Saddam’s quarter-century in power was a virtually uninterrupted exercise in bloodletting in nearly every direction.
Soon after becoming president, he massacred personal opponents in and outside of his ruling Baath party. For the next two decades, he would subject critics and adversaries to a steady stream of torture, assassination, and terror, including the rape rooms, prison horrors, and executions that were regularly reported by Amnesty International and others. Fellow Sunni Arabs were not exempt, but the main categories of victims were Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Iraq’s Kurds and Shiites.
In 1980, Saddam launched a needless and bloody war against majority-Shiite Iran and terrorized Iraq’s own Shiites to ensure their quiescence. As that war wound down, Saddam was freed to turn his attention to the Kurds whose loyalty was, indeed, questionable. In the 1988 “Anfal” campaigns, his henchmen killed 100,000 or more Kurds (including through poison gas) and forcibly resettled thousands more in desolate regions elsewhere in Iraq–events that Human Rights Watch declared “genocide.”
Two years later, he invaded Kuwait and treated its civilians with notable brutality. When Operation Desert Storm shattered Saddam’s army, both Kurds and southern Iraqi Shiites rose in revolt, and the regime maintained power through astonishing savagery, which filled mass graves across southern Iraq with an unknown number of Shiites–perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. The same images are evoked again and again: rapes, murder of children, forms of torture that make your eyes flinch from the page, and masses of victims buried in the night.
The book’s marketing strategy prominently claims that Saddam’s quarter-century claimed two million lives. That might overstate the tragedy. It’s also premature; researchers simply can’t settle on a persuasive number of victims until those mass graves are unearthed in the years to come. But what cannot be denied is the scope of Saddam’s atrocities. Within his regime, Saddam ruled like Stalin: Everyone in the elite was a potential victim, and knew it. Outside the regime, he ruled more like Hitler: Since oil-rich Iraq didn’t need Soviet-style slave labor, Saddam simply killed his adversaries.
In one of the most insightful essays, Hazem Saghieh, a prominent London-based Lebanese journalist, argues that comparisons to those totalitarian counterparts are not out of place. And in the preface, Bernard Kouchner, the human rights campaigner and founder of Doctors Without Borders, unabashedly calls Saddam “one of the worst tyrants in history.”
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