Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2007, pages 30-31, 33

Special Report

Requiem for Saddam Hussain

By Richard H. Curtiss

THE FIFTH TOUR of my foreign service career was spent partly in Washington, DC and partly in Beirut studying Arabic. Two instructors had collaborated on designing a course to examine the several ideologies prevalent in the Middle East at that time.

My memory is that virtually all of the 15 students agreed that if they were Arabs, they would all be Ba’athists. The party called for unity, freedom and socialism—all of which were extremely appealing to people throughout the Arab world. So what happened to make the Ba’ath Party repulsive in real life? In this writer’s opinion, it was Saddam Hussain who so distorted his party’s goals that he transformed himself into the monster he became.

But let’s start at the beginning. Saddam was born on April 28, 1937, in the town of al-Awja, about 10 miles from the town of Tikrit. His father disappeared six months before he was born. Saddam was raised by an uncle in Tikrit. When his mother remarried he was brought home, but his stepfather was abusive. Saddam found this life intolerable, and went to live with his uncle Tulfah in Baghdad.

Saddam went on to study law, supporting himself by teaching secondary school in Baghdad. In 1957 he joined the Ba’ath Party, co-founded by Michel Aflaq, a Christian whose mother may or may not have been Jewish, and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Muslim, who were both based in Syria. This was in the era of Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, who, in 1956, had nationalized the Suez Canal. All of this was a strong influence in the life of Saddam Hussain.

One year after Saddam joined the Ba’ath Party a group of Iraqi officers overthrew the pro-Western democracy of King Faisal II, killing the monarch’s family and an extremely influential longtime army officer, Nuri al-Said. While the Ba’athists supported the coup, they soon realized that its new leader, Abd al-Karim Qasim, did not seem to plan on sharing power with the Ba’athists.

As a result, Saddam Hussain was deeply involved in a 1959 assassination attempt against Qasim. The attempt failed and Saddam was wounded. According to legend, he dug a bullet out of his arm as he escaped to Syria. There Saddam sought to enroll at Damascus University, but its president turned down his application. Saddam argued that he was, as he put it, “connected” to Nasser, to which the university president replied, “Then let him accept you at Cairo University.”

Saddam then went to Egypt. While there, he was sentenced to death in absentia in Iraq. Saddam was acquiring the reputation of a political brawler—a reputation he never sought to alter. Eventually Qasim was overthrown in a bloody 1963 coup, and Saddam returned to Baghdad. The new Iraqi president, Abdul Salam Aref, was a Nasserite. After he was killed in a helicopter accident during a characteristically sudden dust storm, his brother, Abdul Rahman Aref, also a Nasserite, took over and continued in his brother’s stead.

In 1968 the Ba’athists overthrew Abdul Rahman Aref and appointed Ahmad Hasan al Bakr as president. Al-Bakr was a cousin of Saddam Hussain, and the protégé of Ba’ath co-founder Aflaq. In 1969 Aflaq visited Baghdad, eventually moving there from his base in Damascus.

Saddam was rewarded for his 11 years of underground activity with the post of vice president and the deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. President Al-Bakr became only a figurehead, and it was clear that Saddam was Iraq’s de facto ruler. He finally assumed full power in July, 1979.

A decade earlier the British Embassy in Baghdad had reported that Saddam was a “presentable young man” and indicated that it would be possible to do business with him. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs Alfred L. Atherton described Saddam as “rather a remarkable person,” adding that “he is running the show; ….and he’s very ruthless…and pragmatic.”

Shortly before I retired from the U.S. foreign service I visited Iraq to see if it was possible to reopen a U.S. information office which had been closed since the 1967 war. The U.S. Embassy had been a small but very modern new building which the Iraqi government had expropriated, and had become a training institute for the Iraqi foreign service. After going through heavy Iraqi security I was ushered into an office only two doors down from where I once worked. I had been warned that anything I said would be listened to on hidden recorders elsewhere in the building.

I recognized my host as a once very junior officer who spoke English very well. I had been told to be careful about what I said, however, and I could see that he did not want me to say anything personal. During our conversation I twice made personal references to the past, and each time he carefully ignored them. When I left him I went back to the current small American Embassy and reported that the time clearly was not ripe for an increase of American staff.

Saddam gave Iraqis a booming economy in the 1970s, investing heavily in Iraq’s oil industry. While Iraqis were busy making money, he was building a power base in the Iraqi army and security services to prevent a coup from toppling his regime.

Saddam launched a “national campaign to eradicate illiteracy,” offering free schooling to Iraqi children. He supported families of soldiers, granting free hospitalization and gave long-term no interest subsidies to farmers wanting to improve their agricultural output.

Agriculture doubled under Saddam’s orders from 1974-75. Social services were arguably the finest in the Arab world, an achievement recognized by the United Nations. The Iraqi leader also built roads and brought electricity, along with clean drinking water, to remote parts of the country. He was building up the Iraqi middle class and attracting foreign investment. Saddam continued to send thousands of Iraqis to study abroad in excellent schools in North America and Europe. Many of them returned as highly skilled engineers, doctors, professors, artists and scientists.

In Iraq, women were being appointed to senior positions in the government and the judiciary. Saddam also created a legal system in Iraq that was not governed by Islamic shariah law.

These were the most prosperous days in Iraq’s modern history. Meanwhile, in 1978, Al-Bakr negotiated a union with Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad. This was in response to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s signing of a peace treaty with Israel the previous year, a development that appalled Assad, Bakr and Saddam. The treaty also called for Bakr to become president and Syrian President Assad to become his deputy. This seemed to leave no position for Saddam Hussain.

Saddam acted precipitately, forcing Bakr to resign, “because of bad health,” and assumed presidential powers on July 16, 1979. On July 22, Saddam assembled members of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party for a dramatic meeting, which he insisted on videotaping. He accused 68 individuals of being spies loyal to the Syrian Ba’ath. He read out their names and 22 of them were executed for treason.

From that shocking incident onward Saddam became a single-minded tyrant. In October 1978 Saddam expelled from Iraq Iran’s exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The ayatollah had spent 15 years in the Shi’i holy city of Najaf, where he was in the underground. His expulsion from Iraq worked to Khomeini’s advantage, however, because his new Paris base afforded him much more publicity and he was better able to lead the revolution against the shah from there.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fell only four months later, in 1979. Syria’s Assad regarded Khomeini’s Iran as a friend and a potential ally for the Arabs. The real threat, Assad told intermediaries, was not Iran, but Israel. On Sept. 22, 1980, however, based on erroneous reports of Iranian weakness, Saddam Hussain invaded Iran.

The ostensible reason for the war was to restore the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which Iraq had ceded to the shah during a period of weakness in 1965. Fearing Iran’s growing influence, the Persian Gulf states supported Saddam with money and arms. This senseless war cost the lives of 340,000 Iraqis and 730,000 Iranians.

Saddam’s Kurdish Problem

The Kurds were another serious problem for Saddam Hussain. While fighting in the Kurdish town of Halabja on March 16, 1988, Iraqi troops allegedly used a mixture of mustard gas and other nerve agents, killing an estimated 5,000 civilians. More gas attacks followed by Iraqis and Iranians.

Saddam turned the Iraq-Iran conflict into an Arab-Iranian conflict. The Arabian Gulf states, anxious to weaken Iran, did not press Khomeini too far. Instead, they let Saddam take the lead.

After I retired, I returned to Baghdad several times, once with my wife. In the lobby of our hotel we saw an old friend who had once been the editor of the local English-language paper. He was attending a poetry symposium. We had been warned not to initiate conversations, so we said nothing as he walked by. But later he slipped back to say, “It is a very difficult time now for all Iraqis. I cannot say more.” Each time I returned to Iraq, Saddam’s restrictions had become more onerous.

Saddam allied himself with both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, signing an aid pact with Moscow in 1972. He also signed a treaty with France and created business ties in Paris. He began Iraq’s nuclear enrichment project with French support, with the French experimental reactor. That reactor, however, was eventually destroyed by an Israeli air strike, and never replaced.

Prior to the latest U.S.-led invasion, Saddam’s biggest clash with the West came during his invasion and occupation of Kuwait, in August 1990. It was precipitated when Saddam called on Kuwait to cancel most of the $30 billion debt Iraq had accumulated during the Iran-Iraq war, claiming that he had saved the Gulf countries from domination. Kuwait refused, and Iraqi forces entered the country.

The United States assembled some 30 nations into a coalition that liberated Kuwait after an occupation that had lasted seven months. When Saddam’s forces tried to flee they were cut off. The U.S. claims that 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed. Thousands of other Iraqis surrendered and eventually were released.

Washington hoped that, as a result of Saddam’s miscalculation, Shi’i Iraqis in the south and Kurds in the north would rebel. But the U.S. declined to intervene, and in 1991 Saddam’s soldiers killed 30,000 Iraqi Shi’i.

Later two of Saddam’s daughters, Rana and Raghad, along with their husbands, both cousins of Saddam, fled to Jordan. One of them, Husayn Kamel al-Majid, had been Iraq’s minister of military industries during the time U.N. weapons inspectors were searching for weapons of mass destruction. Saddam’s son-in-law offered his services and testimony to the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Saddam later offered amnesty to his two sons-in-law. When they returned to Iraq, however, his security police killed them.

When the United States and Iraq completed the first war crimes trial for 148 Shi’i deaths in Dujail the wheels were set in motion for Saddam’s execution on Dec. 30, 2006. Now the second of those trials of Saddam’s co-defendants is well under way, involving the deaths, some by poison gas, of thousands of Kurds. The evidence lies in unmarked Kurdish graves in many parts of Iraq. Any doubts concerning the large scale of Saddam’s crimes will soon be answered. Presumably more war crimes trials will follow, perhaps continuing for many years.

It will always be remembered that Saddam Hussain took care of a large number of Palestinians in Iraq and in Palestine itself. Unfortunately, however, the enormity of his crimes and the hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s victims cannot be forgiven or forgotten.

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

< Prev		Next >