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THE EXECUTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN
Saddam Hussein: 1937 - 2006
He governed through terror and torture
By Aamer Madhani
Published December 30, 2006
Over his 24 years as president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein earned the moniker Butcher of Baghdad by ruling with brute force, torture and cunning.
His regime murdered at least 300,000 of his countrymen, according to estimates by human-rights groups. During his reign, neighbors spied on each other and children were taught at school to tattle on their parents if they spoke against the regime. More than 1 million Iraqis were killed in wars against Iran, Kuwait and the United States on his watch.
Iraqis, by and large, say they suffered terribly at the hands of the dictator. But Hussein, 69, will also leave a legacy in his country and the Arab world as a sort of Mesopotamian revolutionary--a nationalist leader who stood up to the American superpower that deposed and later captured him.
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti came from nothing--a fatherless, poor boy who ascended from a small village to rule Iraq. He was cruel and arguably maniacal in his quest for power. His behavior, many of his biographers concluded, was that of a megalomaniac.
When the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division captured him hiding in a "spider hole" eight months after the fall of his regime, a haggard Hussein could hardly believe the American soldiers did not immediately recognize him.
"I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq," Hussein declared.
The moment of his capture on Dec. 13, 2003, underscored his monumental ego, rivaled only by his bravado. While he was in power, poets were ordered to write verse comparing Hussein to the Prophet Muhammad and artists were commissioned to paint regal portraits of the dictator that were nearly as common in public spaces as the Iraqi flag.
Hussein is also credited with writing several novels. His first told the story of a beneficent leader who sacrifices luxury for the sake of his people, while his last is the tale of a tribe living along the Euphrates River 1,500 years ago that repels foreign invaders from its land.
While he built garish, opulent palaces for himself and his family throughout the country in the 1980s, he mortgaged his country's wealth in that same decade on the Iran-Iraq war.
During his reign, speaking ill of Hussein or the regime was punishable by death. Baghdad cabdrivers feared him so much they avoided driving past the palaces because they didn't want to take risk angering Hussein or his associates.
Hussein was married, but he was rumored to have an insatiable desire for virgins, whom his henchmen would kidnap off the street. He was passionate about cigars, and Fidel Castro kept him stocked with Cuba's finest tobacco.
He intimidated his people, but he also feared them. During his last years in power, his public appearances were less frequent and he sometimes dispatched doubles to ceremonies in places where he thought he could be vulnerable to assassination. He rarely slept in the same location two nights in a row.
Hussein had created a cult of personality based on coercion, but he knew that occasionally he had to show benevolence.
He earned credibility on the Arab street through his support of thousands of displaced Palestinians he invited to live in Iraq. He ordered the building of mosques to curry favor with Islamic clerics. In the weeks before the U.S. invaded Iraq, he issued amnesty to tens of thousands of Iraqis imprisoned for various crimes.
String of atrocities
But Hussein's most horrific atrocities were the acts of brutality he meted out against fellow Iraqis. His henchmen amputated the tongues of those who criticized him. He ordered the systematic annihilation of tens of thousands of Kurds, including at least 5,000 in a notorious poison gas attack on the village of Halabja in 1988. Tens of thousands of Shiites were killed by forces loyal to Hussein during the uprisings in southern Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion in 1991.
The crime for which he was executed was the roundup and killings of dozens of Shiites in the village of Dujail in 1982 following a failed assassination attempt on Hussein there.
He and seven other members of the former regime stood trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.
In grim testimony, witnesses of the Dujail massacre recalled how Hussein's cronies, led by his half brother and former head of the secret police Barzan Ibrahim, tortured, imprisoned and humiliated hundreds of men, women and children. In all, 148 people died by execution or while under interrogation during the Dujail incident. Some 700 others were evicted from the village and cast off to live in the desert.
Hussein said in court that the executions were a lawful and necessary response to an assassination attempt on a head of state. Witnesses testified that the roundup was random and some of those taken in for questioning were children.
One of the tactics interrogators used on the Dujail victims was ripping their flesh by running them through a meat grinder, witnesses testified. One female witness described how she was stripped naked and sexually humiliated.
Hussein's confrontation with Iraqi justice marked the last chapter in an unlikely rise and fall.
Born into poverty
He was born April 28, 1937, to a poor family in the village of al-Awja, near the city of Tikrit. His father died before he was born, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, who was a father figure to the dictator and a sort of political mentor. Hussein later married Tulfah's daughter Sajida.
In 1957, he joined the Baath Party. That year Hussein was denied admission to the Baghdad Military Academy, a humiliating blow that was assuaged 19 years later when President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr promoted him to general.
Two years after joining the Baath Party, he was found complicit in a failed assassination attempt against President Abdul Karim Qasim, and Hussein was forced to flee to Egypt, where he spent the next four years in exile. He narrowly escaped Qasim's men, and he later told King Hussein of Jordan that he considered every day of his life after the incident a gift, according to Andrew and Patrick Cockburn's biography, "Out of the Ashes."
"I considered myself to die then," Hussein reportedly told the Jordanian king.
He returned to Iraq in 1963 after the country's first Baathist regime took power in a coup only to be deposed months later. In a second coup five years later, a faction inside the party overthrew the regime of President Abdul al-Rahman Aref. Al-Bakr, a relative of Hussein's, became president and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Hussein took charge of the nation's security apparatus.
On July 16, 1979, Hussein forced al-Bakr to retire and was sworn in as Iraq's president.
Soon after he assumed the presidency, Hussein embarked on a purge in which party members were accused of being involved in a Syrian plot to place Iraq under Syrian authority. The purge offered Hussein a chance to remove all potential rivals. Hundreds of top-ranking Baathists and army officers were executed.
Infamous meeting
During the trial over the Dujail killings, an Iraqi television station repeatedly aired grainy black-and-white footage of an infamous meeting early in Hussein's reign in which dozens of party members were accused of treason.
In the video, Hussein sits calmly smoking a cigar and drinking from a glass of water as the accused are removed from the room one by one for their indiscretions. As their colleagues are being called out, the party members are nervous--some sweating profusely, presumably worried that they could be the next to be removed.
When the purge is completed, the surviving members of the party stand, applaud wildly and praise their new president.
From his ascension to the presidency in 1979, Western governments--including the United States--recognized Hussein as a ruthless strongman, but someone they could do business with.
By late 1983, before U.S. special envoy Donald Rumsfeld made a visit to Baghdad to hold talks with Hussein, the U.S. had intelligence that Hussein had used nerve gas to thwart an Iranian offensive earlier that year.
Hussein would later order the use of chemical weapons on Iraq's Kurdish people as part of the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, in which some 180,000 people were killed. He used poison gas against his own citizens more than a half-century after the civilized world had concluded that chemical weapons were too inhumane to use even against enemies. Hussein was still being tried on genocide and other charges related to Anfal when he was hanged.
During the 1980s, the U.S. government and other Western powers tolerated Hussein because they had a common enemy in the Shiite theocracy that ruled Iran.
Hussein's regime and Iran became increasingly hostile over issues that included control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway and two small islands. In September 1980, Hussein launched an invasion, setting off an eight-year war that left at least 1 million Iraqis and Iranians dead. Through the war, the U.S. supported Iraq by providing satellite intelligence and refusing to sell the Iranian military spare parts for its mostly American-made weaponry.
Persian Gulf war
In August 1990, only two years after the war with Iran ended in a stalemate, Hussein's troops invaded another oil-rich neighbor, Kuwait. That act of aggression exhausted the U.S. government's patience with the Iraqi dictator.
The invasion was ostensibly spurred by the Kuwaiti government calling in loans that Iraq had taken to finance its war against Iran as well as accusations that the Kuwaitis were stealing oil from southern Iraq deposits through a method called slant drilling.
But Hussein might have taken the risk out of desperation--Iraq was ravaged by some $80 billion in debt from its war with Iran. Turning Kuwait into Iraq's 19th province, Hussein gambled, was an opportunity for him to refill his bare coffers.
President George H.W. Bush ordered Hussein to immediately withdraw from Kuwait, but the dictator refused. Soon the U.S. and its allies had about 660,000 troops assembled in the region, one of the largest gatherings of armed forces in history. Hussein exhorted his troops to prepare for victory in "the mother of all battles."
Even after Bush gave Hussein a deadline to pull his forces from Kuwait, the Iraqi leader behaved as if he still had the time and the opportunity to negotiate. U.S. pilots were perplexed to find the capital lit up like an amusement park when they flew in for the initial bombardment.
The air war went on for 37 days, and the ground war that followed lasted only 100 hours. Iraqi military resistance collapsed, but Bush chose not to send troops farther north to Baghdad to topple Hussein. In the years after the war, Bush came under criticism for failing to finish off Hussein--particularly from Shiites in southern Iraq who believed they had the White House's unequivocal support to overthrow him.
A week before the ground war began, Bush had called on "the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." Shiite leaders latched on to the statement as affirmation that the American military would come to their aid if they attempted to oust Hussein.
A Shiite uprising ignited in southern Iraq, but troops loyal to Hussein squashed the intifada in a bloody assault that left tens of thousands dead. U.S. troops never intervened.
Bush and his advisers feared the U.S. would lose its coalition if it moved beyond the stated aim of the war, which was accomplished by flushing Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. There was also a hesitance to risk more U.S. lives in an assault on Baghdad.
Many Iraqis, particularly Shiites, concluded that White House officials had determined they would rather have the secular Sunni Hussein in power than an unknown Shiite.
From 1991 to the end of Hussein's regime in April 2003, Iraq lived under paralyzing United Nations sanctions that turned the oil-rich country into a Middle East backwater. Iraq, which in the 1990s still had stockpiles of chemical weapons, biological weapons and long-range missiles, was forced to submit to UN monitoring to ensure that it was complying with a mandate to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S. created no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, establishing areas in which Iraqi aircraft were forbidden to fly. Oil sales were to be tightly controlled through a program monitored by the United Nations.
The UN oil-for-food program, however, was undermined by corruption, allowing Hussein and his cronies to siphon off billions of dollars through oil smuggling and kickbacks from those selling goods to Iraq and buying oil from the country.
Meanwhile, his people slid into deep poverty. UNICEF said the first eight years of sanctions may have been responsible for 500,000 deaths of children under 5.
During President Bill Clinton's eight years in office, the U.S. military launched several air strikes against locations that were suspected of being used by Hussein to build arms. And in 1998, Clinton articulated for the first time that regime change was the cornerstone of U.S. policy regarding Iraq.
The Iraq war
But it wasn't until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the U.S. truly focused on ousting Hussein. Soon after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, President George W. Bush and his administration suspected Hussein might have had a hand in the incident.
But the attacks proved to be the work of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and the U.S. went to war to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan that had long given bin Laden and his fighters refuge.
After the Taliban was ousted, the U.S. turned its focus on Hussein and Iraq. Bush insisted that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, including active programs to build chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
In his State of the Union address in January 2003, less than two months before the start of the war, Bush cited evidence that Iraq had attempted to buy weapons-grade uranium in Africa, underscoring the need to take swift action against Hussein.
