The execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on Eid Al Adha was an act of desperation by the Bush administration and the Shiite-led regime installed in Baghdad.
George W. Bush needed a "victory" over Saddam before outlining a "new" strategy for Iraq in the coming year. This "new" strategy is expected to be little different from the failing strategies he has adopted since March-April 2003. Even the predicted "surge" of 20,000-25,000 troops, to add to the 147,000 largely useless US soldiers already in Iraq, is nothing new. There were "surges" of about the same number during the assembly elections in January and December 2005. At that time, the extra troops managed to curb attacks by the resistance and keep down other violence, but Iraq has been plunged into sectarian warfare since then.
Prime Minister Nouri Maliki also needed a boost with the Shiite public which has been losing faith in him because he has been unable to quell the sectarian violence gripping the country's capital or restore electricity and other services. Maliki has also become increasingly dependent on the movement of radical cleric Moqtada Sadr who was determined to execute Saddam at the earliest possible moment and conditioned the return of his 32 legislators to parliament and his six ministers to their offices on this event.
They began a boycott of the government after Maliki met Bush in Amman in November. By putting immediate-term petty political priorities ahead of the long-term interests of Iraq and the Iraqis, Bush and Maliki have done serious damage to the prospect of Sunni-Shiite coexistence.
Even in Saddam's brutal Iraq, executions were banned on religious holidays. Killing him on the Eid guarantees that he will be regarded by many Sunni Arabs and Muslims as a "sacrifice" and "martyr" to the cause of Arab and Muslim freedom and independence. He must have been pleased to die on this day. It was a day suitable for the death of an Arab hero and Saddam was a man who modelled his reign on the careers of heroes of Mesopotamian and Islamic history.
Saddam was born in April 1937 in Al Auja, a small village outside the town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad. His father, a poor farmer died before his birth and he was raised by a stepfather who brutalised the boy and decided he would spend his life tending sheep and working in the fields. But Saddam ran away from home to attend school in Tikrit. An uncle, Khairallah Talfah, an army officer cashiered after taking part in the 1941 anti-British coup mounted by Rashid Ali Gailani, took the boy to Baghdad where he completed secondary education.
In 1957, Saddam joined the Baath party, a pan-Arab movement espousing Arab renaissance, unity and socialism. In 1958, he was implicated in the murder of the Communist party boss in Tikrit and briefly jailed. In 1959, he took part in a failed attempt to assassinate General Abdel Karim Kassem, the Iraqi officer who overthrew the British-backed monarchy in 1958.
Lightly wounded, Saddam fled to Syria and thence to Cairo, the cultural and political hub of the Arab world. Instead of preparing for university, Saddam focused on Baath party business and rose quickly through its ranks to membership in the Regional Command.
After Kassem was toppled in 1963, Saddam returned to Baghdad where he and a cousin, General Ahmad Hassan Bakr, restructured the party and prepared to seize power. By the time the Baath took sole control in 1968, Saddam had become its enforcer and strongman. When Bakr retired in 1979, Saddam became president.
An unstable, paranoid personality who constantly feared ouster or assassination, Saddam promptly executed 66 opponents who were plotting to replace him through elections. These killings set the pattern of his rule during which he gave no quarter to those who opposed him or threatened the unity of the country.
Saddam strove to use revenues from Iraq's oil exports to transform Iraq into a major regional power and recapture the glories of its ancient and Islamic empires. An avid reader of history, he saw himself as the heir of the kings of Mesopotamia, Hammurabi, the first law giver, and Nebuchadnezzar, builder of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. He became a patron of the arts, like Harun Al Rashid, the ruler of the Abbassid empire at the height of its powers. He sought to imitate Salaheddin, the liberator of Palestine from the Christian Crusaders, by supporting the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.
But his practical mentor was Hajjaj bin Yusif, the 7th century general. When sent to Kufa to put down a Shiite revolt, Hajjaj left his army in the countryside and rode into the city alone on a camel. He went to the mosque where the elders had taken refuge and addressed them: "I see straining eyes and starting necks, heads ripe unto the harvest. Well, I am a master at that trade."
Hajjaj subdued the dissident Shiites and became governor of Iraq which he ruled, on behalf of the caliph, with an iron hand.
Saddam adopted the policies of other Third World leaders. He became a leading figure in the Non-Aligned Movement and played off the West against the Soviet Union to Iraq's benefit. He followed a pan-Arab policy and sent his army to halt the Israeli march to Damascus during the 1973 war. At home, he imposed order and built the country's physical and social infrastructure. He carried out agrarian reform, industrialised, provided Iraqi children with free schooling, introduced literacy courses for adults and established one of the best public health systems in the world.
He transformed Baghdad into a handsome city of broad boulevards, fountains and parks. Iraqi sculptors, painters, ceramists and musicians, the best in the Arab world, flourished.
On the military front, he contained the secessionist ambitions of the Kurds and fought the Shiite fundamentalists of the Dawa party who sought to overthrow the secular Baathist regime.
In 1980, he responded to the efforts of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's new ruler, to export his Shiite Islamic revolution to Iraq by attacking Iran. This was an ill-advised war which Saddam believed would last for three months but went on for eight years and ended in a stalemate. It was in the context of the war that members of the Iranian-sponsored Shiite Dawa movement attempted to assassinate Saddam during a visit to the market town of Dujail. He survived and ordered the execution of 148 townspeople. His death sentence was awarded for the Dujail killings.
Although Iraq claimed victory, the country emerged bankrupt and deeply indebted to Arab governments which had bankrolled the war because they too feared the spread of Iran's revolution. Towards the end of the war with Iran, Saddam launched the Anfal campaign against the Kurds. His aim was to move them from the northern border with Iran because they had collaborated with Tehran during the war. His second trial for the murder of tens of thousands of Kurds during the Anfal operation was going on at the time of his execution.
In 1990, Saddam accused Kuwait of stealing oil from Iraq's fields and of exporting more than its quota in order to keep the price low and harm Iraq. On August 2, he invaded Kuwait, the most disastrous decision of his reign. The administration of George H.W. Bush responded by imposing sanctions and waging a war to drive the Iraqis from the emirate. At its conclusion, Washington called upon Iraqis to overthrow the regime but Saddam's armed forces crushed Kurdish and Shiite rebellions in north and south.
He repaired Iraq's devastated physical infrastructure within a year, but sanctions ground down the country and reduced the people to penury.
Even before taking over the Oval Office in the White House, George W. Bush, vowed to topple Saddam in a bid to best his father. When Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, at the climax of the younger Bush's war on Iraq, US troops pulled down the statue of Saddam in the heart of the capital. He escaped attempts to kill or capture him and remained on the run until December 13, when he was betrayed and found hiding in a hole on a farm near Al Auja.
The Dujail trial began in 2005 and concluded last summer. It was a process deemed illegal under the Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from altering the legal system in a country under occupation. International jurists, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International said the trial was deeply flawed and overtly manipulated by the US and the government.
His death at the hands of hangmen from the Sadrist Mehdi Army militia was a travesty of justice. Although taunted by the Sadrists, he managed to go to his death with the dignity befitting a president of Iraq. He was buried on the second day of the Eid at Al Auja, the hardscrabble farming town which he hated and fled as a boy.
By Michael Jansen
© Jordan Times 2007
