Quick questions on Saddam Hussein and Baathist Iraq: HSC Modern History Conflict in the Gulf

The regime had three overlapping power structures. The Baath Party provided the ideology (pan-Arab socialism), the mass mobilisation, and the personnel pipeline. The state security agencies provided the repression: the Mukhabarat (foreign intelligence), the Amn al-Khass (Special Security Organization), the Istikhbarat (military intelligence), and the General Security Directorate. The third structure was tribal and clan-based: Saddam's Albu Nasir tribe and Tikriti relatives dominated the Special Republican Guard, the Republican Guard, the presidential security, and the senior security positions.

Iraq's Shia majority (around 60 per cent of the population) was structurally excluded. The senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr was executed on 9 April 1980. The Dawa Party was banned and its members killed or exiled.

Saddam personally chose three wars.

Saddam saw the post-revolutionary disorganisation of the Iranian military as an opportunity to seize the Khuzestan oil fields. The war lasted eight years and killed 500,000 to 1,000,000.

Saddam emerged from the Iran war with around 80 billion US dollars in debt and a need to raise oil prices that Kuwait would not support. Operation Desert Storm expelled Iraq on 17 January to 28 February 1991.

The Bush 43 administration, after 9/11, treated Iraq's WMD programs and alleged terror links as intolerable risks. Coalition forces invaded on 20 March 2003.

Set Makiya against Sassoon. For Kanan Makiya, the regime was a "republic of fear": a totalitarian machine in which terror reached into every household and atomised society. For Joseph Sassoon, working from the Baath archive captured in 2003 (files on around three million Iraqis), it was a participatory, bureaucratic party-state in which ordinary Iraqis informed, joined and advanced - terror and complicity working together rather than fear alone.