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Analysis: Saddam Hanged for Past Crimes

Council on Foreign Relations

December 30, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner

The most difficult month of Saddam Hussein’s life may not have been March 2003, when a U.S.-led coalition toppled his regime, but rather March 1991. It was then, shortly after his army was driven out of Kuwait, he faced a Shiite insurrection and briefly lost control of all but one of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. “Going back to the ‘68 revolution, everything pales in comparison to that very short, very intense two and a half-month period of time,” recounts Kevin Woods, an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses and coauthor of the Foreign Affairs article “Saddam’s Delusions.” Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident and author of the Republic of Fear, called it the first “Iraqi revolt against barbarism” (the second, he says, would come during the Iraqi elections of 2005). “Nothing like that had happened before,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

At the time, Iraq’s Shiites had been encouraged by then-President George H.W. Bush to “take matters into their own hands” and force Saddam aside. When they did, tens of thousands of Shiites were killed by Saddam’s forces. The White House, its rhetoric notwithstanding, stood by idly. “We did not think… that Saddam would continue in power having suffered such a resounding defeat,” James A. Baker, III, then secretary of state, later told PBS.

This episode encapsulated the topsy-turvy relationship between Saddam and the Americans. Nobody in the West mistook Saddam, who rose to power from Tikrit’s al-Khatab clan in the 1960s, as a benign force. He was a seen as a buffer to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a secular influence in a region swimming in religious extremism. Hence, Washington reestablished relations with Baghdad in 1983 and backed Iraq both militarily and financially during the Iran-Iraq War.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.