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Relentless pursuit of power { December 15 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A96-2003Dec14.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A96-2003Dec14.html
A Relentless Pursuit of Power
Hussein Demanded Loyalty, Eliminated Foes at All Costs
By Max Berley
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 15, 2003; Page A16
As absolute ruler of Iraq for 24 years, Saddam Hussein sought to transform the country into the major power of the Middle East and to restore to Arab lands the glory of bygone eras. His paramount ambition, however, appears to have been to acquire, consolidate and expand his power in Iraq by eliminating all political opposition, demanding absolute loyalty from subordinates and citizens and driving many Iraqis into exile.
In "Saddam Hussein, a Political Biography," Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi wrote in 1991: "In the permanently beleaguered mind of Saddam, politics is a ceaseless struggle for survival. The ultimate goal of staying alive, and in power, justifies all means."
Hussein, 66, was captured alive on Saturday by U.S. troops in the northern town of Dawr, 80 miles north of Baghdad. The town is not far from Auja, the village where he was born. Nearby Tikrit, the area's largest city, served as a base for Hussein, and he filled the top ranks of his government with Tikritis.
Hussein's father was Hussein Majid, a landless peasant who died before his son was born. Shortly after Hussein's birth, his mother put him in the care of an uncle, Khayrallah Tulfah, a nationalist army officer and opponent of the British-backed monarchy then ruling Iraq. When Hussein was 3, his uncle was imprisoned for joining a failed coup attempt against the king. The boy was returned to his mother, who had remarried, in Auja.
During an interview on the eve of the Persian Gulf War in 1990, Hussein recalled his impoverished childhood in the village, which had neither electricity nor running water. "Life was difficult everywhere in Iraq," he told Diane Sawyer of ABC News. "Very few people wore shoes. And in many cases they only wore them on special occasions. Some peasants would not put their shoes on until they had reached their destination, so they would look smart."
In 1947, his uncle was released from jail and Hussein returned to live with him in Tikrit, where he attended school for the first time. He was 10 years old and could not spell his name. After graduating from elementary school at 18, in 1955, he followed his uncle to Baghdad, where he enrolled at the Karkh high school.
In 1957, he joined the Baath Party, a budding Arab nationalist movement formed in Syria in the late 1940s. One of the party's leaders in Iraq was Ahmad Hassan Bakr, a relative of Hussein's, who would play a central role in his rise to power.
It was during this period that Hussein, who was a street enforcer for the party, was accused of his first murder. In 1958, he was jailed for the killing of a government official in Tikrit, but was released after six months for lack of evidence.
Also that year, Iraq's monarchy was overthrown by a group of army officers led by Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem. The new leader included many Baathists in his government but later turned away from them and cultivated the Iraqi Communist Party.
On Oct. 7, 1959, a group of Baathists, including Hussein, ambushed a car carrying Qassem, wounding him. Hussein was also wounded in the assassination attempt and fled into exile in Syria, and three months later, to Egypt. In Hussein's official biographies, the story of his role in the plot and escape from Iraq with a leg wound have been highlighted as crucial milestones on his path to power.
After three years in Cairo, where he studied law and rose in the Egyptian Baath Party, Hussein returned to Iraq. His relative, Bakr, had led a coup against Qassem in 1963 and had been appointed prime minister by the new Baathist president, Abdul Salam Arif.
But relations between Baath Party members and Arif rapidly deteriorated, and in 1964 the president turned against them and removed the party from his government. The Baathists went underground for the next four years, and Hussein rose through the ranks of the clandestine organization, taking over its security apparatus.
In 1968, riding a wave of popular anger over the Israeli victory in the 1967 Middle East war, the Baathists overthrew Arif's government in a nearly bloodless coup.
Bakr became president and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, the supreme committee of the Baath Party. As his second in command, Hussein assumed control over the country's intelligence and security agencies and began to develop the political base that would lift him to power.
Over the next 11 years, Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, worked to neutralize potential opposition by acting against other political, ethnic and religious groups. The government cracked down ferociously on Shiite Muslims, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population and are concentrated in the country's south, and against the Kurds, a distinct ethnic group in the north.
During this period, Hussein also used the country's oil revenues to push a broad modernization campaign. He launched a nationwide literacy program, for which he was given an award by UNESCO, and built hospitals throughout Iraq, establishing one of the best public health systems in the Middle East.
In July 1979, Bakr resigned and Hussein, 42, was sworn in as president. Within days he consolidated his power in a theatrical display of the techniques that would characterize his rule. Hussein convened the members of the Revolutionary Command Council and other Baath Party leaders at a conference hall in Baghdad and told them that plotters backed by Syria were planning a putsch. Hussein identified 60 conspirators, who were led out of the room one by one. Weeks later, they were executed by firing squads.
Hussein rapidly began attempting to fulfill his dream of reestablishing Iraq as the political, military and cultural center of the Middle East, using Iraq's oil wealth to launch huge public works and to rebuild Nebuchadnezzar's palaces and other sites from the past. He also spent lavishly on himself, erecting numerous sprawling palace compounds. According to Laurie Mylroie, an American expert on Iraq, Hussein's grandiosity was an attempt to reverse a "lifetime of personal indignities, real and imagined" and he used his political power "to acquire the social and economic standing he had long coveted."
He also began to spend heavily to develop Iraq's military, which by 1990 was the world's fourth-largest. Some of the spending went to programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents. His early plan to develop nuclear weapons, however, was derailed when Israeli bombers destroyed a French-built nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. The program was restarted later, and by the time of the Persian Gulf War, Iraq was months away from building a nuclear bomb. Occupation forces, however, have so far uncovered no evidence that these programs were resumed.
The operations of his government reflected his deeply suspicious nature and his grip on power. To ensure loyalty, he selected almost all his closest aides from the ranks of kinsmen from Tikrit. His rule was built on a security apparatus that reached into every segment of society and relied on a vast network of prisons and torture chambers. Human rights groups suggest that as many as 300,000 people may have disappeared or been murdered.
Soon after taking over as president, Hussein began to plan an attack on Iran, Iraq's hereditary enemy and neighbor. In 1980, Iraqi forces entered Iran's oil-rich Arab Khuzestan province. Hussein hoped for a quick victory, but the war dragged on for eight years. Iraq has estimated its casualties from the war at 500,000, with millions of wounded; Iran has estimated that it lost 300,000 soldiers and civilians.
Throughout the Iran-Iraq war, many Western nations, including the United States, sought to contain Iran and lent at least tacit support to Hussein, providing him with weapons and possibly intelligence on Iranian troop formations.
Iraq was forced to borrow heavily to finance the war, and when the conflict ended, it began to default on its loans. It was then that Hussein set his sights on oil-rich Kuwait, which Iraq had long considered a renegade province.
On July 17, 1990, in a televised speech, Hussein warned he would attack Kuwait if it did not meet Iraqi demands, including redrawing the border, reducing Kuwaiti oil production -- which Hussein blamed for bringing down oil prices -- and reducing Kuwait's share of oil from the Rumaila field, which extends into Iraqi territory.
In August 1990, Iraqi forces seized the kingdom, bringing immediate condemnation from the United Nations, which presented Hussein with an ultimatum to withdraw. Hussein's government refused and formally annexed Kuwait. In January 1991, a coalition led by the United States and backed by U.N. resolutions went to war to evict him. After 40 days of intense bombardment, coalition troops liberated Kuwait and pushed into Iraqi territory.
After a 100-hour ground war, the Iraqis accepted a peace deal that required them to dismantle any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs. The country was also subjected to U.N.-mandated sanctions that restricted its imports of sensitive materials. Its oil exports were controlled by a U.N.-mandated "oil-for-food" program.
Immediately after the hostilities, Hussein's government moved to brutally repress uprisings by the Shiite majority throughout the country, and his troops killed thousands of Shiites in the southern city of Basra. He also once again moved against the Kurdish population in the north.
Although he often presented the Gulf War as an Iraqi victory, in the years that followed Hussein ruled over a country that was deeply damaged. Iraq had become an international pariah, U.S. and British warplanes enforced "no-fly" zones in substantial sections of the country, the Kurds had established a semiautonomous region in the north and the Iraqi leader found few allies. He put down several coup attempts, including one in 1995 and another in 1996 that were reportedly backed by the CIA. During this period, Iraq's economy deteriorated sharply and there were reports of acute misery and malnutrition caused by shortages of food and medicine.
In the final years of his rule, he groomed his youngest son, Qusay, as his successor after the eldest, Uday, fell out of favor by killing one of his father's favorite aides. The brothers were killed in Mosul by U.S. forces on July 22.
In late 1998, Hussein refused to allow inspectors to visit presidential palaces where some weapons were believed to have been hidden. The inspectors withdrew from Iraq, and President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain ordered several days of bombing against targets in Iraq.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush began to press anew the issue of Iraqi disarmament and inspections resumed, even as the United States and Britain began to mass forces in the Persian Gulf region. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 29, 2002, Bush included Iraq in what he called an "axis of evil," along with Iran and North Korea.
On March 20, 2003, after declaring Iraq in "material breach" of U.N. Resolution 1441, Bush ordered a missile attack on a palace in Baghdad in an attempt to kill Hussein. The Iraqi president survived this "decapitation strike" but the war led to his downfall three weeks later. He went into hiding and was the target of an intense manhunt that ended with his capture Saturday. During the eight-month period from the fall of Baghdad to Hussein's capture Saturday, U.S. officials said they could not with certainty say whether the deposed Iraqi leader was dead or alive. Several taped messages were broadcast by Arab television networks in which a speaker purporting to be Hussein called on Iraqis to resist occupation.
In the days before the war, Bush had presented Hussein with an ultimatum, giving him 48 hours to surrender power and flee into exile. In a television interview with Dan Rather of CBS News, Hussein struck a combative tone. "We will die here," he said. "We will die in this country and we will maintain our honor, the honor that is required, in front of our people."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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