The excecution of Saddam Hussein aon the day of Id marks an opportune moment to look back on his life, his brand of politics and of course, his relationship with the US which extended over three decades. I must say at the very outset that I deplore all that Saddam Hussein did in his life time, but yet maintain that the killing was not just bad politics but totally unjustified due to the fact that he did not receive a fair trial.
Saddam Hussein was born on 28th April 1937 near Tikri to a shepherd Arab family and was brought up by his stepfather for whom Saddam retained a great deal of real affection. He did not attend school till the age of 12 and learnt to read and write only in his teens. The early political formation of Saddam and men of his generation from less priveleged social backgrounds was in the Arab Socialist Baath Party which was influence deeply by Nasser's ideas of Arab nationalism. In the Arab Baath vision of politics there was no place for sectarian/religious/tribal identities. The US invasion of Iraq and its barbaric assault on the Iraqi polpulation has unravelled the carapace of pan regional Arab identity that was built up over the years, after Suez crisis of 1956.
In Iraq as well as in neighboring Iran, the Communist Parties were quite powerful and recived the full backing og the Soviets. In this deady coktail of cold war politics and Arab nationalism, Saddam Hussein plunged head long. The Iraqi monary established by the British was overthrown by General Karim Kassim, who was supported by the Communists. Though it is not clear from the primary records, there have been persistent echoes across the Arab world of Saddam Hussein being in the pay of the CIA which was trying to subvert the Iraqi government with the silent support of Nasser in Egypt. In 1959 Saddam Hussein participated in an attempted assasination of the Prime Minister of Iraq, Kassim.He escaped with a bullet in his leg and the scars of that injury remained all his life. As can be expected he was sentenced to death in absentia as he had escaped to Egypt. Had this sentence been activated and Saddam executed it would have been more just and honest. In Cairo Hussein trained to be a lawyer.
In 1963 the American backed CIA coup overhrew Qassim and this was just the first of several CIA operations in the Middle East. Saddam was back in Baghdad and the CIA provided him a list of prominent Communists and Saddam proved his mettle by tracking down and having a large number of communists killed. The Baath Party filled the political vacucum created by the eslipse of the Communists. In neighboring Iran too the CIA sponsored a coup in which a Natioanlist government was overhrown and the Shah and his blood thirst crew brought back. In 1963 Saddam Hussein became the Vice Secretary General of the Baath Party and in 1968 played an important role in the Coup that toppled the regime in Baghdad and in this coup too the US hand is suspected.
In the early 1970's Saddam Hussein was secure in his position to ease out Ahmed Bakr, a Tikriti, and became the dominant political personality. At every step he was aided by his deep and abiding links with the CIA. In fact the Baathist regime under Saddam Hussein was reviled all over the Third World as a right wing dictatorship. What was not understood by the American sponsors of Saddam Hussein was that though he was willing to play ball with the Amricans, he was at heart an Arab Nationalist. One of the first acts of Saddam Hussein in power was to nationalise the oil and petroleum wealth of Iraq, a major blow to the US interests. Now we can understand why a President with strong links to the Oil Companies like George Bush II was so eager to launch an all out war against Saddam Hussein and even collaborate in his execution.
In 1972 Saddam Hussein signed a Treaty of Friendship with the then Soviet Union He embarked upon a programme of social and economic development in Iraq which transformed Iraq from a poor backward country into a vibrant economy. Saddam Hussein was responsible for spreading literacy in Iraq and today that country has the highest rate of literacy in the middel east. He launched a programme of Cummpulsory Free Education in Iraq and instituted land reforms that completely changed the face of Iraqi socirty. In fact the UNESCO honored Saddam Hussein with its highest award for the program.
Throughout the 1970's and 1980's the USA enjoyed the closest of ties with the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iranian revolution had overthrown the client monarchy in Iran and the USA began to build up Saddam Hussein as a bulwark against what it preceived to be the threat of the Iranian Revolution spreading into the rest of the Arab world. USA in particular stoked Saddam's ambition of becoming the preeminent power in the region. Though Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party were staunch nationalists, the Iranian Government began to fan the fires of Shiaa sectatrian opposition to Saddam Hussein. The fact that Saddam had the complete backing of the USA and other western powers throughout the 8 long years of the Iran-Iraq War which took more that 1.5 million lives.In that war Kuwait with its cash rich oil weatth had promised Iraq a sum of 30 billion US $ as its contribution to the war against Iran. Kuwait never kept the promise and Iraq was drained of its oil wealth during the course of the war. The US gave military aid to the tune of 1.5 billion US dollars to Saddam Hussein dring the Iran Iraq War. This fact is hidden in all the discussions on the US relationship with the deposed dictator. This fact also explains why Saddam was not tried for the more serious charges of war crimes during the Iran Iraq war. Had a trial been held the truth of US complicity would have come out.
The problem with Kuwait was not just the promise of the war charges. During the Iran Iraq war, Kuwait bagan side drilling the oil fields near the border with Iraq and extracted oil worth a few billion. And Kuwait was a provinve of the Ottoman Empire and Iraq has always had claims over Kuwait and trhe only reason the West created Kuwait as an independent emirate was to protect its investment in Kuwait.
It is at this point Saddam made his biggest mistake: he marched into Kuwait in earlyn 1991 thinking that the US will back him as it had done in the past. That was a major miscalculation and the UN imposed sanctions regime led to the death of more than a million Iraqis.
How will the Iraqis remember Saddam Hussein? After the passions exited by the US sponsored Idenntity politics dies down, the Iaqis will remember Saddam Hussein as a martyr killed by the USA when he asserted Arab natioanlist pride.