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

Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was born on 28 April 1937 near Tikrit. Raised by his maternal uncle Khairallah Talfah, a pan-Arab nationalist army officer, Saddam joined the Arab Socialist Baath Party in 1957. He participated in the failed 7 October 1959 assassination attempt on Prime Minister Abdul-Karim Qasim and fled to Egypt.

By 1979 al-Bakr was ill and contemplating a federation with Hafez al-Assad's Syria that would have made Assad his deputy and sidelined Saddam. Saddam forced al-Bakr's resignation on 16 July 1979.

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.

The al-Anfal campaign (the name from a Koranic chapter, "The Spoils") ran from February 1986 to September 1989 under cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, who earned the nickname "Chemical Ali". Eight phases of combined-arms operations destroyed around 4,000 Kurdish villages. Chemical weapons were used at Halabja on 16 March 1988, killing around 5,000 civilians in a single attack. Total al-Anfal deaths are estimated at 50,000 to 100,000, with around 1.5 million displaced.

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 fled Baghdad on 9 April 2003 as US forces entered. He hid for eight months. US 4th Infantry Division forces captured him in a spider hole on 13 December 2003 ("Operation Red Dawn"). The Iraqi Special Tribunal tried him for the al-Dujail killings.

Kanan Makiya writing as Samir al-Khalil (Republic of Fear, 1989) is the classic anatomy of the Baathist police state.

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.

He was rational within his information environment; his miscalculations flowed from poor information, not irrationality.

"Baathist" is the wrong primary descriptor by the 1990s. Tikriti and Albu Nasir clan dominance is closer to reality.

1986-1989, peaking in 1988. Not the whole Iran-Iraq War period.