Hussein, Saddam
(b. 1937), president of Iraq since 1979. Saddam Hussein presides over one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East. He was born near Takrit, a small town on the Tigris about one hundred miles from Baghdad. In 1955, attracted by Arab nationalism, he joined the fledgling Iraqi Baʾath Party.
In July 1958, the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and a republic installed. In October 1959, Saddam Hussein was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the president, ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim. He fled to Egypt until Qasim's overthrow in February 1963.
Saddam Hussein at a ceremony honoring military officers in Baghdad on 4 January 2000. (AFP/CORBIS)On his return, he headed the civilian wing of the Iraqi Baath and by 1969 had become Iraq's vice president. Through the 1970s he gradually consolidated his power.
The nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1972 gave the government—now equivalent to Saddam Hussein and his entourage—full control over the country's oil revenues. Saddam Hussein defeated the Kurdish opposition movement in 1975 and turned against the Communists. By the mid-1980s, most Iraqi intellectuals, and almost all Iraqi leftists, had been killed, imprisoned, or forced into exile.
In July 1979, Saddam Hussein took over the presidency and less than a year later he launched an invasion of the Islamic Republic of Iran. After initial successes, the Iraqis were driven back by Iran; the war continued for eight years, during which Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces. In 1988, Saddam Hussein initiated a massive campaign against the Iraqi Kurds, known as al-Anfal (the spoils of war), during which at least 100,000 Kurds were captured and killed. During and after the Iran-Iraq War, a personality cult evolved around the "Great Leader."
In another bid for regional supremacy, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. By late February 1991, however, he had negotiated a cease-fire with the multinational forces under United Nations auspices and U.S. leadership, after weeks of aerial bombardment and five days of ground war, followed by rebellions in the Kurdish North and the Shiʿite South. Iraqi troops retreated from Kuwait, but Hussein soon regained control in southern Iraq and Kurdistan.
U.N.-imposed sanctions after the Gulf War caused the people of Iraq great suffering but hardly affected its leaders. An oil-for-food agreement, which, if adopted earlier, might have alleviated much of the malnutrition and infant mortality the country experienced, was eventually accepted in 1996. Saddam Hussein's power base is fragile, but his monopoly of the means of coercion, the fragmentation of the opposition, the absence of serious rivals, and fear of the chaos that might follow his downfall have combined to keep him in supreme power for over two decades.
Further Reading
Farouk-Sluglett, Marion, and Peter Sluglett. (2001) Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship. 3d ed. London: I. B. Tauris.
Makiya, Kanan (formerly Samir al-Khalil). (1998) Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq. Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Tripp, Charles. (2000) A History of Iraq. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
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