Page 2 of 4 Saddam's life after
death By Sami Moubayed
engaging smile" with whom "it would be
possible to do business". Saddam insisted that
Iraq's relationship with the Soviet bloc "was
forced upon it by the central problem of
Palestine" and hoped "for improved ties with
Britain and with America, too, for that matter".
The US assistant secretary of state for
Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, Alfred L
Atherton Jr, described Saddam as a "rather
remarkable person ... He is running the show; and
he's a very
ruthless and ... pragmatic,
intelligent power."
To compensate for lack
of political freedoms, Saddam gave the Iraqis a
booming economy in the 1970s. While the Iraqis
were busy making money, he was delicately building
a power base in the army and the security
services, to prevent a coup from toppling his
regime. Saddam championed himself as a hero of the
masses - a symbol of the working class. He
invested heavily in state welfare, and based much
of his successes on the oil industry, which he
nationalized from international companies - again
under the influence of Nasser - on June 1, 1972.
Saddam also launched his famous "national
campaign to eradicate illiteracy" and offered
universal free schooling to Iraqi children. He
also supported the families of soldiers, granted
free and modernized hospitalization, and gave
grand long-term subsidies with zero interest to
farmers wanting to improve their agricultural
output. He trained the unskilled and paid workers
according to the amount of their labor.
Agrarian spending doubled under Saddam's
orders in 1974-75. His social services were the
finest in the Arab world, prompting the United
Nations to grant him an award. He also invested
heavily in building roads and bringing electricity
to remote districts of Iraq, along with clean
drinking water. In the 1970s, everyone seemed
happy in Saddam's Iraq. The poor were making money
and so were the rich. He re-created the Iraqi
middle class, attracted a lot of foreign
investment, and sent thousands of Iraqis to study
abroad in the finest schools of North America and
Europe. They returned to Iraq as highly qualified
engineers, doctors, professors, scholars, poets
and scientists.
Women were also educated
and received senior posts in the government and
judiciary. Also influenced by his secular
Ba'athist ideology, Saddam created a Western-style
legal system in Iraq, which became the only Arab
country in the Persian Gulf region not governed by
Islamic sharia law. These are the years that
Saddam's supporters are pointing to when defending
him today, 30 years later. Although thanks to
Saddam the 1970s were probably the most stable and
prosperous in Iraq's modern history, the period
from 1980 onward was to prove a nightmare for
Iraqis.
In 1979, Bakr negotiated a union
with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. This was in
response to Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat's
signing of a peace treaty with Israel in 1978,
something that greatly distressed Assad, Bakr and
Saddam. The treaty, however, called for Bakr to
become president and Assad to become his deputy,
threatening to eliminate Saddam from the political
arena altogether.
Acting firmly, Saddam
forced Bakr to resign and assumed presidential
powers on July 16, 1979. On July 22 he assembled
members of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, in an infamous
meeting that he wanted videotaped, and accused
many of being spies, loyal to the Syrian Ba'ath.
He read out the names of 68 of his comrades,
accusing them of being "disloyal", and had them
walk out of the room, where they were immediately
arrested. Twenty-two of them were put on trial and
executed for treason. Saddam was making his point
as president: questionable loyalties to the Iraqi
Ba'ath and to Saddam were now a capital offense,
punishable by death.
Saddam's real threat,
however, came from the Iranian revolution that
took place five months before he came to power, in
February 1979. The revolt's leader, ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, had spent 13 years in Iraq
(1965-78) in the holy city of Najaf, where he
worked with the Shi'ite underground against the
regimes of presidents Abd al-Salam Aref, Abd
al-Rahman Aref and Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr.
In
October 1978, Saddam expelled Khomeini from Iraq,
accusing him of wanting to overthrow the regime,
triggering an all-out war with the Shi'ites that
lasted until he was toppled in 2003. Khomeini set
up base in Paris, where he led the revolution on
two fronts, against Saddam in Iraq and Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran.
The shah
fell four months later, in February 1979. Saddam
was terrified by the Iranian revolution, while
Syria's Assad wanted him to see Iran as a friend
and as a potential ally for the Arabs. All Saddam
could see was a monster at his doorstep, fueling a
Shi'ite uprising in his own back yard. The real
threat, Assad would often tell intermediaries, was
Israel, not Iran. On September 22, 1980, Saddam
invaded Iran, based on false security reports he
had received on Iranian weakness, believing that
he could capture Khomeini in a breeze.
These reports were given to Saddam by
Iran's enemies, mainly Saudi Arabia, the US,
Jordan's King Hussein (who opened his port of
Aqaba to Iraqi war supplies), and Iranians in
exile still loyal to the shah. The official reason
for war was to restore the Shatt al-Arab waterway,
which Iraq had given to the shah during a period
of weakness in 1975.
Gulf states, fearing
Iran's growing influence, eagerly supported Saddam
with money and arms, and so did the US. The
senseless war cost the lives of 1 million Muslims,
340,000 from Iraq and
