The rise and fall of Saddam Hussein

Photo: AFP

The above account of Saddam's arrest was culled from newspaper report posted in the Yahoo news site on December 15, 2003. People all over the world were baffled because Saddam Hussein did not pump bullets into his head. He had one revolver next to him.

The farmhouse also had some semiautomatic AK 47 guns. He even did not try to bribe the soldiers, not that ploy would have worked. There was a large sum of money, $ 750,000 in US 100 bills stashed in a suitcase nearby. Being a classic megalomaniac, he thought he was in control of the situation. No wonder he said, "I'm willing to negotiate." He lost all his political power in the second week of April 2003. Nonetheless, he was an optimist. In his grand delusion, he thought he was still in control.

Without a valid psychiatric evaluation, the humankind will never know what was he thinking as one lone soldier from the Fourth Infantry Division asked the man in the hole who he was. The NBC News anchorperson, Tom Brokaw, while delivering the news of Saddam's arrest on Sunday mentioned a line from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Man," which was very appropriate. Saddam's world ended not with a bang but a whimper.

It will be a worthwhile exercise to probe into Saddam Hussein's life in the context of Iraq to figure out why did he become so tyrannical. Saddam has a softer side to his demeanor. Tareq Aziz, his long time associate, who is also a detainee, had mentioned recently that Saddam was busy as ever writing a romantic novel in Arabic language in the last couple of years. That had become Saddam's first love. He was really not in charge in the waning days of his power in Baghdad. There is so much incongruity in Saddam Hussein's life that it becomes necessary to probe his life to understand the anomaly in his behavior.

Saddam Hussein At-Tikriti was born into a peasant family on April 28, 1937, on the outskirts of Tikrit, the so-called Sunni Triangle of Iraq. At the age of twenty, he joined the newly formed political party-- Baath, which had a socialist leaning, in the year 1957. In 1959, he participated in an abortive attempt by Baathists to assassinate Karim Qasem, the then Iraqi prime minister. Saddam was wounded; he then escaped to Syria and ended up in Egypt. There, he attended Cairo Law School (196263) and continued his studies at Baghdad Law College after the Baathists took power in Iraq in 1963. When the Baathists were overthrown the same year, Saddam was jailed and he spent several years in prison in Iraq. Later, he escaped, becoming a leader of the Baath party. He staged a coup that brought the party back to power in 1968. Saddam effectively held power in Iraq jointly with along with President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, and in 1972, he directed the nationalization of Iraq's oil industry. Saddam began to assert open control of the government in 1979, becoming president upon Bakr's resignation.

Saddam then became chairman of the "Revolutionary Command Council" and prime minister, among other important positions. He used an extensive secret-police establishment, Mukhabarat, to suppress any political dissension, and jailed and tortured anyone who would oppose him. Eventually, he made himself the object of an extensive personality cult among the Iraqi public.

His political objective then shifted to becoming an Arab leader more charismatic than Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, to achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf, and to use oil revenues to raise the country's standard of living. To fulfill the last objective, he launched an invasion of Iran's oil fields in September 1980, but the effort bogged down in a war of attrition. The cost of the war and the interruption of Iraq's oil exports caused Saddam to scale down his ambitious programmes for economic development. The Iran-Iraq War was a no-win situation for Saddam or the Ayatollahs; it simply dragged on in a stalemate until 1988, when both countries accepted a cease-fire that ended the fighting. To carry on his decade-long war with Iran, Iraq had to incur a massive foreign debt. Saddam was undeterred; he ended up building a massive armed force. In August 1990, Saddam's army overran neighboring Kuwait. He grossly miscalculated the effect of his misadventure in Kuwait. The occupation of Kuwait immediately triggered a worldwide trade embargo on Iraq. A defiant Saddam ignored international appeals to withdraw his forces from Kuwait, notwithstanding the buildup of a large U.S.-led military force in Saudi Arabia and the passage of U.N. resolutions condemning the occupation and authorizing the use of force to end it.

In a six-week-long Gulf War that began on January 16, 1991, the military coalition drove Saddam's armies out of Kuwait. Iraq's humiliating defeat triggered internal rebellions by both Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north. However, by using brutal force one more time Saddam was able to suppress the uprisings, causing thousands of Kurds to flee to refugee camps along the country's northern border with Turkey. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the UN handed down a cease-fire agreement to Iraq. The nation was prohibited from producing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Numerous sanctions were leveled on the country pending compliance of the ceasefire terms. That caused severe food and medicine shortages and further shrinking of the economy. Saddam's continued refusal to cooperate with UN arms inspectors led to a four-day air strike by the United States and Great Britain in late 1998. Both countries announced that they would support efforts of the Iraqi opposition to unseat Saddam. After the 9-11 terrorist attack, the Bush Administration identified Iraq as the "Axis of Evil." Once Talibans were removed from the seat of political power in early 2002, the Bush Administration started to apply pressure on Iraq through the UN on the plea that Saddam was making "weapons of mass destruction." In the later part of 2002, we witnessed a massive troop build-up in Kuwait notwithstanding any support from the UN. Only Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, and a handful of countries lend their support for invasion. A rift developed between America and her allies in Europe with France and Germany not supporting Mr. Bush's position . On March 19, 2003, US tanks rolled into Iraq from their staging ground in Northern Kuwait. The war only lasted about three weeks. On April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell into the hands of the invading army. Along with it, Saddam's massive statues came crashing down all over Baghdad. In the wake of the US-led coalition taking over Iraq's administration, Saddam, his two sons, and all Baath Party leaders went underground. There were bounties placed on top Baathist leaders by the US government.

Saddam's 39 and 37 year old sons, Uday and Quasy were hiding in the northern city of Mosul in a family friend's house who betrayed and alerted the US army. They both were killed in a massive bombing done on July 22, 2003. The family friend netted a cool $ 30 million. Iraqi insurgents stepped up their activities especially in the so-called Sunni Triangle starting from October 2003. Saddam loyalists recruited suicide bombers to demolish police station, US military installations, etc. More civilians were becoming the target of the insurgents as US soldiers were well entrenched into fortified military compounds. Nonetheless, snipers, grenade attacks, and suicide car bombings killed a small number of the US soldiers. The US authorities in Iraq were becoming restless because of the adverse publicity brought on by the news of the soldiers being killed in different parts of the country. The mainstream news media in the US were publishing editorials, commentaries, etc., criticising the Bush administration for not protecting adequately the lives of the soldiers in Iraq. To boost the morale of the troops, Mr. Bush even visited Baghdad secretly on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 2003.

The major newspapers and weekly magazines in the US were writing commentaries on stepped up underground insurgencies in Iraq immediately after Mr. Bush's trip to Baghdad. Respected columnist Seymour M. Hersh in the December 15 issue of the New Yorker wrote one such article entitled "Moving Targets." Considering the fact that a full-scale guerrilla war had broken out in Iraq in recent days Hersh wrote, "An American military expert in Baghdad says, "We're going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla." I gleaned from the New Yorker article that the Bush Administration has authorised "a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq." There is a merit in this line of thinking. Only hours before Saddam was arrested in his hideout at Ad-Dawr an intense interrogation of a Saddam acquaintance had resulted in the tip that pointed finger at the shack where Saddam was holed up. Even though there was a price tag of $ 25 million for the information leading up to Saddam's arrest no one is going to receive that money. The information was not volunteered; rather it came out during an intense questioning of Saddam's tribesman. In the aftermath of Saddam's arrest, many Iraqis are demanding that a tribunal is set forth for gross human rights violation Saddam loyalists had carried out over three decades under his order. The tribulations of the persecuted in Iraq perpetrated by Saddam regime should not go unchallenged.

What is the take-home message from Saddam's ignominious life? His foray into politics has caused an utter misery for millions of Iraqis. He even showed a tinge of his megalomania at the time of his arrest. He thought that the arresting soldier would negotiate with him. It certainly takes a special breed of people to be megalomaniac. Saddam has all the hallmark of a person, who suffers from delusional fantasies for power. Humankind should make an example out of him. Indeed, he should be put on trial.

A H Jaffor Ullah, a columnist and research scientist, writes from New Orleans, USA.