Saddam’s Total Recall: The Story of Another American Crony-Dictator Recalled to the Factory

By Farish A. Noor

Saddam Hussein must be regretting the fact that while he was a dictator in Iraq he did not abolish the death penalty. For now he faces the prospect of being put on trial before an Iraqi court, interrogated by American and Iraqi intelligence personnel, sent to an Iraqi jail (one of many that he built) and finally made to stand before a firing squad or forced to walk to the gallows – a fate he reserved for hundreds of his own opponents during his long stay in power.

The irony of it all is that this is the man who was also lauded in the West during the 1980s as a great modernizer and the father of modern Iraq. The fact that he was also a strategic ally of the United States of America and helped to contain the so-called ‘threat’ of Iran has also been conveniently forgotten.

Saddam Hussein was born in the village of Al-Awja, east of the city of Tikrit, in the north of Iraq. His family belonged to the clan Al-Khatab, and during his student days he belonged to a number of Baghdad-based student movements that were opposed to the British-backed ruler of Iraq. During those turbulent years Saddam was known as a radical and militant, and he was involved in the failed assassination attempt of the Iraqi President Abd Al-Karim Qasim. For his part in the plot Saddam was imprisoned, but later pardoned and released thanks to his family’s political connections.

Saddam later joined the Ba’th party that was then made up and led by Iraqi nationalists, intellectuals, social scientists and activists. The Ba’th party was then a progressive-nationalist movement that was largely urban in its constituency and ethno-nationalist in its outlook. The Ba’th party’s philosophy (then) was fundamentally egalitarian, and it opposed the neo-feudal structures of power that had been maintained in Iraq by the king. The Ba’thists were attracted to the Nasserite concept of Pan-Arabism and wanted the Arab states to unite to become stronger. Other branches of the party appeared in neighboring Arab countries like Syria.

Within the Iraqi party Saddam quickly rose to power and in 1968 – when the Ba’thists managed to topple the king – Saddam came to power as Vice-President behind his cousin Ahmad Hassan al-Bark who was then the president of the Ba’th Revolutionary Council. Through the use of force, guile and intimidation, Saddam managed to build a power base for himself back in Tikrit. He began to recruit party members and assistants from his own village of Al-Awja, who would rise with him later when he became President of the country.

In 1979 Saddam’s political ambition was fulfilled when he became the President of the country. He then centered all power and authority on himself and redirected the ideology of the Ba’th party by discarding its socialist-egalitarian principles while promoting a conservative and exclusive ethno-nationalism and Pan-Arabism instead. This move was welcomed by Iraq’s Western allies (most notably the United States of America), who wanted to ensure that Iraq would not fall into the Soviet bloc and prevent the rise of a leftist Arab movement in the Middle East. Iraq turned to the West for its model of development and soon enough was the recipient of Western aid and investment. The West also helped Saddam to build the Iraqi war machine, and countries like the United States and Britain were the main sources of weapons that he later used against his enemies in and out of the country.

Throughout his period of rule he was an ardent modernizer and pro-development in his outlook. He forced through a nationwide mass literacy campaign that made illiteracy a crime against the state, and despite the harshness of his modernization program he was supported by UNESCO as a model leader for the Arab world. UNESCO even went as far as describing him as the most forward-looking and progressive Arab politician in the Middle East, and in the capitals of Europe the powers-that-be hailed his achievements and supported his efforts to drag his country and its people kicking and screaming into the modern world. Like that other pro-Western ‘modernizer’ and crony of Washington Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, Saddam was allowed to get away with his appalling human rights record for he was seen as sympathetic to Western interests and a fierce opponent of Islamist revolutionary politics emanating from Iran next door.

A great admirer of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, Saddam preferred that his followers fear rather than love him. He often used aggressive tactics to scare and eliminate his opponents, and in July 1979 he shocked the members of his own party when, during the annual party conference, he accused a number of senior Ba’th party leaders of a Syrian-backed plot to topple him. Saddam had the party leaders denounced in public, including Muhyi Abd Al-Hussein Mashhadi, the Secretary General of the party, and they were all taken away by the secret police to be tortured and executed later. Earlier in 1969 he ordered the public execution of 14 Iraqi leaders who were accused of working for the Zionists and had their bodies hung in a public square for days so that the people could see them. During the many anti-Shia purges that he launched, he ordered his troops to kill not only the Shia Mullahs, but also their entire families in full public view. (The Iraqi secret police and security forces internalized Saddam’s own sick sense of irony and humor: after torturing and shooting their victims they would often send a bill to the members of the victim’s family, demanding payment for the number of bullets used in the killing.)

When the Iran-Iraq war broke out in 1979, the modernizing and secular Saddam was promoted by the West as an exemplary Arab leader who would be able to hold back the tide of Islamic radicalism in the Arab world. Saddam ordered the use of chemical weapons and the killings of thousands of people during the Iran-Iraq war, and his pro-Western and anti-Iranian stance made him America’s closest ally in the region. The Iran-Iraq war went in Iraq’s favor until Saddam personally took command of the Iraqi armed forces and sidelined the generals. On several occasions Saddam’s plans led the Iraqi army to disaster, and on one occasion while he was touring the front lines Saddam was himself cut off behind enemy lines and narrowly escaped capture by advancing Iranian troops.

Like many Arab leaders, Saddam also used the discourse of Islam to bolster his credentials and unite his people behind him. He ordered a number of Iraqi historians and ulama to construct a complex genealogy that traced his ancestry to the Prophet Muhammad – whom he admired as a great tactician and military leader – but whose humane, philosophical and mystical character totally eluded him; and even donated six liters of his own blood for a copy of a 600-page Qur’an – written in his blood – that was later kept in the national museum of Baghdad. Like some other Muslim leaders – notably Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Zia ul’ Haq of Pakistan – Saddam used and abused the discourse of Islam and his own image as the ‘leader of the faithful’ to the hilt: the propaganda machinery of the state waxed eloquent about his services to his religion and the Muslim umma, overlooking the fact that the biggest threat to the Muslims in Iraq all the while was none other than Saddam himself. Like many other Muslim leaders he also turned to Israel as a convenient means to distract his followers from his own abuse of human rights at home.

Despite his claims to be a descendant of the Prophet, Saddam never hid his rural tribal background. At the age of six he received a tattoo on his right hand, which he kept as a symbol of his tribal lineage. Saddam also turned to Iraq’s ancient past in order boost his own power and charisma at home. Like the Shah of Iran who hoped to deepen his own psychological hold on his people by falling back on history, Saddam Hussein tried to revive the memory of ancient Iraq in order to consolidate his grasp on power: while the Shah of Iran tried to revive the memory of ancient Persia through the celebration of the ancient city of Persepolis, Saddam tried to revive the memory of the ancient Assyrian Empire, which led to his reconstruction of the fabled city of Niniveh and the legacy of the great Assyrian ruler Nebuchanezzer. It was reported that the bricks of the reconstructed city of Nineveh bore the legend: ‘This city was built by the Great Nebuchanezzer, rebuilt during the time of Saddam Hussein.’ For a dictator whose ego was unwieldy as his, only a great imperial counterpart like Nebuchanezzer would do.

In 1990 Saddam Hussein ordered his army to march southwards and invade Kuwait. This led to open conflict with the United States, which regarded Kuwait as a major strategic and economic ally. During the first Gulf War of 1991, Saddam escaped the numerous attempts to kill him when the US Air Force bombed Baghdad.

Throughout the 1990s, Saddam’s regime was forced to deal with numerous revolts in the north and south of the country that were inspired and backed up by the United States, Saddam’s erstwhile ally. Millions of Iraqi civilians were also forced to suffer thanks to the international embargo imposed on Iraq by the Americans and their allies, with the backing of the United Nations. The Americans also divided Iraqi airspace in three, by declaring two ‘no-fly’ zones in the north and south of the country where Iraqi warplanes were not allowed to fly. For more than a decade the Iraqi population were forced to suffer as supplies of medicine and other necessities into the country was interrupted thanks to the foreign embargo.

Finally in April 2003 Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled during the Second Gulf War when the United States and Britain – acting against the consensus of the international community – chose to unilaterally invade Iraq in order to ‘liberate’ the people from Saddam. The fact that Saddam Hussein was one of America’s longest-serving allies in the Arab world was conveniently forgotten by the American media that was then staunchly behind US President George W. Bush.

The pathetic story of Saddam Hussein has become a template for the rise and fall of dictatorial regimes all over the Muslim world today. Like the other cronies of Washington – the Shah of Iran, Habib Bourguiba, Zia ul’ Haq, Anwar Sadat, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, et al. – Saddam was helped to power with the hand of the US, with Israel never far away. In the end he met the same fate as they did: unwelcome and unwanted when they were no longer useful, they were all dispensed with or ‘recalled’ by their manufacturers.

Now the eyes of the world are on Iraq to see what kind of treatment Saddam will get at the hands of his erstwhile allies-turned-enemies. In his case at least he will be given a trial (no matter how cosmetic), something he denied to many of his previous victims. But the fear of many is that in the course of the trial that will come all we will be shown and given is the long list of errors and crimes that the man has committed, with scant regard or mention of the very same countries that helped him or looked the other way when he was at his worst: most of all the USA itself. Now that Saddam has been caught many will hope that his trial will not end up as a kangaroo court where the man will be speedily processed so that he can be dragged to the firing squad as quickly as possible. There are simply too many questions that have yet to be asked, much less answered.

The Americans in turn will try their best to present this as yet another one of their diplomatic victories, though it should never be forgotten that if Saddam ended up as one of the bloodiest dictators and mass murderers in the world, it was the West that stood by him for so long. Saddam the used up crony may have been recalled to the crony factory, but the world should take this opportunity to recall the long history of collusion and co-operation that once marked this ‘rosy’ relationship between the world’s only remaining superpower and its strategic ally from not too long ago.

Dr. Farish A. Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist. This interview was conducted at a workshop on Muslim intellectual trends in 2000. It is part of a series of interviews published under the title “New Voices of Islam” (Farish A. Noor, (ed.) ISIM institute, Leiden, Netherlands, 2002.)