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Profile: Saddam Hussein's Rise to Power in the '60s and '70s, and His Ability to Maintain Control of Iraq
All Things Considered, November 17, 2002
Saddam's History
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Steve Inskeep.
The chief United Nations weapons inspector says that the question of war and peace will be answered in Saddam Hussein's dealings with the UN. Hans Blix is expected to arrive in Baghdad on Monday. A UN resolution gives Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein until December 8 to disclose all weapons of mass destruction or face a possible US-led attack. Iraq's final response will depend on Saddam, so tonight we start with the story of the Iraqi president. In the next few minutes, we'll examine Saddam's political life, how he rose to power and how he has used that power. After winning re-election last month, Saddam Hussein made a defiant statement to the world.
President SADDAM HUSSEIN (Iraq): (Foreign language spoken)
INSKEEP: `He who tries to shed the blood of others,' Saddam said, `must expect his blood to be spilt.'
Former US national security adviser Sandy Berger says the US has expended enormous energy trying to guess Saddam Hussein's intentions.
Mr. SANDY BERGER (Former US National Security Adviser): He's been the focus, probably, of more intelligence gathering than any figure in the last 25 years.
INSKEEP: Saddam began his career as part of the Arab nationalist movement. In the 1950s, he joined an organization called the Ba'ath Party. One of the party's founders wrote that change comes through violence. `When we are cruel to others,' the founder wrote, `we know that our cruelty is in order to bring them back to their true selves of which they are ignorant.' And the teachers and intellectuals who founded the movement in Damascus, Syria, were more idealistic than the men who took over the movement when it spread. In the 1950s, the Ba'ath Party involved itself in the violent politics of Iraq. David Newton, who's a former US ambassador to Iraq, says rival political parties attacked the Ba'ath in the streets.
Former Ambassador DAVID NEWTON: And they, in competition and in self-defense, developed their own street thugs, if you will. And the leader of this street was Saddam. And Saddam was not only seen as a tough man, he was a seen as a reformer and a modernizer.
INSKEEP: In 1959, at the age of 22, Saddam joined a group of Ba'ath Party members who tried to assassinate Iraq's president. Many of the plotters were arrested; Saddam fled into exile, but later returned. Author Edmund Ghareeb says that by the time the Ba'ath Party seized power in 1968, Saddam had made himself one of the most powerful men in the party.
Mr. EDMUND GHAREEB (Author): Saddam Hussein took charge at that time of two important bureaus within the party, and that is the party's military organization and the peasant bureau, which dealt with peasant affairs. Many of the peasants had begun to move from the rural areas to the urban areas.
INSKEEP: Saddam himself had grown up in Iraq's tribal culture and he acted like a tribal chief, everybody's powerful uncle. He promoted education, helping to make Iraq one of the most literate nations in the Middle East. For two decades, Khidir Hamza was a leading scientist in the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. He met Saddam several times, starting in the 1970s.
Mr. KHIDIR HAMZA (Scientist): In the '70s, he was building up his power base, so he was much nicer, he was approachable, he would actually listen to your personal problems and try to resolve them if he can, and he usually can. People in debt will go see him and he'll pay their debts off. People who need a house will go see him and try to help them with some government housing project or something, put them on a list or something. He was very helpful, he listens, he is patient.
INSKEEP: Saddam's image soon dominated the landscape. Rend Rahim Francke grew up in Iraq.
Ms. REND RAHIM FRANCKE (Director, Iraq Foundation): His picture hung up in all offices and on the streets alongside the photograph of Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, the then-president.
INSKEEP: In 1979, the president's picture disappeared and Saddam's image has hung alone ever since. Iraq soon started a disastrous eight-year war against Iran. Iraq survived only by using chemical weapons and depending on assistance from the United States. By then, Rend Rahim Francke had fled the country. Today, she's the director of the Iraq Foundation in Washington, which has collected documents from the Iraq regime, mostly papers stolen by opposition groups after the Gulf War. When we visited the other day, Francke handed over a binder full of papers neatly organized by subject.
Ms. FRANCKE: Detentions, arrests and deportations, executions, systematic deportations and elimination of villages.
INSKEEP: Many papers are available on the foundation Web site; even more are piled up on desks awaiting translation. Some of the most interesting are routine clerical memos from the security forces that Saddam controlled. One letter certifies that an Iraqi security officer has been properly trained in the art of opening other people's mail. Francke reads another letter from the Iraqi files. It's a letter written by a man whose son has been executed by the government.
Ms. FRANCKE: (Reading) `I am the father of the executed criminal,' so and so. `I have received the certificate of execution of my son, and I undertake--I pledge not to hold a funeral.'
INSKEEP: Saddam used ruthless methods to recover control of Iraq after he lost the Gulf War in 1991. The remains of the Iraqi army destroyed rebellions by Kurds and Shiite Muslims. Thousands of northern Iraqi villages were destroyed. Andrew Coburn visited northern Iraq in 1991 while writing a book about Saddam.
Mr. ANDREW COBURN (Author): You could see across the countryside, across the mountains of Kurdistan--you'd see these sort of smears on the hillside, which is where there had been villages which had been totalled razed to the ground. And it was kind of extraordinary because this region had been, you know, inhabited for 10,000 years. It was the first time in 10,000 years that this countryside had been emptied. And they were saying that wild animals that hadn't been seen for years were coming back; predators, you know, that hadn't been seen for like millennia were sort of once again roaming the land.
INSKEEP: Saddam mixed brutality with charm. In 1995, his own son-in-law defected to Jordan, taking with him valuable secrets about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Saddam courted the defector, pleading with him through letters and phone calls to come back. And Hussein Kamel did return, only to be executed on the orders of his father-in-law, Saddam Hussein.
Mr. COBURN: He understands Iraq very well. He understands how to manipulate people.
INSKEEP: Andrew Coburn saw the letter Saddam wrote in an effort to win back another of his former friends.
Mr. COBURN: This is a Kurd who had been--it was a Kurdish, sort of a feudal chieftain, who had been very well in with the regime--a collaborator, if you will--and then had sort of jumped ship during the uprising , you know, afterwards in '91. And Saddam was trying to get him back, and he was shunned. He was sending these letters every few weeks, which were like--the guy showed them to me. They were so charming and so--`How are you, Omar, my friend? Please don't let not this little disagreement come between us. I really value your friendship, your advice.' And, you know, this guy was smart enough not to buy that.
INSKEEP: Yet a man of such ruthlessness and shrewdness is isolated from the outside world. Only once did Saddam spend much time outside Iraq; when he was in exile in Egypt as a young man. Today, Iraqi defectors and others report that Saddam's closest advisers hesitate to tell him unpleasant facts.
In 1990, US Ambassador David Newton brought several US senators to meet Saddam. According to the Iraqi transcript of that meeting, the senators were deferential, yet Newman remembers that the Iraqi president was uncomfortable.
Mr. NEWTON: And I really came to the feeling at that meeting that Saddam, down deep, is a very insecure person, and that's why he insists on total control. And everything in his own meetings with his own people is totally scripted. He doesn't have any, really, face-to-face discussions with people. Meeting five US senators made him extremely nervous.
INSKEEP: People who've had audiences with the Iraqi president report that they're required to wash their hands with a special solution to make sure they don't contaminate him with disease or poison. Former national security adviser Sandy Berger says Saddam is, in his own way, a rational man, but one who's living in his own world.
Mr. BERGER: Is he rational within that world in terms of his own ambitions? Yes. But I think the danger always with Saddam Hussein is that world is a virtual world and not the real world.
INSKEEP: To Berger, that explains why Saddam ordered the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and believed his armies could defend it against the United States. Now Saddam faces the US and the rest of the world, again playing an extraordinarily complicated political game. Western governments trying to guess Iraq's next move have to try to see the world as Saddam sees it.
Today, the chief United Nations weapons inspector is assembling his advanced team and preparing to make the first entry into Baghdad since inspectors left four years ago. This time next Saturday we'll learn more about the history of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. We'll also review shifting US attitudes toward Iraq and its leader.
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