Death of Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein, Dictator Who Ruled Iraq, Dies at 69
The hanging death of Saddam Hussein tonight ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history and negated the fiction that he himself maintained even as the gallows loomed— that he remained president of Iraq despite being toppled by the American military and that his power and his palaces would be restored to him in time.
Saddam Hussein visiting the Shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf in 1996.
Saddam Hussein in court as he received the death sentence on November 5 for his role in the killing in 1982 of nearly 150 people in the mainly Shiite village of Dujail.
The despot, known universally as Saddam, had oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years, unleashing devastating regional wars and reducing his once promising, oil-rich nation to a claustrophobic police state.
For decades, it had seemed that his unflinching hold on Iraq would endure, particularly after he held on to power through disastrous military adventures against first Iran and then Kuwait, where an American-led coalition routed his unexpectedly timid military in 1991.
His own conviction that he was destined by God to rule Iraq forever was such that he refused to accept that he would be overthrown in April 2003, even as American tanks penetrated the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in a war that has become a bitterly contentious, bloody occupation.
After eluding capture for eight months, Saddam became the American military’s High Value Detainee No.1. But he heaped scorn on the Iraqi judge who referred to him as the “former” president after asking him to identify himself on the first day of his trial for crimes against humanity, which ultimately lead to his execution.
“I didn’t say ‘former president,’ I said ‘president,’ and I have rights according to the Constitution, among them immunity from prosecution,” he growled from the docket. The outburst underscored the boundless egotism and self-delusion of a man who fostered such a fierce personality cult during the decades that he ran the Middle Eastern nation that joking or criticizing him in public could bring a death sentence.
Mr. Hussein’s own execution came after he lost the automatic appeal against his death sentence. The conviction stemmed from the ruthless revenge killing of 148 Shiite Muslim men and boys from the small town of Dujail just north of Baghdad, after a 1982 attack on his motorcade there. It was one of countless assassination attempts he survived. Mr. Hussein was due to face a series of trials over incidents of far greater magnitude, but Iraqi prosecutors started with Dujail because the evidence was clear-cut — including Mr. Hussein’s signature on at least one execution order.
“Long live the people!” Mr. Hussein shouted, looking drained but defiant, when the chief judge, Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, read the death sentence. “Long live the nation! Down with the occupiers! Down with the spies!” The judge ordered him removed from court and he exited still yelling.
The tribunal’s proceedings were condemned by some lawyers and human rights advocates as “victor’s justice,” not least because Iraq remained under American military occupation.
If a man’s life can be boiled down to one physical mark, the wrist of Mr. Hussein’s right hand was tattooed with a line of three dark blue dots, commonly given to children in rural, tribal areas. Some urbanized Iraqis removed or at least bleached theirs, but Mr. Hussein’s former confidants told The Atlantic Monthly that he never disguised his.
Ultimately, underneath all the socialist rhetoric, underneath the Koranic references, the tailored suits and the invocations of Iraq’s glorious history, Mr. Hussein was a village peasant trying to be a tribal leader on a grand scale. His rule was paramount, and sustaining it was his main goal behind all the talk of developing Iraq by harnessing its considerable wealth and manpower.
Mosques, airports, neighborhoods and entire cities were named after him. A military arch erected in Baghdad in 1989 was modeled on his forearms and then enlarged 40 times to hold two giant crossed swords. In school, pupils learned songs with lyrics like “Saddam, oh Saddam, you carry the nation’s dawn in your eyes.”
The entertainment at public events often consisted of outpourings of praise for Saddam. At the January 2003 inauguration of a recreational lake in Baghdad, poets spouted spontaneous verse and the official translators struggled to keep up with lines like, “We will stimulate ourselves by saying your name, Saddam Hussein, when we say Saddam Hussein, we stimulate ourselves.”
While Mr. Hussein was in power, his statue guarded the entrance to every village, his portrait watched over each government office and he peered down from at least one wall in every home. His picture was so widespread that a joke quietly circulating among his detractors in 1988 put the country’s population at 34 million — 17 million people and 17 million portraits of Saddam.
Throughout his rule, he unsettled the ranks of the Baath Party with bloody purges and packed his jails with political prisoners to defuse real or imagined plots. In one of his most brutal acts, he rained poison gas on the northern Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 of his own citizens suspected of being disloyal and wounding 10,000 more.
Even at the end, he showed no remorse. When four Iraqi politicians visited him after his capture in December 2003, they asked about his more brutal acts. He called the Halabja attack Iran’s handiwork; said that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and that the mass graves were filled with thieves who fled the battlefields, according to Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister. Mr. Hussein declared that he had been “just but firm” because Iraqis needed a tough ruler, Mr. Pachachi said.
It was a favorite theme, one even espoused in a novel attributed to Mr. Hussein called “Zabibah and the King.”
At one point, the king asks the comely Zabibah whether the people needed strict measures from their leader. “Yes, Your Majesty,” Zabibah replies. “The people need strict measures so that they can feel protected by this strictness.”
Aside from his secret police, the main factor that preserved his power was his practice of filling the government’s upper ranks with members of his extended clan, regardless of their qualifications. Their Corleone-like feuds became the stuff of gory public soap operas. Saddam once sentenced his eldest son, Uday, to be executed after he beat Mr. Hussein’s food taster to death in front of many horrified party guests, but later rescinded the order. The husbands of his two eldest daughters, whom he had promoted to important military positions, were gunned down after they defected and then inexplicably return to Iraq.
Continual wars sapped Iraq’s wealth and decimated its people. In 1980, Mr. Hussein dragged his country into a disastrous attempt to overthrow the new Islamic government in neighboring Iran. By the time the war ended in stalemate in 1988, more than 200,000 Iraqis were dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded. Iran suffered a similar toll. Iraq’s staggering war debt, pegged around $70 billion, soon had wealthy Arab neighbors demanding repayment. Enraged, he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, only to be expelled by an American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf war seven months later.
Yet in the language of his Orwellian government, Mr. Hussein never suffered a setback. After the gulf war ended with the deaths of an estimated 150,000 Iraqis, he called “The Mother of All Battles” his biggest victory and maintained that Iraq had actually repulsed an attack by “America and its criminal gang.”
“Iraq has punched a hole in the myth of American superiority and rubbed the nose of the United States in the dust,” Mr. Hussein said.
His defeat in Kuwait, followed by more than a decade of tense confrontations with the West over his alleged weapons programs, ultimately led to his overthrow. The extended bloodbath that followed the invasion, with the monthly death toll of Iraqi civilians estimated roughly at 3,000 by the end of 2006, made some nostalgic for even the oppressive days of Mr. Hussein, when public security was not an issue. His repressive ways were credited with keeping the fractious population of 26 million — including 20 percent Sunni Muslims, who dominated; 55 percent Shiite Muslims; 20 percent Kurds plus several tiny minorities including Christians — from shattering along ethnic lines.
Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in a mud hut on stilts near the banks of the Tigris River near the village of Tikrit, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad. He was raised by a clan of landless peasants, his father apparently deserting his mother before his birth. (Government accounts said the father died.) “His birth was not a joyful occasion, and no roses or aromatic plants bedecked his cradle,” his official biographer, Amir Iskander, wrote in “Saddam Hussein, the Fighter, the Thinker and the Man,” published in 1981.
Mr. Hussein told his biographer that he did not miss his father growing up in an extended clan. But persistent stories suggest that Saddam’s stepfather delighted in humiliating the boy and forced him to tend sheep. Eventually he ran away to live with relatives who would let him go to school.
Mr. Hussein’s first role in the rough world of Iraqi politics came in 1959, at age 22, when the Baath Party assigned him and nine others to assassinate Abdul Karim Kassem, the despotic general ruling Iraq. Violence was a quick way for a young man who grew up fatherless in an impoverished village to get ahead; bloodshed became the major theme of his life.
During the failed assassination, Mr. Hussein suffered a bullet wound to the leg. The official version portrayed him as a hero who dug the bullet out with a penknife, while the other version suggests that the plot failed because he opened fire prematurely.
He sought asylum in Egypt, where President Gamal Abdel Nasser nurtured the region’s revolutionary movements. Mr. Hussein recalled studying law and ignoring Cairo’s attractions. Others remember differently.
“He was what we call a troublemaker,” said Hussein Abdel Meguid, the owner of the Andiana cafe that Mr. Hussein frequented, recalling years later in an interview with The New York Times that the Iraqi once turned a brawl into a knife fight.
Soon after returning to Iraq, Mr. Hussein married his first cousin and the daughter of his political mentor, Sajida Khairallah Tulfah, on May 5, 1963. The couple had five children including two sons, Uday and Qusay, and three daughters, Raghad, Rana and Hala. He had mistresses, including prominent Iraqi women, but never flaunted them.
His wife, three daughters and roughly a dozen grandchildren survive him. Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay’s teenage son, Mustapha, died in July 2003 during a gun battle with American forces in a villa in the northern city of Mosul. Denounced by an informant, they had been the two most wanted men in Iraq after their father.
The first years of Saddam Hussein’s marriage coincided with political tumult in Iraq, with at least six coups or attempted revolts erupting between the assassination of King Faisal II in 1958 and the July 1968 putsch that brought the Baath Party to power.
Mr. Hussein’s main role while still in his early 30s was organizing the party’s militia, which became the seed of the dreaded security apparatus. By November 1969, he had eliminated rivals and dissidents to the extent that President Hassan al-Bakr appointed him vice president and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, as the cabinet was known. Saddam remained head of the intelligence and internal security agencies, in effect controlling Iraq.
The Arab Baath Socialist Party, whose name means “renaissance” in Arabic, had been formed in the 1930s to push a secular, socialist creed as the ideal path to achieving Arab unity. But that dogma proved a sinister excuse for the imprisonment, exile or execution of all potential rivals.
No other Arab despot matched the savagery of Mr. Hussein as he went about bending all state institutions to his whim. His opening act, in January 1969, was hanging around 17 so-called spies for Israel, up to 13 of them Jews, in a downtown Baghdad square. Hundreds of arrests and executions followed as the civilian wing of the Baath Party gradually eclipsed the Iraqi military and the era of coups ended.
Mr. Hussein staged perhaps his most macabre purge in 1979, when at age 42 he consolidated his hold on Iraq. Having pushed aside President Bakr, Saddam called a gathering of several hundred top Baathists.
One senior official stepped forward to confess to having been part of a widespread plot to allow a Syrian takeover. After guards dragged the man away, Mr. Hussein took to the podium, weeping at first as he began reading a list of dozens implicated. Guards dragged away each of the accused. Mr. Hussein paused from reading occasionally to light his cigar, while the room erupted in almost hysterical chanting demanding death to traitors. The entire dark spectacle, designed to leave no doubt as to who controlled Iraq, was filmed and copies distributed around the country.
Firing squads made of cabinet members and other top officials initially gunned down 21 men, including five ministers. Iraq’s state radio said the officials executed their colleagues while “cheering for the long life of the Party, the Revolution and the Leader, President, Struggler, Saddam Hussein.”
Mr. Hussein invariably ensured that those around him were complicit in his bloody acts, which he masqueraded as patriotism, making certain that there would be no guiltless figure to rally opposition.
In an authoritative account of Mr. Hussein’s regime called “The Republic of Fear,” the self-exiled Iraqi architect Kenaan Makiya (writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil) estimated that at least 500 people died in the purge that consolidated Saddam’s power.
Mr. Hussein’s titles reflected his status as an absolute ruler modeled after one of his heroes, Josef Stalin of the former Soviet Union. They included President of the Republic, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Field Marshal and Prime Minister. In addition, the state-owned news media referred to him repeatedly as the Struggler, the Standard Bearer, the Knight of the Arab Nation and the Sword of the Arabs.
Mr. Hussein saw his first opportunity for Iraq to dominate the region in the turmoil that swept neighboring Iran immediately after its 1979 Islamic revolution. In September 1980, Mr. Hussein believed that by invading Iran he could both seize a disputed waterway along the border and inspire Iranians of Arab origin to revolt against their Persian rulers. Instead, they resisted fanatically. Mr. Hussein never acknowledged making a gross miscalculation; rather, he vilified the Iranian Arabs as traitors to the Arab cause.
Iraq fared badly in the war, not least because Mr. Hussein interfered in the battle plans despite a complete lack of military training, even issuing orders based on dreams. When strategies urged by Mr. Hussein failed, he often accused the commanders of betrayal, cowardice and incompetence and had them executed.
Mr. Hussein adored the macho trappings of the armed forces, appointing himself Field Marshal and dressing his ministers in olive-green fatigues. If he was a poor military strategist, he was fortunate in his first choice of enemy. The fear that an Islamic revolution would spread to an oil producer with estimated reserves second only to Saudi Arabia tipped the United States and its allies toward Baghdad and they provided weapons, technology and, most important, secret satellite images of Iran’s military positions and intercepted communications.
The war lasted for eight years until Iran accepted a cease-fire in July 1988, with both sides terrorizing each other’s civilian populations by rocketing major cities. But the March 1988 mustard gas attack on the Iraqi village of Halabja by its own government was perhaps the most gruesome incident.
Mr. Hussein waged war while promising the Iraqi people that he would not diminish their standard of living, investing in massive development that markedly improved daily life. Rural villages were electrified and linked by modern highways. Iraq boasted some of the best universities and hospitals in the Arab world — all free. Its painters, musicians and other artists, many benefiting from generous government subsidies, were also the most accomplished in the region. Mr. Hussein had his own development methods — anyone who avoided mandatory adult literacy classes in rural areas faced three years in jail.
Official corruption was unknown in Iraq in the 1980s, and religious worship somewhat free. Mr. Hussein occasionally took populist measures to underscore the importance of the public welfare. Once, for example, he decided that his ministers were too fat and he demanded that they diet, publishing their real weights and their target weights in the news media. Mr. Hussein’s own weight could fluctuate from chubby to relatively trim, although well tailored suits hid his paunch. Around six feet tall, he was stocky and sported a trademark moustache.
In keeping with a ruler who used violence to achieve and sustain power, Mr. Hussein’s most widespread investments were in his military. He ended the Iran-Iraq war with one million men under arms.
By then Iraq had embarked on extensive projects to acquire a homegrown arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Iraq had also become a regional power, and Mr. Hussein expected to dominate the Arab world much as his hero Nasser held sway through the 1960s. In March 1990, he threatened to “burn half of Israel” if it ever acted against Iraq, even though the Israeli Air Force had humiliated the Iraqi leader by destroying his country’s nuclear research center at Osirik in June 1981.
Mr. Hussein’s next target was another neighbor, Kuwait, which Iraq had long considered part of Iraq and coveted for its deep-water port. On Aug. 2, 1990, his army swiftly occupied the tiny, immensely wealthy emirate, provoking an international crisis. Mr. Hussein declared the country Iraq’s 19th province, installing a puppet government. Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab states were shaken and outraged, while the United States and other Western countries feared for the oil fields ringing the Persian Gulf. The United Nations imposed a trade embargo and economic sanctions.
The United States and eventually 33 other nations deployed forces to the region and warned of a wider war if Mr. Hussein did not withdraw. As the crisis wore on, Mr. Hussein held onto Kuwait despite repeated threats from the United States, which dominated the military coalition by dispatching some 500,000 American soldiers.
While Uday and other senior Iraqis set about plundering Kuwait, Mr. Hussein portrayed the invasion as the start of an Islamic holy war to liberate Jerusalem. He declared that the “throne dwarfs” of the gulf must be overthrown so their wealth could fund the Arab cause. To lend himself the veneer of a religious crusader, he added the words “Allah-u akbar,” or “God is great,” to the Iraqi flag, said to be modeled from his own handwriting.
His public aims resonated among many Arabs in Jordan, Yemen and elsewhere, particularly because the brutality of Mr. Hussein’s government had never been detailed by the state-controlled media of other Arab states. In addition, Mr. Hussein’s Scud missiles crashing into Tel Aviv, however ineffective, created a stir in the Arab world.
Washington and its coalition allies hoped that the war would bring Mr. Hussein’s downfall. Even before the war ended, President George H. W. Bush encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow him, but there was no coherent plan. The ground offensive against Iraq ended after 100 hours, partly out of concern that American troops not occupy an Arab capital, partly because Arab allies feared the disintegration of Iraq and partly because a “100-hour war” made a good sound bite. Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, warned that sending American forces to Baghdad would get them stuck in a “quagmire.”
This decision enabled much of the elite Republican Guard to escape with minimal losses. The first Bush administration did little to support Shiite and Kurdish uprisings that erupted immediately after the war, which Saddam crushed with tanks and helicopter gunships.
For the next decade, Mr. Hussein repeatedly brought Iraq to the brink of renewed warfare by refusing United Nations weapons inspectors the unfettered access required to catalogue and destroy Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as specified in the cease-fire agreement.
The United Nations maintained strict economic sanctions against Iraq until 1996, when some oil exports were allowed to pay for food, medicine and war reparations. The sanctions, devastating to Iraqis, proved a boon to Mr. Hussein and his subordinates. The Government Accountability Office in the United States Congress estimated that the Iraqi leader siphoned at least $10 billion from the program by making oil trades off the books and demanding kickbacks.
Still, in an effort to end sanctions, Baghdad over the years offered at least five “full, final and complete” weapons disclosures, which the United Nations dismissed as incomplete. Some of the most extensive revelations emerged after the astonishing August 1995 defection of Saddam’s two sons-in-law and his two eldest daughters to Jordan. The Iraqi government was apparently worried that Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the minister in charge of weapons development, would disclose all that he knew. Six months later, Gen. Kamel Majid and his brother abruptly declared they had accepted amnesty and returned. Within days, Mr. Hussein’s daughters divorced them and they died in a violent shootout.
Mr. Hussein dyed his hair black and refused to wear his reading glasses in public, according to interviews with exiles published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 2002. Since a slipped disc caused him to limp slightly, he was never filmed walking more than a few steps. Each of his 20 palaces was kept fully staffed, with meals prepared daily as if he were in residence to disguise his whereabouts. Delicacies like imported lobster were first dispatched to nuclear scientists to be tested for radiation and poison.
His wine of choice was Portuguese, Mateus Rose, but he never drank in public to maintain the conceit that he was a strict Muslim. He even had genealogists draw a family tree that linked him to Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad.
He kept an immaculate desk, with reports from all the ministries neatly stacked. He usually read only the executive summaries, but would occasionally dig deeper and always complained that he was being deceived. He often was, with even his son Qusay telling military commanders to lie if Mr. Hussein thought something had been accomplished that was not.
He was particularly phobic about germs. Even top generals summoned to meet him were often ordered to strip to their underwear and their clothes were then washed, ironed and X-rayed before they could get dressed to meet him. They had to wash their hands in disinfectant.
Mr. Hussein’s American jailers reported that he tried to maintain those precautions, using baby wipes to clean meal trays, his table and utensils before eating.
Rarely traveling abroad, and surrounded by often uneducated cousins, Mr. Hussein had a limited worldview. He once reacted with wonder when an American reporter told him that the United States had no law against insulting the president. Former officials painted him as a vain, paranoid loner who no longer believed he was a normal person and considered compromise a sign of weakness.
Saad al-Bazzaz, an Iraqi writer and editor, said that Mr. Hussein, having risen so far beyond the village and cheated death so often, believed that God anointed him.
Mr. Bazzaz told The Atlantic that even Mr. Hussein’s speeches echoed Koranic texts. “In the Koran, Allah says, ‘If you thank me, I will give you more,’ ” Mr. Bazzaz said. “In the early ’90s, Saddam was on TV, presenting awards to military officers, and he said, ‘If you thank me, I will give you more.’ ”
Iraq under Mr. Hussein had a stifled quality. Imprisonment, torture, mutilation and execution were frequent occurrences, at least for those who chose to dabble in anything vaguely political. Simple information like the weather report was classified. There was no freedom of expression — even foreign newspapers were banned — and no freedom to travel. Contact with foreigners was proscribed.
There were widespread reports that Mr. Hussein himself periodically carried out the torture or even execution of those he felt had crossed him. In the summer of 1982, for example, Riyadh Ibrahim Hussein, the health minister, suggested during a cabinet meeting that Mr. Hussein step down to ease the negotiation of a cease-fire with Iran. Mr. Hussein recommended that the two retire to another room to discuss the proposal. When they did, a shot rang out. Mr. Hussein returned to the cabinet meeting alone, although in later interviews he denied killing anyone. The minister’s widow was sent his dismembered corpse.
Right after the gulf war, Mr. Hussein had 42 merchants executed for profiteering, their bodies hung on telephone poles with signs reading “Greedy Merchant” around their necks. Leaders of the Shiite Muslim religious community were a particular target for summary executions, a 1998 United Nations human rights report noted.
On the other hand, Mr. Hussein ordered mosques constructed around Baghdad on a scale not seen since it was the medieval capital of the Muslim caliphate. Perhaps the most striking was the Mother of All Battles mosque completed in 2001, the 10th anniversary of the gulf war. The minarets resembled Scud missiles, and the mosque held a Koran written with Mr. Hussein’s own blood, the president having donated 28 liters over more than two years.
Evidence from inside Iraq after the invasion confirmed what United Nations weapons inspectors anticipated beforehand — that Mr. Hussein abandoned the attempt to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons after his 1991 defeat. Orders from Mr. Hussein to destroy vestiges of the program, interpreted before the 2003 invasion as an attempt to hide their development, turned out to be an effort to comply with the ban.
The fatal controversy over whether Iraq was still developing unconventional weapons stemmed in part from Mr. Hussein’s desire to convince different audiences of different things, a postwar study by the Defense Department concluded. He wanted the West to believe that he had abandoned the program, which he had. Yet he also wanted to instill fear in enemies like Iran and Israel, plus maintain the esteem of Arabs, by claiming that he possessed the weapons.
Some Bush administration critics argued that the accusations over unconventional weapons were a smoke screen, that government hawks were determined to topple Mr. Hussein as a way of reasserting American power. Richard Clarke, a former national security adviser to three presidents, described in his 2004 book “Against All Enemies” the scene in the White House in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, with President Bush and other senior officials trying to link Mr. Hussein directly to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s organization. No such link was ever established.
Just before the invasion, Mr. Hussein, cigar in hand, appeared on television almost nightly, belittling American forces to small groups of Republican Guard commanders. He also admonished that the battlefields should be throughout Iraq, wherever there were people, even while secretly planning to protect only Baghdad.
His main concern was preserving his government, which the United States military discovered in interviews with his top aides after they were captured. Some of the unclassified results were published in a 2006 article in Foreign Affairs titled “Saddam’s Delusions: The View From the Inside.”
By 2003, Iraq’s military was anemic, weakened by sanctions and constant changes in command, not to mention the fact that Mr. Hussein, suspicious of coup attempts, barred any rigorous maneuvers and repeatedly created new popular militias. Commanders also constantly lied to him about their state of preparedness. The United States report quoted Mr. Hussein’s personal interpreter as saying that the president thought that his “superior” forces would put up a “heroic resistance and inflict such enormous losses on the Americans that they would stop their advance.”
Mr. Hussein cited both Vietnam and the hasty American withdrawal from Somalia in 1994 as evidence that Americans could not stomach casualties, and he did not take the threat of regime change seriously. He so believed his own publicity about his success in fighting the first gulf war that he used it as a blueprint for the second. Hence, his main worry during the invasion was to avoid repeating the Shiite and Kurdish internal rebellion of 1991. He did not blow up the bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates to slow the American advance, for example, out of concern that he would need to rush troops south to quell any uprising. Nor did he order the oilfields ignited, as he had in Kuwait, thinking he would need the revenue in the postwar period.
“Even with U.S. tanks crossing the Iraqi border, an internal revolt remained Saddam’s biggest fear,” Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, told the American investigators.
The war plan as described in the 2006 book “Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq” states that while Republican Guard troops were supposed to seal off the approaches to Baghdad, only the Special Republican Guard was permitted inside the capital, again as insurance against a coup. Military commanders needed permission for any large troop movements, and the collapse came so quickly that Mr. Hussein was still issuing orders to units that had ceased to exist.
One of his last sightings was on April 9, the same day that American soldiers pulled down his statue in a Baghdad square. He appeared outside a mosque in one neighborhood, addressing a crowd from the back of a truck, with the film broadcast later on Abu Dhabi television. “I am fighting alongside you in the same trenches,” he said.
He then disappeared, apparently using up to 30 hiding places and the aid of loyal tribesmen to escape capture despite a $25 million reward. He often traveled as he had during the first gulf war, in a battered orange and white Baghdad taxi. He issued periodic messages encouraging the insurgency.
In a letter dated April 28 that was faxed to Al Quds al Arabi, an Arabic newspaper published in London, Mr. Hussein blamed traitors for his ouster and urged Iraqis to rebel. “There are no priorities greater than expelling the infidel, criminal, cowardly occupier,” he wrote.
In December 2003, his location was divulged by a clan member captured in a raid on a Baghdad house. Less than 11 hours later, 600 American soldiers and Special Operations forces supported by tanks, artillery and Apache helicopter gunships surrounded two farmhouses near the banks of the Tigris in Al Dwar, a village about nine miles southeast of Tikrit, the tribal seat. The soldiers — no Iraqis were involved — found nothing on the first sweep. But on the second, more intensive search, underneath a trap door apparently made of Styrofoam, Mr. Hussein was discovered lying flat at the bottom of an eight-foot hole.
His first words when he emerged, nervous and disoriented, were, “I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate” in halting English. A special operations soldier there shot back “President Bush sends his regards,” the military said later. The main indication that the filthy, dilapidated concrete hut close by had been used by the former Iraqi president was a battered green metal suitcase holding $750,000 in neatly bundled bills.
L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupation authority, made the first official announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we got him.” The Iraqi journalists at the heavily guarded Baghdad news conference leapt up, applauded and cheered.
Mr. Hussein, sporting a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, was first shown on television undergoing a medical exam for head lice. The pictures electrified and shocked Iraqis and the larger Arab world, with some cheering and some appalled to see a captive Arab leader put on undignified display.
He was imprisoned at Camp Cropper, near the international airport some 10 miles from Baghdad, on the grounds of a former palace complex that the United States military turned into a prison for senior members of the government. The prison consisted of three rows of single-story buildings surrounded by a double ring of razor wire.
Mr. Hussein was kept in solitary confinement — letters and care packages including cigars sent via the Red Cross from his wife and daughters living in Qatar or Jordan were his main contact with the outside world. He lived in a relatively spartan cell consisting of a bed, a toilet, a chair, a towel, some books — including a slightly singed Koran with a bullet hole in it, which he said he found in some rubble —and a prayer rug.
Some of his former American guards, interviewed for a July 2005 story in GQ magazine, said he acted in a fatherly way, offering advice on finding a good wife — “neither too smart nor too dumb, not too old nor too young” — and invited them to hang out in one of his palaces after he was restored to power. He claimed that President Bush always had known he had no unconventional weapons. His favorite snack was Doritos corn chips, his guards said.
Mr. Hussein was combative throughout his trial, using it as a platform to encourage the insurgents. The proceedings frequently seemed to slide toward chaos, with the star defendant and the judges shouting at each other. The trial, held in one of the grandiose buildings erected not far from Mr. Hussein’s former presidential palace, proved something of a security nightmare, with three defense lawyers assassinated.
At one point, something he said prompted guffaws from a spectator in an overhead gallery. Mr. Hussein turned and pointed a finger, saying, “The lion does not care about a monkey laughing at him from a tree.”
Mr. Hussein often tried to draw parallels between himself and the famous leaders of Mesopotamia, the earliest civilization in the region, as well as Saladin, the 12th-century Kurdish Muslim military commander who expelled the crusaders from Jerusalem.
What preoccupied him, he said, was what people would be thinking about him in 500 years. To the horror of historic preservationists, he had the ancient walls of the former capital city of Babylon completely reconstructed using tens of thousands of newly fired bricks. An archaeologist had shown him bricks stamped with the name of Nebuchadnezzar II in 605 B.C.
After the reconstruction, the small Arabic script on thousands of bricks read, “In the reign of the victorious Saddam Hussein, the president of the Republic, may God keep him, the guardian of the great Iraq and the renovator of its renaissance and the builder of its great civilization, the rebuilding of the great city of Babylon was done.”
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posted by Joe Paris @ Friday, December 29, 2006
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