The Truth About The Saddam Hussein Affair

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

The Western public was encouraged to blame every ill act upon Saddam Hussein, conflating Iraq with one man and to lend their ears to his most entrenched enemies in order to bring him down.

The Western media invariably prefaces references to Saddam Hussein with the sobriquets ‘dictator’ or ‘tyrant’. His achievements are rarely admitted. Similarly, Western publications including books select dark unsmiling photographs to further emphasise their view. Today in Iraq, to speak well of Saddam Hussein is akin to a crime and can result in serious harm. Even circulating his image has become taboo.

The tall, handsome young Arab man stretched his long legs from the stylish French settee then resumed decorum. Seated beside him was the French premier, Jacques Chirac [1]. An agreement for France to sell Iraq two French reactors had just been signed. It was 1975 [2]. Chirac had also visited Baghdad the year before and France had also agreed to train 600 Iraqi nuclear technicians and scientists. [3] Saddam Hussein had first travelled to France and met Georges Pompidou in 1972 for talks about the nationalisation of Iraq’s petrol.

A friend to Iraq, France had enjoyed a 24% stake in Iraq’s oil production since the 1920s in competition with Britain. She had become Iraq’s main trade and technology partner [4] under Chirac’s leadership. Saddam Hussein had also long declared his admiration for General de Gaulle and his style of leadership. He did not admire or copy Stalin or Hitler as his foes have alleged. Early footage is testimony to his gravitas and style. [5] This upright formal bearing and culturally sensitive conduct in public was also evident in his visit to Delhi, India, in 1974 meeting Indira Ghandi. [6]

To his great credit, the late French leader, Jacques Chirac (who passed away in September 2019) would later strongly oppose the US-led invasion and refused to join the Coalition. He sent Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin to “do diplomatic battle at the United Nations. “De Villepin’s address to an emotionally charged Security Council on February 14 was a vibrant challenge to the logic of war, and elicited rare applause from his audience…In this temple of United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, we are guardians of a conscience. The heavy responsibility and great honour that is ours must lead us to give priority to peaceful disarmament,” de Villepin said. [7]

Alas, for Iraq, the French did not carry the day, and on March 18, 2003, the very eve of the invasion began, Chirac warned: “Iraq does not represent an immediate threat that would justify an immediate war. France appeals to the responsibility of all to respect international law. Acting without the UN’s legitimacy, putting power before law, means taking on a heavy responsibility.” [8]

This position was backed by three-quarters of the French population and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. [9]

Regrettably, Iraq is further than ever from meeting such democratic standards as Bush Jnr claimed his invasion would bring to the country. The Muhasasa (quota-based) system of government apportioned according to sect and ethnicity has failed in Iraq – just as it has in Lebanon. [10]

US/UK Enemies of Iraq

Britain openly vaunted a different manner of “strong” leadership amongst its own. The Conservatives hailed Margaret Thatcher – at her peak – when challenging Argentina over the Falklands Islands – as the ‘Iron Lady.’ Ingratiating, New Labour’s Tony Blair, a performing lawyer, conversely adopted a smiling stage-managed sincerity. She had armed Saddam all along. [11]

America acted in its now well known smug self-righteousness as the world’s leading super power, failing to apologise for its excesses in Vietnam including the use of Agent Orange or earlier, unleashing the H bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki; its debacle over the Bay of Pigs, its double dealings in the Iran Contra Affair, its role behind the UN sanctions regime imposed upon Iraq for some 13 years, followed by Washington’s false claims about Iraq’s involvement in 9/11; rendition and torture of prisoners at ‘black’ sites’, torture at Gitmo and at Abu Ghraib and Falluja in Iraq. Throughout the 1990s until the illegal invasion of Iraq hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs were dropped on civilian targets in Baghdad, Basra and the Kurdish north killing many thousands and maiming thousands of others. Depleted Uranium (DU) tipped weapons resulted in birth defects, cancers and Gulf War Syndrome among former armed forces. White phosphorus was also widely used by American forces in civilian areas including Falluja after the invasion.

The crippling of Iraqi society and its health system through sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council between 1990-2003 had already killed over half a million babies and infants and exposed the once wealthy, self sufficient nation to widespread poverty, humiliation and despair.

The economic sanctions have since been categorised as laying “claim to be the worst humanitarian catastrophe ever imposed in the name of global governance.” [12]

The Coalition killed thousands of Iraqi civilians through constant aerial bombardments including 408 civilian victims in the bombing of the al-Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad in 1991 – almost four times the number of the Dujail fatalities for which Saddam Hussein was made to appear in the IHT televised farce. They slaughtered retreating Iraqi forces heading north from Kuwait at Mutla Ridge and repeated the tactics on convoys fleeing towards Jordan. The justifies resistance to the invasion was labelled an ‘insurgency’ and any ‘insurgent’ was a legitimate target.

The United States still refuses to acknowledge these “errors” or to compensate the families of the victims such as those of the al-Amiriyah bombed out bomb shelter who complain about being forgotten.

Everyone knew the urban site in the middle of the predominantly Sunni district of al-Amiriyah in Baghdad was being used as a civilian shelter during US bombing raids. But the US military continued to claim it was an act war as they believed the location to be a Ba’ath “command and control centre”, but it was not wartime: the ceasefire with the Coalition had been signed ending the conflict with Kuwait.

On 14 April 1995, UN Security Council Resolution 986 was adopted unanimously and established the subsequently notorious Oil-For-Food Programme “. [13] The effects of sanctions and the ill-run programme would become so catastrophic that the International Red Cross had to extend its own budget for 1999 by 60% just in order to try to continue its programmes in health, water and sanitation – areas of service provision that had once been first class in Iraq. [14]

The UN was heavily surcharging the country for the pitiful goods purchased in its name under the corrupt Oil-For-Food regime. As has been exposed in the case of various other such UN projects, burdensome administration fees cut deeply into the budget, such as $1,300,000,000.00 in just the first four years – an amount equivalent to providing salaries of $300,000 per annum for each Iraqi including the Kurds. [15] The UN also refused to aid Iraq in any practical form on the ground by buying its wheat yet maintained sanctions and handsomely paid its own staff and contractors. Projects they funded in the name of Iraq, and for the Kurds, were rarely completed but the money was still mysteriously spent. [16]

The Arab world admired the vision and strength of Saddam Hussein, who eradicated illiteracy in Iraq and empowered women. He stood by the rights of the Palestinians, combatted Islamic fundamentalism, tackling Shi’a and Sunni Wahhabist extremist groups, refrained from assassinating Ayatollah Khomeini despite his plotting against his hosts, and after the revolution stood up both to Iran and the West. The Kurds were seen as insurgents that no deal would please.

Iraq had not been behind the division of Kurdistan – that deed was the work of the Sykes-Picot accord of 1916 and a century on it has still to be overturned.

Nor was it the Ba’ath Party that murdered the Hashemite kings installed by Britain when, as a colonial power, she secured the mandate for Iraq after the carve up of the Ottoman Empire. The barbaric slayings were the work of pro-Nasserite Iraqi officers under the command of General Abd al-Karim Kasim in Iraq’s Royal Guard that revolted against the royals they were assigned to protect. The Free Officers slayed, dismembered and violated the corpse of Crown Prince Abdul al-Ilah, and assassinated 19-year -old King Faisal II and Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said, in an attack on Rihab Palace. The bloody events are known as the July 14 revolution of 1958. Landmarks, including a bridge across the Tigris still bear its name. Its main goal was to “sever Iraq from its imperial ties with the British and United States. [17] Saddam Hussein took part in the first attempt to assassinate General Kasim, by this time installed as the country’s leader. The Ba’athists overthrew him on February 8, 1963 in a fresh coup. Premier Kasim was executed the following day by firing squad…

It was not to be the end of colonial, or neo-colonial, schemes towards Iraq by the British, Americans, and indeed, by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s pro-Islamist Turkey. [18]

Britain and the US to control Iraq anew

Virtually every media or diplomatic reference made to Saddam Hussein in Britain and the United States was prefaced by the sobriquet, ‘dictator’, ‘tyrant’, ‘despot’ or even the ‘butcher of Baghdad.’ This tendency endures today, even among academics, as if to do otherwise would be to betray Washington or Downing street. Perhaps, it is because a majority has swallowed the populist falsehoods put about concerning Saddam’s Iraq such that few bother to check the facts for themselves. Saddam Hussein is blamed for events that occurred even before he was in power and others he had no connection with.

Iraq was and remains primarily a tribal society. It was not an authentic monarchy. When the secular socialist Arab Ba’ath party took power it was not in order to launch a Western-model democracy but to establish stability and effect social change on a Pan-Arab secular nationalist basis.

CIA funding

In the 1990s, the CIA funded Shi’a dissidents to form the Iraqi National Congress (INC) including ex-Ba’athist, Ahmad Chalabi, to the tune of an initial $100 million aiming to topple the Iraqi President. He also had the ear of Judith Miller of the New York Times who did not adequately check what Chalabi fed her or her sources. The Guardian called this coverage a ‘pyre of lies’ against Iraq. [19]

Chalabi was also later given the reins of De-Ba’athification and his nephew, Salem Chalabi, was positioned to head the trial judges in the US-funded $75 million tribunal to try Saddam Hussein for the deaths of 148 males in Dujail. The victims were largely subversive elements supporting the pro-Iran, Da’wa party inside the small town of Dujail. In 1982, they tried to assassinate the Iraqi leader when he stopped to visit there during the war with Iran. His government then treated them as they treated other traitors. That treatment was viewed by the International community as involving excessive force and was therefore considered to be a ‘crime against humanity’ despite it being wartime and that Iraq’s leader nearly lost his life in the failed shooting attempt.

These same pro-Khomeini elements finally executed the Iraqi leader, 24 years later, after the sham trial. The trial was condemned by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other human rights observers as not meeting even the minimal standards of a fair trial.

CNN has since noted: “ In 2004, even after being captured by U.S. forces, Saddam Hussein told an FBI interrogator he believed Iran was a greater threat to Iraq than the United States, according to newly released FBI documents.” [21]

The same truth was shared with CIA-interrogator, John Nixon. It has proven correct.

Saddam Hussein also “commented about the mental state of U.S. soldiers occupying Iraq. “If you asked the American soldier – who came to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but none could be found, and who came to remove the leaders of the Hussein dictatorship, who are all in jail now, but are replaced with other dictators – whether he wanted to stay or go, he would say go.” [22]

Lasting damage by Kanan Makiya

American citizen of Iraqi background, INC activist and author, Kanan Makiya, did more damage to Iraq during the 1990s than almost anyone else. He gained the ear of George W. Bush and produced two pro-Shi’a anti-Saddam books under the pseudonym, Samir al-Khalil, claiming to tell the truth about what was happening in Iraq under the Ba’ath: the Republic of Fear (1989) followed by Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993) and – he added a further scathing appraisal of Iraqi architecture, with The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam’s Iraq (2003). Makiya had a personal grudge against Saddam Hussein as his family had been moved from their home in Baghdad and went into exile in Britain after family disagreements with the Ba’ath Party in 1972. His father however returned to Baghdad in the 1980s to work on the historic Khulafa project. “The son would make his name deriding the regime that his father had worked for,” one able commentator observed. [23]

A professional friend of Makiya, Christopher Lydon, publishing his views on Radio Open Source recently declared “He got it wrong, Alas: “My friend Kanan Makiya was the most influential Iraqi advocate in America of the war to “liberate” his country five years ago. Today he is the most articulate casualty of his own fantasy. Kanan is famous now mainly for telling President Bush, face to face two months before the US invasion, that the American troops “will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months… Kanan Makiya’s scripts and interviews, which informed much mainstream war-mongering, read now like the full catalog of illusion, self-delusion and folly. He is a caution to us intellectuals and wannabes against the poison of very bad ideas — like the notion of transformation by conquest and humiliation.” [24]

CIA analyst, John Nixon, the first de-briefer of the Iraqi president when referring to Makiya’s views emphasised that Iraq was not just a “republic of fear” as in Makiya’s book title. Nor did Nixon consider that the West’s caricature of Saddam Hussein represented the complex (and very likeable) man whom he came to know. [25]

The Western public was encouraged to blame every ill act upon Saddam Hussein conflating Iraq with one man and lending their ears to his most entrenched enemies in order to bring him down. Saddam Hussein had few Western friends but an important one was the former US Attorney General, Ramsay Clark, who was outraged by the humiliating spectacle of the Iraqi strongman brought down by his foes. [26]

He had protested against the sanctions regime and had met Saddam in Baghdad at least four times. After the latter’s capture by the US Fourth Infantry Division in December 2003, tipped off by a mole aiming to claim the $25 million reward on offer, Clark visited Raghad Saddam Hussein, the president’s eldest daughter, at her home in Amman, Jordan where she had been given asylum. He kept her informed about her father’s situation as the unlawful trial trial went on. Clark observed correctly: “The Iraqi Special Tribunal was created and financed by the United States and therefore has no legitimacy… Plus, the judges are long time political enemies of the defendant who’ve shown their bias in statements like “a trial is not necessary, just a hanging.” [27]

Once the CIA and FBI interrogations began, the media blackout carried on into the first months of 2004. Just as in the period leading up to the Iraqi leader’s capture, news reports on events in Iraq were dominated by the constant suicide bombings, ambushes, kidnappings and sectarian clashes as the fatalities spiralled ever higher.

News about Saddam himself remained that of the poison pens, some Western media like the UK tabloid, the Daily Mail stooping so low as to publish photographs of the captive Iraqi leader stood in his underwear as if this was a worthy headline. Saddam Hussein was still the more dignified and despite being filmed twenty-four hours a day even when using the toilet would hang a towel in front of it over the back of his plastic chair. The cell was otherwise a bare concrete tomb.

THE TOP TEN LIES

Lies spun about Saddam Hussein by his foes

The following fictions were fabricated by the West in concert with their allies from among the Shi’a and Kurdish opposition exiles. The intent was to vilify Saddam Hussein the easier to overthrow him and the Ba’ath Party with popular consensus. Most of these fictions still dominate Internet searches despite archive source material and reliable witnesses refuting it.

Lies:

1. Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937. By his own account, he had a happy childhood and sought to better himself by obtaining an education. His father, Hussein al-Majid, died when his mother was six months pregnant with him. [28] An elder brother, Adham, had passed away at the age of 13 around 1937. Subha Tulfah, his widowed mother, then remarried his paternal uncle, Ibrahim Abd al-Majid, as tribal custom goes, some two years later as considered fitting. Saddam also had a sister called Siham born in the mid 1930s in addition to the better-known half-brothers –the eldest of which, Sabawi, was not born until 1947. By then, young Saddam was ten years old and living with his maternal uncle in Baghdad. For a time, his sister, Siham is said to have been president of the Iraqi Women’s Association but there is very little mention of her.

Contrary to the tales of abuse in circulation by his enemies, Saddam claimed to have loved and admired his uncle Ibrahim who became his step father and they remained close. He was not brought up as an abused, unloved, thug in a “mud hut”. Houses in Mesopotamia were traditionally made of baked or fired clay bricks, including the great cities of Sumer, Akkad and Babylon. Earth and clay are better materials for the heat than concrete. The simple homes thus constructed were not ‘mud huts’ but small houses the like of which can be found across the Near and Middle East. Saddam had a positive family upbringing among a large extended kinship group.

2. The charismatic and distinctive Iraqi leader had NO body doubles, nor did his sons. As he laughingly replied to CIA-de-briefer, John Nixon, this is Hollywood fantasy. No one could successfully imitate Saddam’s style or his speech. To external viewers there could be many lookalikes stood near him, around him or in similar circumstances, uniformed and with moustaches.

3. Saddam Hussein did not have President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr pushed aside against his will so as to take over. The two men were very close and Saddam regarded the General like a father figure as he emphasised in his interrogations to John Nixon. al-Bakr was also his near relative, being the cousin of his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah.

Al-Bakr was president of Iraq following the Ba’ath Party coup that terminated the rule of Colonel Abdel Salam Aref on 16 July 1979. He died at the age of 68 on 4 October 1982 after a very long illness and three years after stepping down, naming Saddam Hussein as his most-able successor. King Hussein of Jordan attended al-Bakr’s state funeral that was led by Ba’ath founder, Michel Aflaq. Al-Bakr received full honours and a week’s mourning was announced. To run the rumour that Saddam Hussein had him poisoned was an insult to both men. It would also have led to an internal tribal feud. Old film footage of the two men shows al-Bakr ailing but always friendly with the dynamic 42-year-old vice president, Saddam Hussein.

4. Saddam Hussein did not have his maternal cousin, Adnan Khairallah Tulfah, killed. The helicopter crash was just that – an accident caused by one of the sand storms that are becoming ever more frequent in Iraq with climate change [29]. The helicopter with two escorts was returning to Baghdad from Sarsang in Kurdistan on May 4, 1989 during the volatile spring weather. All three helicopters were caught in the storm.

A crew member in Adana Khairallah’s helicopter survived after the pilot lost control as did the crew of the other two helicopters. There can have been no just cause for suspicion of foul play and the aircraft went down near Mosul. Family members had been together at the Sarsang Kurdish resort where Adnan Khairallah had a palace and had been inspecting Iraqi army positions in the Kurdish heartland. The war with Iran had ended the year before but hostilities were ongoing between the Iraqi forces and the Kurdish peshmerga fighters who had supported Iran against their own country.

Saddam Hussein loved Adnan Khairallah and hailed him afterwards as a “sparkling star in Iraq’s sky” and “war hero”. General Khairallah received full honours in a state funeral.

Adnan Khairallah’s statue in Baghdad has also since been toppled by the Shi’a-led usurpers installed by the United States [30]. By this time, plotting in the US was well underway to vilify Saddam Hussein and human rights groups were being quoted. (Once the Kurds gained quasi -autonomy in 1991, they soon turned their weapons on each other anew.)

The Iraqi leader had a mausoleum raised to Adnan Khairallah opposite the split dome monument known as the Shuhada Martyr’s Memorial built to honour Iraq’s war dead from the Iran-Iraq war. (That monument has now been taken over by the pro-Iran Shi’a groups in power that have turned the underground museum into a memorial to their own dead in the war and to the dissidents killed by the former government.)

5. Saddam Hussein had married Khairallah Tulfah’s daughter, Sajida, the sister of Adnan in 1963 when he was aged 26. He had been very close to his uncle, her father, and all his cousins throughout his life. Cousin marriages are the most common form of tribal marriage in Iraq, including among Kurds. The betrothal between Saddam and Sajida had been arranged when they were still children between the branches of the families. Adnan was 50 years old at the time of the accident, and commander of the Iraqi Army and Defence Minister. He had been in position since Saddam became president.

6. Rumours over the family rift after Uday killed Saddam’s guard, Kamel Hana Gegeo, were American inspired. The sons of successful fathers often turn out rotten. The loving father that Saddam Hussein was, just as photographs show him to be – and according to the testimonies of his daughters, did NOT take his sons to watch torture sessions or brutalise them. This is an INC fiction. Uday’s excesses became impossible to curb and he was punished several times by his father including being sent into exile in Switzerland for a time and Saddam torching his beloved car collection. His mother always spoke up for him.

7. The very good-looking father of five was not a womaniser. He had no time for dalliances, kept long office hours, wrote his own speeches and later, wrote books that reflected his socialist ideals; he fought numerous deadly enemies without and within Iraq while maintaining an active family life. Kamel Hanna was not killed in a rage by eldest son, Uday, because he had brought women to Saddam Hussein but because he introduced his father to Samira. That is another Hollywood fiction. Many of these fictions derive from Latif Yahiya’s book, I was Saddam’s Son, that was turned into a Hollywood film Devil’s Double. Sources close to Uday refute the claim that underpins it. Latif Yayha was not Uday Hussein’s body double.

Saddam Hussein took a second partner later in his life in 1986 when he was almost fifty – an aristocratic, but married, Iraqi woman named Samira Shahbandar. Saddam’s own children were grown up and independent by this time, Uday being 31. Saddam married Samira in a private ceremony owing to Sajida’s jealousy. Islam permits a man to take four wives. Born in 1946, Samira was almost a decade younger than Saddam and had two sons by her previous marriage. It is claimed that she bore Saddam a son named Ali that he did not deny in his CIA interrogations. Speaking openly about women is considered shameful in Islam and this was stressed to his American captors. Politics is a different matter to open discussion of a public figure’s personal life concerning relationships with women.

Saddam Hussein had pushed forward implementing equal rights for women – those rights have since been forfeited following his demise with the reversion to fundamentalist interpretations of Islam in all sectors of life in Iraq under the Shi’a dominated administration. Women have been pushed back under the veil and hijab and equality in the workplace is a thing of the past. Domestic violence and ‘honour’ killings have dramatically increased.

8. The Iraqi leader did not personally order or know in advance about the attack on Halabja in which chemical-biological weapons were used. The Ba’ath archives corroborate this. He was infuriated when he heard how General al-Khazraji under his paternal cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid’s command, had staged the attack. The operation came in retaliation for the Kurdistan Patriotic Union (PUK) bringing Iranian troops into the area against Iraq in the war with Iran. The Iranians had also used chemical weapons against Iraqi troops. Iran Watch notes: By 1998, the Iranian government had publicly acknowledged that it began a CW program during the war. [8] According to the DIA, the program began under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), with the role of the Ministry of Defense increasing over time.[9] [31]

Just as ethnic Kurds have sought to secure a greater Kurdistan, so too have several Arab leaders sought to form a United Arab Republic. This aim has largely failed over differences in leadership and the means for securing their objective – both in the case of Iraq and of Kurdistan.

The West cared little if anything about the use of bio-chemical weapons at the time. Indeed, British PM, Margaret Thatcher, doubled Iraq’s trade credits afterwards.

The necessary elements for the weapons manufacture had been provided by the Swiss, the Germans and the Dutch. Britain had also long since developed them at Porton Down. Churchill had threatened to use them in crushing the Kurdish rebellion in the 1920s under Shaikh Mahmud Barzinji saying, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes…It would spread a lively terror.”

American policy was also so duplicitous that while the American administration had openly supported Iraq in the war with Iran it covertly provided Iran with weapons and surveillance intelligence on Iraq in what came to be exposed as the Iran Contra Affair. The Ba’ath Revolutionary Command Council was convened by Saddam over it and spent weeks investigating the evidence, shocked by the revelations. [33] As a side note, had the Kurdish leadership (the KDP and the PUK) not aligned themselves with Iran, happily overlooking how Iran was executing their fellow Kurds) Kurdish villages in Iraq would not have been likely to face attacks and reprisals whether unconventional or conventional.

9. There was no Kurdish ‘genocide’ according to the strict definition of the label. The Anfal operation in its several phases was aimed at the Kurdish armed rebel groups and not at all Kurds as a people or as a race. The operation predominantly targeted the Barzanis and followers of Jalal Talabani’s PUK. In order to undercut their power and influence over the local population some 2,000 villages in border areas were razed and the inhabitants moved inland, or deported to the south, to prevent contact with the rebels in the mountains. Village razing and clearances had already begun in the mid 1970s with further clearances along the Iran-Iraq border after the Algiers Agreement of 1975 – before Saddam’s presidency. Arabization of Kurdish areas proceeded apace during the same period and does so afresh under the pro-Iran Shi’a government. NATO member Turkey did the same in Kurdish areas under its control/occupation throughout the 1990s with little, if any, censure by the United States and Britain and repeats the exercise in Syria since invading and occupying sectors in the north (Kurdish, Rojava) by recycling Islamic jihadists. [34]

After the failed 1991 Kurdish uprising, encouraged by George W. Bush – but not backed up by him thereafter, the two Kurdish leaders met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to discuss reaching a fresh agreement [35].

Had Saddam Hussein been as brutal as many detractors claim he could have killed Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani in their visits to Baghdad. He could equally have imprisoned them for life in the same manner as the Turks have done in sentencing PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, to death commuted to life in prison after his capture on 12 February 1999.

Instead, Saddam Hussein welcomed the rival leaders with great civility. [36] Massoud Barzani recalled this conduct later yet still labelled Saddam ‘evil’. He also claimed that he as Kurdish leader had forgiven all the Kurds that had served in the Fursan (Knights or Jash) for the Baghdad government.

Short of using chemical weapons, the Kurdish leadership in power since 1991 has used national security justifications for clamping down on dissent against their own people – and external critics.

The KDP and PUK have also fought bitterly against one another for long periods openly, and in a war of words and smear campaigns, as well as against the Communists, the Kurdish Salafist Islamists of Ansar al-Islam and the PKK.

The KDP, as rebel forerunner, had fought Iraq since the collapse of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, Iran, in 1946. The Kurdish conflict pre-dated the Ba’ath era. The fault lay with the manner of division of the Kurdish heartland upon the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire although Kurdish tribes had warred with one another and every neighbour throughout their documented history.

A state of semi-autonomy was accorded to the north by Saddam Hussein, a secular Arab nationalist that sought to keep Iraq intact. When Kurdish “insurgents” continued to fight him, they were met with the full force of the Iraqi army and treated as traitors. Many Kurds worked for Iraq and were reviled as ‘jash’ by the rebels. [37] On 31 August 1996, Massoud Barzani implored Saddam to send in troops against his rival, the PUK. Iraq did so. [38]

Mass graves exist, but it was not a campaign of genocide programmed aimed to kill all Kurds as with Hitler and the Holocaust towards the Jews as a people. (The American forces backed by Kurdish peshmerga in Falluja have also since been guilty of the massacre of Sunni Arabs with the dead hastily buried in mass graves; the Shi’a usurpers of power since 2003, Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI, ISIS and the Hashd al-Sha’bi militias are also guilty of massacres, murders and mass graves are being uncovered. Saddam Hussein, unlike the Turks, never banned the use of the Kurdish languages or Kurdish literature and music. Kurdish culture was prominently featured on Iraqi state television and Kurdish culture and folklore celebrated at festivals and highlighted on Iraq’s postage stamps. By contrast, throughout the same period, Turkey sought to Turkify Kurdish expression and banned the use of Kurdish openly, including giving children Kurdish names and changing Kurdish place names to Turkish ones. [39]

10. Saddam Hussein neither threatened nor intended to assassinate George Bush Snr or any member of the Bush family. This lie is still propagated in Bush Jnr’s memoirs. Intelligence investigations showed the claim to be baseless. Bush Jnr used it as another pretext to invade Iraq.

Many more lies than these are still in circulation…

Iraqi Shi’a opposition to Iranian influence

Many Iraqi Shi’a Arabs willingly fought in the war against Iran and continue to oppose Iranian intervention in Iraq. Those present in the Tishreen opposition movement have faced slaughter at the hands of state snipers and pro-Iran militias many trained by the IRGC.

The main historic pro-Iran Shi’a Iraqi groups comprised within Da’wa and SCIRI were bankrolled by the West as well as Iran and have effectively helped deliver Iraq into Iran’s hands. They do not represent the will of all Iraqi Shi’as, many of whom boycotted the most recent parliamentary elections held in October 2021. Eight months on the contestants are still fighting amongst themselves over forming a cabinet and taking control of the country’s resources rather than the national interest. [40]

Saddam Hussein had sought to curtail Iran’s influence over the Shi’a citizens of Iraq and in separating the powers of state from religion to prevent the ‘black turbans’ from seizing power as in neighbouring Iran.

No legal basis existed for the trial of Saddam Hussein convened under the Occupation with the IHT trial paid for by the occupying power, the U.S. There was no basis for comparisons to be made between the IHT and the Nuremberg trial, or references to Hitler and Goebbels. Such are frequent through the pro-US prism of the two American lawyers, Michael Newton and Michael Scharf in their book, Enemy of the State: The trial and Execution of Saddam Hussein. [41]..

It was the pro-Iran loyalists who had so long intrigued against Baghdad (in collusion with both Tehran and the West) that were behind the focus and inevitable outcome of the President’s show-trial. Several of the main protagonists were also present at the undignified execution. The condemned man had more dignity than all of them.

As Gary Kern aptly described: In the last chapter of The Prisoner in His Palace, (Will) Bardenwerper lists the lasting psychological effects on the men forced to stand and allow sacrilege to the body of an old prisoner they had guarded and couldn’t help but admire. One after the other they would experience post-traumatic stress, marital problems, unemployment, incommunicability. Shortly after the execution, the Iraqi government released its film to TV networks around the world. But the secretly recorded video was released immediately afterward, and it went viral on the Internet. Nixon saw it and was appalled: “We had come to Iraq saying that we would make things better. We would bring democracy and the rule of law,” he wrote in Debriefing the President. “And here we were, allowing Saddam to be hanged in the middle of the night.” [42]

The Kurdish duopoly

“Toxicity of political infighting and factionalism” (UNAMI)

Each of Iraq’s ethnic Kurdish presidents since Saddam Hussein have been paper tigers. For its part the Kurdish leadership in Kurdistan itself has become a kleptocracy characterised in the eyes of the UN Iraq’s representative, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert as guilty of the “toxicity of political infighting and factionalism. “ [43]

The West should acknowledge that they helped to sacrifice the man who could hold the country together and who kept the Shi’a fundamentalists and Sunni Salafists at bay. He had mellowed and there had been a willingness to ally itself against extremism after 9/11 – a willingness that Bush Jnr. rebuffed in his personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein.

The misalliance of Western governments with Saddam Hussein’s enemies has destroyed the lives of millions of people in Iraq and blighted the survivors. Thousands of US and British military personnel also suffer from war disabilities and psychological illnesses. Others took their own lives on return from their tours in Iraq, including some of Saddam Hussein’s last personal guards.

Let us recall an early British Embassy assessment:

Telegram from British Embassy Baghdad to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, “Saddam Hussein,” December 20, 1969.
Source: Public Record Office, London, FCO 17/871.

“At first, Hussein comes across as “singularly reserved” but eventually begins to speak “with great warmth and what certainly seemed sincerity” about various subjects. He insists Iraq’s relationship with the Soviet bloc “was forced upon it by the central problem of Palestine,” and he reveals an apparently “earnest” hope for improved ties with Britain – “and with America too for that matter.” He is “young,” with an “engaging smile,” “a formidable, single-minded and hard-headed member of the Ba’athist hierarchy, but one with whom, if only one could see more of him, it would be possible to do business.”

That position need not have changed. After Saddam Hussein’s hastened execution, Sir Terence Clarke, Britain’s former Ambassador to Iraq (during the Iran-Iraq war, 1985-1989) declared somewhat ruefully:

“One has to understand that Saddam for all his terrible faults did have a vision for Iraq, he set it out in many speeches and indeed in books. And his vision of Iraq was that it should be a major player not only in the region but on the world scene, and he had the means to achieve that end – enormous oil wealth, well educated, well motivated, people, and he undoubtedly did a lot of things for the benefit of the people. He brought things that we accept as normal: education, health, water, electricity, to the most remote corners of the country where previously these things simply did not exist. There were many parts of Iraq that were extremely primitive. So there were benefits. And, people, provided that they didn’t seek to oppose him and just kept their heads down and got on with their lives had a reasonable way of life. [44] [45]

Alas for progress, the Shi’a turban dominated regime has outlawed all positive expression concerning the Ba’ath era and Saddam Hussein. Even Ba’ath era memorabilia is now banned in Iraq or distorted by the state. Rather than any attempt at reconciliation, revenge is the key driver as it has been since the exiles usurped power.

Iraqi defence lawyer in the Anfal trial, Badi’ Aref, had opined in 2014, “I am thinking of emigrating from my country, and if I was tasked with defending Saddam, I would not hesitate.” [47]

It is, of course, the thought that counts. But even the thought is taboo with the usurpers still clinging to power – but divided over almost everything else.

Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a senior contributing writer for iKurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.

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