“I expect to die a violent death, with nothing but the tip of my pinky finger remaining behind.”
– Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein grew up barefoot in a mud hut in the town of Takrit, north of Baghdad on the Tigris River. He never met his father. His mother, Subha Tulfah, was deeply disturbed, suicidal and homicidal. She repeatedly tried to kill the child in her womb. According to one, probably apocryphal, account, she jumped in front of a bus and screamed: “I am giving birth to the devil!” Some witnesses recalled the pregnant woman banging a door against her extended belly.
Against all odds, the child survived his mother. When he was born, she gave him the name “Saddam, “meaning “the one who confronts.”
Abandoned by his mother, Saddam was raised by a politically active uncle who became his role model and taught him to be a genocidal racist. When the budding despot was an adolescent, his uncle wrote a pamphlet titled “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies.” Saddam later turned the title into a credo, etched on a plaque on his office desk.
Upon taking power, Saddam transformed Iraq into a monument to himself. The megalomaniac sought to rebuild the biblical city of Babylon – a $200-million project in which every tenth brick was inscribed “Babylon was rebuilt in the reign of Saddam Hussein.” This would be his apotheosis, but it was never completed, stopped by the man Saddam hated as much as Jews: George W. Bush.
By dispatching U.S. troops to Iraq in 2003, Bush ended two-and-a-half decades of non-stop terror by Saddam, including the most wide-scale use of chemical weapons by any nation since World War I.
As part of the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire, Saddam had agreed to allow UN weapons inspectors to dispose of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which he claimed he did not possess. As the inspectors soon learned, however, his arsenal was staggering, including bio weapons like anthrax and botulinum toxin. His country remains the only in history to weaponize aflatoxin, a substance that gradually causes liver cancer and has no battlefield utility whatsoever; it could be used to give cancer to certain ethnic groups.
UN inspectors also uncovered an enormous Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Spread among 25 facilities, the $10-billion program employed 15,000 technical people. Based on a Manhattan Project bomb design, Iraqi scientists pursued five different methods for separating uranium.
The world feared that Saddam’s clandestine support of WMD might be coupled with his open support of terrorism. The final terrorism report by the Clinton State Department devoted more words to Iraq than any other country. In April 2002, Saddam publicly offered $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers who blew themselves up in the service of killing Jews. Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal, the two most wanted terrorist ringleaders of the last 20 years, both lived with safe haven in Baghdad.
Saddam operated his own terror camps. One of the most chilling was a facility south of Baghdad called Salman Pak, where terrorists (prior to September 11) had conducted training missions on a 707 fuselage, where they practiced the art of hijacking an aircraft without guns, using only knives and utensils. Just like the September 11 hijackers, these terrorists were mostly of Saudi origin.
By 1998, the watchful eye of the global community had frustrated and enraged Saddam, and he did his best to further obstruct UN inspectors. In December of that year, inspections stopped. The world wrung its hands over how to get Saddam to comply.
Then came September 11, which, as George W. Bush put it, “changed everything.” The Bush administration responded by first removing the Taliban government that harbored Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Fearing the next devastating attack could be ordered by Saddam, the American president decided the Iraqi dictator was an unacceptable danger in the post-9/11 world. He judged that the only way to disarm Saddam was to dislodge him.
Sure, the Bush administration had other reasons for removing Saddam – human rights, the objective of creating a “democratic peace” in the Middle East – but Saddam’s history with WMD and sponsorship of terrorism were the two primary factors in the 2003 invasion.