used torture.

After the June 1967 Arab defeat facing Israel, the Soviets then looked to Baghdad in terms of gaining influence in the Middle East to replace the ailing Nasser.

The Baath Party also wanted to get back into power after it was curtailed by president Abdel-Salam Aref.

In 1968, Iraq had a weak president who was a follower of Nasser. But the 1967 defeat meant that whatever government was in power had to go. So the Baath saw an opportunity in this and they thought the time has come for them to take over the country again.

The background was extremely interesting. There were two things happening within Iraq at that time. They were developing their own oil and very close to giving the concessions for huge new oil fields, to the USSR and France.

The US did not want this to happen for it wanted the oil for American oil companies. The Baath arrived once again at some kind of an agreement of collaboration with the CIA. On the American side negotiating for both the oil and sulfer was a well-known personality, Robert Anderson, the former secretary of treasury under Eisenhower. He met secretly with the Baath and they agreed that if they took over power these concessions would be given to the US.

The US sponsored a successful Baath coup in 1968. This time Saddam Hussein played a key role. He was one of the people who donned a military uniform, though he's not a military man, and attacked the presidential palace and occupied it.

The president, being weak, surrendered immediately. Two weeks after they took over power on July 17 1968, there was what they call "the correction movement." That meant getting rid of the non-Baath elements in the coup, and Saddam was prominent in that. However, the communists were hardly thrown out and not long after, they turned to Saddam, and he personally lead a delegation to Moscow where there was a development of a relationship between the two.

But the Baath had commitments with the US. Saddam was not the president but the second man, after a relative of his from Tikrit, President Ahmed Bakr. The Baath needed help economically. They needed arms. The US were not in the business of openly supplying arms to Arab countries to re-equip themselves for another round of fighting with Israel.

That was the major issue between the two sides. Saddam knew he could get the arms from Russia.

In 1972, Iraq and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation. They wanted to seal the cooperation taking place between them in a formal alliance. The reason Saddam signed that treaty of friendship and cooperation was because that obligated the Iraqi communist party, which was very strong, to cooperate with the Baath Party, which was not so strong at that time.

Of course the Russians loved an opportunity to have a hold on Iraq and they signed the treaty and told the local communist party to join the Iraqi government. That alliance internally did not last very long.

But the external one was on and off for a very long time. And the Soviet Union at one point thought Iraq was a more important ally than Egypt for its army always acquitted itself better than the Egyptian army. It was a wealthy country that did not need a lot of aid, like Egypt and it was the gateway to the Gulf, to oil. It represented a more immediate threat to the West's lifeline than Egypt did.

In the early 1970s, Saddam started out controlling one small department called the Peasants Department; at that time the Baath regime, for a very brief period of time, was committed to installing a democratic system in Iraq. It was a bit of a dream. Came the time for them to assign the job of head of the security system, and no one from the inner circle wanted the job. Everybody said, "This is a dirty job. I don't want it." Young Saddam Hussein raised his hand, and said, "I want the job. I'll take over the security system."

He took over the security system, called it the Department of General Relations and proceeded to expand it. This was his first step towards attaining power.

The president at the time, Ahmed Bakr had been a general, and a very nice man. Quite a religious man too. Saddam was a relative of his. He surrendered everything to Saddam, because Saddam worked an 18-hour day.

In no time at all, Saddam was head of security, he was head of the Peasants Department, he was head of relations with the Kurds, he was head of the committee that controlled the oil. He was head of the committee that controlled relations with the Arab countries. He was head of the workers union.

There was a conflict between all these departments that Saddam controlled so tightly and the armed forces since the army was the one organization capable of overthrowing government. Saddam proceeded to emasculate the army and place his professional soldier relations from Tikrit in key positions.

For example, his brother-in-law became chief of staff of the army. And of course soon enough, like all people who are dictators, who are jealous of the army, he appointed himself general and eventually like Stalin he became field marshal.

Without any doubt everything Saddam did had Stalinist overtones. In particular, the reliance on the security system rather than the armed forces, the jealousy of the generals in the armed forces, the use of criminal elements within the country, and, incorporating them into the security system.

He had two qualities that put him ahead of his colleagues namely his ability to work an 18-hour day and a sense of organization. If you missed an appointment with Saddam by five minutes he would ask you why you were five minutes late. If you had an appointment with Saddam at three, you showed up at three. That was that. He is that organized. He is that methodical.

And perhaps another comparison to Stalin is his relationship with Bakr and, Stalin's relationship with Lenin.

Without any doubt there are similarities in the careers of Stalin and Saddam. Among other things, the major one is Stalin played second fiddle to Lenin for a long time. It was then Lenin became very suspicious of Stalin. Saddam did the same thing with Ahmed Hassan Bakr and towards the end, Ahmed Hassan Bakr became very suspicious of Saddam and wanted to get rid of him. But it was too late.

By then Saddam was in control of the whole country. And Bakr was shoved aside and replaced. Saddam became president in 1979.

On the even of his resignation, Bakr sent one of Saddam's close associates, Adnan Hussein to Syria.

Thirteen days later, Saddam discovered a coup attempt lead by Adnan Hussein. He publicly tried members of the Baath leadership and executed them. He also severed his relations with Syria for a decade to come.

When Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution toppled the Shah of Iran in 1979, Saddam was still Vice President. Shortly after, when he became president, he visited several Arab countries to consult them about his intentions to invade Iran to settle an old score: Taking the disputed border coastal area on the Arabian Gulf which Saddam had conceded to Iran in the Algeria Treaty in 1975 for he lacked the military might at the time.

Arab states that saw a threat of the Iran Islamists, encouraged Saddam to wage his war. In a visit to Jordan, Saddam reportedly met senior CIA officials who also supported his adventure.

During his war with Iran in 1980, Arab states supplied Saddam with the state-of-the-art Western weapons. Several Arab states also contributed to strengthening Saddam's position in the eyes of the West.

Meanwhile, Saddam was developing his Weapons of Mass Destruction Program with consent of the Western Power.

After a short draw back in his war with Khomeini, Saddam toppled the balance and started winning over the annihilated Iranian army. Khomeini abruptly ended the war in 1988 with Saddam seemingly coming out victorious.

All of a sudden he was sitting on top of a million-man tested army, unconventional weapons but he was broke, and restless. He became dangerous. He had to do something in order to survive.

This was followed by a series of incidents which led to a crisis, the discovery of the supergun, the discovery of the atomic triggers, Saddam threatening the American fleet in the Gulf and threatened burning Israel. He also started bullying his Gulf allies and Egypt. His growing power and the downfall of the Soviet Union which made the US an undisputed superpower, Washington reportedly reverted to the divide-and-conquer strategy. It urged Saddam to achieve an Iraqi old dream, invade Kuwait. Reports were revealed about talks between the last American ambassador in Iraq, April Galspy, and Saddam during which Glaspy confirmed to Saddam the US would not interfere in case his forces invade Kuwait.

He did and therefore gave the US the excuse it needed to station its forces in the Gulf, control oil and impose sanctions on the anti-Israeli Iraq. After a decade, the US saw the situation ripe for toppling Saddam and instating a regime, that is largely expected to be its puppet. (See Page 3)

References: Interview with Said Abu-Rish, an associate of Saddam during the 1970s. He wrote a book, Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge.