The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (90 page)

SADDAM HUSSEIN

Death toll:
300,000 killed internally
¹

Rank:
96

Type:
despot

Broad dividing line:
Saddam vs. everyone

Time frame:
ruled 1979–2003

Location and major state participant:
Iraq

Who usually gets the most blame:
Saddam

Economic factor:
oil

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Was he really as evil as the U.S. government made him out to be?

N
EVER A SOLDIER DESPITE THE UNIFORM HE HABITUALLY WORE, SADDAM
s
pent his youth as a street brawler and enforcer for the Ba‘ath Party—revolutionary pan-Arab nationalists. The overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958 led to a decade of coups and countercoups, in which the Ba‘ath sometimes won and sometimes lost. By 1968, Saddam was the chief deputy to the dictator, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, and in July 1979 he set aside his ailing boss and quickly killed anyone who seemed likely to object.

Iraq is an artificial country with borders that were drawn to suit the European colonial powers (Britain especially) rather than to reflect local allegiances. In this multiethnic mishmash, Saddam gave lucrative favors to the Sunni Arab minority concentrated in the center of the country in exchange for their help in keeping the Shiite Arab majority under control. Saddam especially promoted family and friends from his hometown of Tikrit to high positions and encouraged them to loot their various fiefdoms with near impunity, although any cronies who showed ambition beyond simple greed would be dragged away and killed.
²

Saddam himself was the idolized apex of power. He erected statues to his glory and hung posters wherever statues wouldn’t fit. Songs praising him opened television newscasts.
³
He maintained tight control over his people by propagandizing himself into a great hero and then whisking away in the dead of night anyone who dared disagree. In prisons up and down Iraq, tens of thousands of troublemakers were either tortured and killed or tortured and released as a warning to others. Mutilated bodies of state enemies were returned to their families for burial in order to spread rumors of savage treatment in prison.
⁴
Innocent family members of dissidents were kidnapped, raped, tortured, or killed as an additional punishment against anyone who got on his bad side.
⁵

Kurds

While most dictators in the past half century have been content to stay at home and quietly brutalize only their own countries, Saddam tried twice to expand into his neighbors, first Iran (1980–88) and then Kuwait (1990–91). He failed both times and turned his wrath against his own people.

The Kurdish minority that straddled the border of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq had been sporadically resisting Iraqi rule since the country had been formed after World War I. When the Kurdish town of Halabja just inside Iraq fell to an Iranian advance in March 1988, the local Kurds welcomed the liberation. Angered by the disloyalty, Saddam unleashed hell against Halabja. Several rounds of airstrikes destroyed the town with explosives, napalm, and poison gas, indiscriminately killing 5,000 or so civilians.
⁶

By this time, Saddam had focused on the Kurds as the scapegoats for the failure of his war with Iran. Between February and September 1988, Saddam’s troops systematically swept through Kurdish territory, destroying the rural Kurds village by village in Operation Anfal. The men of fighting age were trucked off to be beaten, shot, and dumped into mass graves. The elderly were sent to concentration camps in the south to be starved, and the women were resettled, often sold as brides or nightclub hostesses across the Arab world.
⁷
Saddam killed anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 Kurds in this operation.
⁸

Americans

In 1991, as the American-led coalition drove Saddam out of Kuwait, the Americans encouraged the Iraqis to throw off the dictator who had dragged them into a war against the entire world. The Shiite Arabs of the southern marshes rose in revolt, expecting the coalition to come to their aid. The Americans were not about to get sucked into a civil war, so they held back while Saddam moved in and massacred 50,000 Shiite rebels, sympathizers, and bystanders. A simultaneous uprising of Kurds also failed to dislodge him, and Saddam drove the Kurds into the mountains of the north where American air cover eventually helped them establish an autonomous zone.

Although the world quarantined Saddam and Iraq after 1990 for disrupting international calm, that never seemed like a satisfactory solution. Leaving such a valuable supply of the world’s oil sitting unused under a pariah dictator was dangerous and unprofitable. In March 2003, hoping to drag Iraq kicking and screaming back into the community of nations and the global economy, American President George Bush (the younger) invaded Iraq and clumsily replaced Saddam with what was supposed to be a lucrative and stabilizing outpost of Western Civilization in the heart of unfriendly territory, but it deteriorated into car bombs and chaos instead.

Saddam, now a prisoner, was tried and hanged by this new regime in 2006.

IRAN-IRAQ WAR

Death toll:
700,000
¹

Rank:
61

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line and major state participants:
Iran vs. Iraq

Time frame:
1980–88

Location:
Persian Gulf

Who usually gets the most blame:
Saddam Hussein

Economic factor:
oil

I
RAN AND IRAQ HAD DISPUTED OWNERSHIP OF THE OIL-RICH BORDERLANDS
along the Shatt al-Arab River at the head of the Persian Gulf for years. Then Saddam Hussein tried to take advantage of the chaos unleashed by the 1979 Iranian Revolution by annexing the disputed territory. Iraqi armies crossed into Iran in September 1980 and rammed through the first Iranian lines of defense, but as Iranian resistance stiffened, the war stalled in the outskirts of the city of Abadan.
²

When two of the world’s leading suppliers of oil go to war, the rest of the world has to take sides, but when the war pits a brutal dictatorship against a fanatic theocracy, it’s hard to know which side to take. As a purely practical matter, however, it’s easier to line up with corrupt dictators because they’re usually more willing to work a deal. During the Iran-Iraq War, most of the world tossed in with Iraq. Centrist Muslim states such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia openly assisted the Iraqis, as did the Soviets, who were the traditional Cold War sponsors of Iraq. The United States supplied the Iraqis with intelligence, and committed the U.S. Navy to safeguarding the flow of oil out of (and the flow of money and arms into) Iraq.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was too crazy for any respectable nation to support openly, but plenty of nations operated covertly. The world’s outcast states—Israel, South Africa, North Korea, and Libya, for example—supported their fellow outcast by supplying military technology and expertise in exchange for cash or oil. Iran also got secret aid from the superpowers in exchange for the Iranians using their influence with dangerous Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan (Russians) and Lebanon (Americans).
³

In May 1982, an Iranian counterattack restored the antebellum border and shifted the momentum of the conflict. Over the next couple of years, the Iranians gradually slugged deeper into Iraq, until once again the war stalled in the suburbs of a major objective, the Iraqi city of Basra.

By now, both sides had turned desperate and were fighting dirtier than usual. To terrorize the enemy population, both sides sent warplanes and missiles screaming out of the sky into cities far behind the front lines. Iraq shelled enemy soldiers with nerve gas. Iranians took advantage of their superior numbers and fanatically religious youth to launch human waves against Iraqi positions in the hopes that some—not many—might break through.

Iran launched Operation Kheiber (Dawn) from mid-February to mid-March 1984 over control of the strategic Basra-Baghdad waterway. It was an artless slugging match of Iranian frontal assaults and Iraqi gas attacks that killed 20,000 Iranians and 6,000 Iraqis—and mutilated and scarred tens of thousands more—in less than a month.
⁴

The last major offensive was the Battle of Basra, which became the bloodiest battle fought anywhere in the world since World War II. From December 1986 to April 1987, approximately 50,000 Iranians and 8,000 to 15,000 Iraqis were slaughtered for no gain on either side.
⁵

None of these efforts broke the stalemate; they merely elevated this conflict to the deadliest war for soldiers since Vietnam. Finally, in August 1988, when it became clear that no one was going to win, the two exhausted countries agreed to a cease-fire negotiated by the UN.