The "antiwar" movement's favorite dictator, Saddam Hussein. How they miss him....

In 1979 al-Bakr started to make treaties with Syria, also under Ba'athist leadership, that would lead to unification between the two countries. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad would become deputy leader in a union, and this would drive Saddam to obscurity. Saddam acted to secure his grip on power. He forced the ailing al-Bakr to resign on 16 July 1979, and formally assumed the presidency.

Shortly afterwards, he convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on 22 July 1979. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped (viewable via this reference), Saddam claimed to have found a fifth column within the Ba'ath Party and directed Muhyi Abdel-Hussein to read out a confession and the names of 68 alleged co-conspirators. These members were labelled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one by one and taken into custody. After the list was read, Saddam congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty. The 68 people arrested at the meeting were subsequently tried together and found guilty of treason. 22 were sentenced to execution. Other high-ranking members of the party formed the firing squad. By 1 August 1979, hundreds of high-ranking Ba'ath party members had been executed.

And so Saddam created a cult of personality. Never a good sign.

As a sign of his consolidation of power, Saddam's personality cult pervaded Iraqi society. Thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals were erected in his honor all over Iraq. His face could be seen on the sides of office buildings, schools, airports, and shops, as well as on Iraqi currency. Saddam's personality cult reflected his efforts to appeal to the various elements in Iraqi society. He appeared in the costumes of the Bedouin, the traditional clothes of the Iraqi peasant (which he essentially wore during his childhood), and even Kurdish clothing, but also appeared in Western suits, projecting the image of an urbane and modern leader. Sometimes he would also be portrayed as a devout Muslim, wearing full headdress and robe, praying toward Mecca.

And he created the secret police, or the Mukhabarat, which turned Iraq into a police state which Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib pale in comparison to.

IIS is alleged to be responsible for a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations abroad. These include the assassinations of Sheikh Talib al-Suhail al-Tamimi in Beirut (April 1994), Ayatollah Mehdi al-Hakim in Sudan (January 1988), and Dr. Ayad Habashi in Rome (October 1986), as well as the nearly successful assassinations of President George H.W. Bush, former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and the Emir of Kuwait.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded revolutionary Iran which resulted in a futile eight year war that cost 500,000 lives. (Hussein's dictatorship consisted of his minority Sunnis who lorded over the majority Shias and minority Kurds and Saddam feared Shia Iran's meddling.) The United States backed Iraq, as did the Soviet Union. Although both countries sold weapons to each side, as did other countries like Spain and Portugal. Britain, France, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, West Germany, Italy, Egypt, Jordan, and Singapore all backed Iraq as well.

The conflict is often compared to World War I, in that the tactics used closely mirrored those of World War I, including large scale trench warfare, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, use of barbed wire across trenches, human wave attacks across no-mans land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas against Iranian troops and civilians as well as Iraqi Kurds.

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In the first days of the war, there was heavy ground fighting around strategic ports as Iraq launched an attack on Khuzestan. After making some initial gains, Iraq's troops began to suffer losses from human wave attacks by Iran. By 1982, Iraq was on the defensive and looking for ways to end the war .

At this point, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. Health Minister Dr. Riyadh Ibrahim suggested that Saddam temporarily step down to promote peace negotiations. Initially, Saddam Hussein appeared to take in this opinion as part of his cabinet democracy. A few weeks later, Dr Ibrahim was sacked when held responsible for a fatal incident in an Iraqi hospital where a patient died from intravenous administration of the wrong concentration of Potassium supplement.

Dr Ibrahim was arrested a few days after he started his new life as a sacked Minister. He was known to have publicly declared before that arrest that he was "glad that he got away alive." Pieces of Ibrahim's dismembered body were delivered to his wife the next day.

Against the Iraqi minority Kurds, Saddam lauched the Al-Anfal Campaign (genocide).

According to the HRW during the Anfal campaign, the Iraqi government:

• Massacred 50,000 to 100,000 non-combatant civilians including women and children;
• Destroyed about 4,000 villages (out of 4,655) in Iraqi Kurdistan. Between April 1987 and August 1988, 250 towns and villages were exposed to chemical weapons;
• Destroyed 1,754 schools, 270 hospitals, 2,450 mosques, 27 churches;
• Wiped out around 90% of Kurdish villages in targeted areas.

Then the war ended with the Halabja poison gas attack (Kurdish: Kîmyabarana Helebce)

a chemical weapons attack that took place on March 16, 1988, during the closing days of the Iran-Iraq War. The weapons were used by Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The attack quickly killed thousands of people (around 5,000 dead) and injured around 11,000, most of them civilians. The incident, which has been officially defined as an act of genocide against the Kurdish people is the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history.

And yet the so-called "antiwar" movement wishes Saddam was still in power.

After the Iran-Iraq war Saddam was deep in debt:

The financial loss was also enormous, at the time exceeding US$600 billion for each country (US$1.2 trillion in total). But shortly after the war it turned out that the economic cost of war is more profound and long-lasting than the estimates right after the war suggested. Economic development was stalled and oil exports disrupted. These economic woes were of a more serious nature for Iraq that had to incur huge debts during the war as compared to the very small debt of Iran, as Iranians had used bloodier but economically cheaper tactics during the war, in effect substituting soldiers lives for lack of financial funding during their defense. This put Saddam in a difficult position, particularly with his war-time allies, as by then Iraq was under more than $130 billion of international debt, excluding the interest in an after war economy with a slowed GDP growth. A large portion of this debt was loaned by Paris Club amounting to $21 billion, 85% of which had originated from seven countries of Japan, Russia, France, Germany, United States, Italy and United Kingdom. But the largest portion of $130 billion debt was to Iraq's former Arab backers of the war including the US$67 billion loaned by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Jordan, a debt which contributed to Saddam's 1990 decision to invade Kuwait and threaten Saudi Arabia.

And so Saddam went rogue like Sarah Palin and annexed a member of the United Nations, Kuwait, and raped her population. After he was kicked out of Kuwait, Saddam ordered the retreating Iraqi army to set all of the oil fields on fire. The environmental destruction of the BP oil spill pales in comparison to this spiteful act.

The Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by Iraqi military forces setting fire to 700 oil wells as part of a scorched earth policy while retreating from Kuwait in 1991 after conquering the country but being driven out by Coalition military forces. The fires started in January and February 1991 and the last one was extinguished by November 1991.

The resulting fires burned out of control because of the dangers of sending in firefighting crews. Land mines had been placed in areas around the oil wells, and a military cleaning of the areas was necessary before the fires could be put out. Somewhere around 6 million barrels (950,000 m3) of oil were lost each day. Eventually, privately contracted crews extinguished the fires, at a total cost of US$1.5 billion to Kuwait. By that time, however, the fires had burned for approximately ten months, causing widespread pollution.

Also after the war in 1991, the majority Shia Iraqis in the south revolted.

With little more than small arms, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and some captured tanks and artillery pieces, the rebels had few surface-to-air missiles, which made them almost defenseless against Iraqi helicopter gunships and indiscriminate artillery barrages. The central government responded to the uprisings with crushing force.

Saddam also responded with the draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes:

According to a 2001 United Nations Environmental Programme report by Hassan Paltrow, the projects resulted in:

• The loss of a migration area for birds migrating from Eurasia to Africa, and consequent decrease in bird populations in areas such as Ukraine and the Caucasus
• Probable extinction of several plant and animal species endemic to the Marshes
• Higher soil salinity in the Marshes and adjacent areas, resulting in loss of dairy production, fishing, and rice cultivation.
• Desertification of over 7500 square miles.
• Saltwater intrusion and increased flow of pollutants into the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, causing disruption of fisheries in the Persian Gulf

For all the damage he inflicted over the years, Saddam was admirably dignified at his execution, in contrast to his Shia executioners who behaved like taunting thugs to the camera.

John Burns and Marc Santora, writing in The New York Times, described the execution as "a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video recordings, of making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shi'ites who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs."

Hitchens wrote, "The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against "the Persians" and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself."