Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (born April 28, 1937) has been the President of Iraq since 1979, Prime Minister, 1979-1991 and1994 onwards.
He was born in the village of Al-Auja, in the Tikrit District of Iraq, to a family of sheep-herders. He never knew his father, Hussein al-Magid, who died or disappeared before Saddam was born. His mother, Subha Tulfan al-Mussallat, remarried, and Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly, and forced young Saddam to steal for him.
At the age of 10, Hussein moved to Baghdad to live with his uncle, Khayrallah Tulfah. He joined the Ba'ath Party and in 1956, he took part in an unsuccessful coup attempt against Faysal II of Iraq. In 1958, a non-Baathist group led by General Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew the king. In 1959, following an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Qassim, Hussein fled to Egypt by way of Syria and was sentenced to death in absentia.
He received some of his higher education at the University of Cairo law school. On his return to Iraq following the 14th of Ramadhan revolution (February 8, 1963) he was imprisoned in 1964 following a change in power, but escaped from jail in 1967. In 1968 he helped lead the successful and non-violent Ba'athist coup. He also gained a degree in law from the University of Baghdad in 1968. He was vice-chairman of the Revolution Command Council from 1968 and was appointed a General in the Iraqi armed forces in 1973. In 1979 the President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr announced his retirement (aged 42) and Saddam Hussein gained the posts of Chairman and President.
A Baathist who dreams of unifying the Arab World as a single modern state, Hussein on June 1, 1972, he led the process of nationalizing western oil companies which had had a monopoly on Iraq's oil. Hussein actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy, urging the construction of various developed industries and following their administration and execution. He also supervised the modernization of the Iraqi countryside, the mechanization of agriculture and the distribution of land to farmers. He affected a comprehensive revolution in energy industries as well as in public services such as transport and education. He also initiated and led the National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy and the implementation of Compulsory Free Education in Iraq.
Hussein, to the consternation of Islamic fundamentalists and the Islamic Republic of Iran, liberated women and offered them high level government and industry jobs. The Baathist government provided social services to Iraqi people unprecedented in other Middle Eastern country. Under Hussein’s auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels, supported families of soldiers killed in war; granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Earlier, Hussein’s government had broken up the large landholdings in the first place and redistributed land to peasant farmers.
Iraq is a highly fragmented society. Hussein’s authoritarian rule has kept the lid on pervasive tribal, class, religious, factional, and ethnic conflicts, and destabilizing forces externally, such as hostile powers like Iran and the United States. The cost, though, has been one of the more autocratic of the Middle East’s many autocracies. Islamic fundamentalists (suppressed through classic carrot and stick tactics and co-optation and coercion) tended to reject the direction in which he had been leading the country. And the region’s traditional aristocracies, both Sunni and Shiite (the kinds of aristocracies that still rule the other Arab Persian Gulf states with an iron grip), rejected the populist nature of his policies which have undermined and largely eroded aristocratic privilege. In short, large segments of Iraq’s population tended to reject modernization even though it has dramatically raised living standards in the aggregate. The secular and socialistic nature of his government thus explains his authoritarian rule.
But it also explains Iraq's impressive human development, at least before the 12 years of bombings and sanctions after the Gulf War. Since the nationalization of oil fields and refineries, electricity has been brought to nearly everyone in Iraq, including those in far outlying areas. The government has made great progress in building roads, establishing mechanized agriculture on a large scale, promoting mining and other industries diversify the oil-dependent economy.
Iraq is the only country in the Persian Gulf region not to be ruled according to Islamic law. Hussein provided both Arab and Western style banking systems to give the people a choice between these interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing accounts, created a fair, western style legal system, and abolished the old Mosaic law courts except for personal injury, small court claims.
Because of the Iraqi regime’s modernizing nature under Hussein, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran threatened to divert Iraq from this progressive path of development. After all, Shiites, many of whom were sympathetic to Iran’s Ayatollahs, accounted for the majority of Iraq’s population. The pretext for the bloody, protracted Iran-Iraq War was a territorial dispute, but most attribute the war as an attempt by Hussein, supported by both the US and the USSR, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansionism of radical Iranian-style revolution. And though the war was a stalemate, Islamic Revolution would not spread and Iraq would not be diverted from its modernizing path.
The war with Iran left Iraq bankrupt. Faced with rebuilding its infrastructure destroyed in the war, Iraq needed money. No country would loan it money except the U.S. Borrowing money from the U.S. made Iraq its client state. The costs of the Iran-Iraq War would later explain Iraq’s confrontation with Kuwait and the United States.
Iraq has always been hostile to Kuwait because Kuwait was created by the British from land that was originally part of Iraq and Hussein needed the seaport Kuwait occupied. Kuwait had already offered its seaport to Iraq, and it was using Iraq's fleet of oil tankers to transport its own oil abroad, as were many other oil countries. This gave them an indigenous industry, independent of outside European and American tankers which demanded higher fees. Thus Kuwait and Iraq were in the oil tanker business together, Iraq furnishing the tankers, Kuwait furnishing the port.
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because Kuwait was illegally slant-drilling across the border, removing Iraq's underground oil. In 1990 Saddam Hussein complained to the US State Department about Kuwait's illegal removal of Iraqi underground oil by slant drilling across the border into Iraq. This had continued for years, but now Iraq needed the money that this oil would supply to pay its bills. Hussein considered a war with Kuwait but needed Washington's permission. April Glaspie, the US Ambassador to Iraq, implied such permission by telling Hussein that we were not concerned about disputes between Middle Eastern nations and would not interfere. Believing this to be the green light he wanted, Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait. We all know what happened next. U.S. and Britain, major members of the UN Security Council of five, stirred a reluctant Security Council into declaring war on Iraq, which President George Bush declared was "for the New World Order."
Prior to that point, however, Iraq’s stances in international community had really irked the Western powers. Iraq was the leading country in forming an Arab Alliance similar to the European Economic Commission, an alliance of European countries. All oil nations would share and work together and plan their own army that would include no Europeans. In effect, Hussein was striving to pay off the debts accumulated during the Iraq-Iran War by pushing oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices and cutback production. That, of course, would be intolerable to the West, considering the very destabilizing effects of the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s.
A United Nations trade embargo has been in place continuously since the Gulf War. In 1996 the Iraqi parliament accepted a UN Security Council plan authorizing Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil in order to meet its urgent humanitarian needs.
The long cruel blockade has killed many in Iraq since the military war. It is reported to have caused the deaths by starvation and disease of a million people and is said to account for the deaths of 500 children a week.
According to official reports, Hussein appears to enjoy extremely widespread popularity within Iraq. A 2002 referendum, asking whether he should continue to lead Iraq, claimed 100% of voters thought he should, and that the turnout was 100%, with international media releasing pictures of Iraqi women voting in their own blood. However, he was the only candidate on the ballot and voting was mandatory.
He has been married three times. His first marriage to his first cousin Sajida Talfah produced two sons (Uday Saddam Hussein and Qusai Hussein) and three daughters. There was no issue from his other two marriages to Samira Shahander and Nidal al-Hamdani.
See also: Saddam International Airport, Saddam's Dirty Dozen.
http://www.brookings.edu/fp/research/projects/iraq/hussein.htm - Brookings Institution's links on Saddam Hussein
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Above: Hussein is admired by a good deal of the Arab world because he has been standing-up to the United States. Here, a Lebanese demonstrator condemns the attack by the United States during the 2003 invasion of Ira while holding up a portrait of Hussein.