Saddam Hussein The President of Iraq
Uploaded by Gotskillz on Jul 04, 2004
Huddled in an underground bunker with his country smoldering in ruins around him, Iraqi President SADDAM HUSSEIN seemed buried for good in February 1992. U.N. forces had devastated Iraq in the six-week Persian Gulf War; sewage systems and telephone lines were out, electrical grids were down, and roads were impassable. Harsh international sanctions and reparation debts hobbled recovery prospects for the oil-rich republic of Iraq. But Hussein resurfaced, unrepentant for the failed invasion of Kuwait and its enormous toll.
The man who would become known as the enemy of the Western world had beaten the odds before. Hussein grew up in Auja, a village of mud-brick huts northwest of Baghdad. His parents were poor farmers, but inspired by his uncle Khayrallah Tulfah, an Iraqi army officer and crusader for Arab unity, Hussein gravitated to politics as a teenager.
Saddam joined the socialist Baath party when he was 19. He made his mark three years later when he participated in a 1959 assassination attempt against Iraqi Prime Minister Abudul Karim Kassim. Saddam was shot in the leg during the botched effort and fled the country for several years, first to Syria, then Egypt.
In 1968 he helped lead the revolt that finally brought the Baath party to power under Gen. Ahmed Hassan Bakr. In the process, he landed the vice president’s post, from which he built an elaborate network of secret police to root out dissidents. Eleven years later he deposed Bakr and plastered the streets with 20-foot-high portraits of himself.
Saddam’s years as a revolutionary left him keenly aware of the danger of dissent. Shortly after taking office, he purged and murdered dozens of government officials suspected of disloyalty. In the early 1980s, he used chemical weapons to crush a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq. Saddam’s power struggles extended well beyond his country’s borders; bent on dominating the Muslim world, he attacked neighboring countries. In 1980 he invaded Iran, launching an eight-year war that ended in stalemate.
In August 1990 he invaded the oil sheikdom of Kuwait, proclaiming it Iraq’s 19th province. He defied U.N. directives to retreat from Kuwait, provoking what he called “the mother of all battles,” the Persian Gulf War. That brief conflict decimated Saddam’s military forces, but he has managed to rebuild his republic and his power base, beginning with the secret police force.