Saddam Hussein (28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was the President of Iraq from 16 July 1979 to 9 April 2003, succeeding Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and preceding Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer.
Biography[]
Saddam Hussein was born on 28 April 1937 near Tikrit in the Kingdom of Iraq, and he came from a poor family of shepherds. Saddam did not know his father while growing up, his 13-year-old brother died of cancer, he was raised by his uncle Khairallah Talfah, and his mother remarried, giving him a rough childhood. In 1957 he joined the Ba'ath Party, an Arab nationalist and socialist political party that was influenced by Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabism. In 1958, the military officer Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the King of Iraq, and the Ba'ath Party gained 12 out of the 16 seats in Qasim's cabinet. However, his refusal to join the United Arab Republic with Nasser's Egypt led to Qasim being overthrown in a revolution in 1963, and Abdul Salam Arif became the new president. Arif died in a plane crash in 1966 and his brother and successor Abdul Rahman Arif was weaker and easier to manipulate than his brother. In 1968, the Ba'ath Party leader Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr ousted Arif, and Ba'athist Iraq replaced the brief republic. Saddam, as a high-ranking member of the party by this time, was in charge of implementing a socialist economy in the country in the 1970s, and he gradually gained more power over his boss. In 1979, al-Bakr resigned due to "health problems", and Saddam became the new president.
Saddam was a man of the people, doing as they wished and gaining immense support due to his nationalist ideas. He had the Iraqi Intelligence Service put newspapers on the payroll, and the people were meant to believe that he was a great person. He proclaimed that he would defend Iraq from the Jews (Israel) and Persians (Iran), and in 1979 he declared war on Iran after the Iranian Revolution in hopes of annexing the Shatt al-Arab waterway and Khuzestan to further his goals of Arab nationalism. However, it also related to his policy of Arab nationalism, specifically by Sunni Muslims over Shi'ites. Chaldeans held offices in his government and he paid a church in Metro-Detroit $2,000,000 to help them expand, but Saddam was oppoesd to Shi'ites and Jews. When Iran went through a popular Shi'ite uprising against the Shah, Saddam feared that another Shi'ite uprising would occur in Iraq. He unified the country in a war against Iran, although the Kurds to the north (victims of Arab nationalism) rebelled against him in hopes of gaining independence. He used chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians, and he was responsible for several war crimes. Saddam was supported by both the Soviet Union (fellow fascists) and the United States (anti-Iranians) in the Iran-Iraq War, but the United States also sold weapons to Iran in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua at the same time. For almost all of the 1980s, bloody warfare took place between Iraq and Iran before a peace in 1988 left both Iran and Iraq economically-crippled.
With the economy in shambles, Saddam decided that a good way to accumulate wealth would be to annex Kuwait, an oil-rich country to the south that gave Iraq money for the Iran-Iraq War. In late 1990, the Iraqi Army quickly took over Kuwait, but the United Nations feared that he would exploit one-third of the world's oil, so the United States, United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, and a coalition of dozens more nations put together forces and invaded Kuwait on 24 February 1991. They liberated Kuwait from Iraq and pushed into southern Iraq while using "smart bombs" to pound Iraqi cities and military installations. Saddam was forced to surrender to the UN forces, but the UN could not assist the Kurds and Shi'ites when they eagerly rose up against the Iraqi government just a few days later in March 1991, and the rebellions were bloodily crushed. The United States and United Kingdom decided to enforce no-fly zones and arms restrictions on Iraq, and they would bomb Iraq whenever they tried to rebuild their defense systems. Throughout the 1990s, their warplanes bombed Baghdad and other Iraqi cities to punish Iraq's failure to comply with their demands.
The statue of Saddam in Saddam Square
After the 11 September 2001 "9/11" terrorist attacks in the United States by al-Qaeda, the US government of George W. Bush became eager to strike at whatever country was suspected of harboring terrorists. Saddam was a staunch opponent of Islamism and was enemies with Osama Bin Laden, but in 2003 George W. Bush declared that he would invade Iraq due to their alleged support of terrorism and their alleged possession of chemical weapons that were never found by UN inspectors. The "Iraq War" was expected to be short, as a swift invasion from March to April 2003 resulted in the victory of the Multinational Force - Iraq (MNFI) coalition over the Ba'athists and their allies. On 13 December 2003, Hussein was captured in Operation Red Dawn at ad-Dawr by Task Force 121, and he was put on trial for war crimes. In 2006, he was found guilty, and he was hanged in the Kadhimiya area of northern Baghdad at the age of 69. Several more Ba'athists would be executed for war crimes as well.
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