Saddam Hussein is back in the news -- and back on the minds of U.S. policymakers, who soon must come to grips with his prolonged defiance. It may be useful, then, to revisit the Iraqi leader and his aspirations. For this is no tinhorn dictator or mere bombastic demagogue, but a thoroughly ruthless and lawless man. The country he commands, moreover, was once the most powerful, and still is potentially the richest, of the Arab nations. His goals are grandiose, his methods unscrupulous; and American policies built on any other assumption are bound to fail.
Clues to the character of Saddam Hussein can be found in his unhappy early years. His family were landless peasants in the small town of Tikrit, about 100 miles north of Baghdad on the Tigris, and for portions of his childhood he lived literally barefoot in a mud hut. Deprivation actually set in before he was born.
Saddam's father died mysteriously a few months before his birth. Then weeks before he was born, his 13-year-old brother died in a Baghdad hospital while undergoing surgery for a brain tumor. His mother, beside herself, tried to abort the child she was carrying, then tried to throw herself under a bus, but was saved. When, despite all, the baby was born, she gave him the unusual name "Saddam," which means "the one who confronts."
The boy was sent to his maternal uncle in Tikrit. Then around the age of two or three, he was returned to his mother, when she married and moved to Uja, a tiny backward village nearby. His mother apparently loved him, and he her, but his stepfather mistreated him and always preferred his own children. At 10, Saddam fled their home and returned to his uncle. Saddam himself has described his childhood as dismal. A fatherless boy in a traditional society where fathers were a source not only of status and pride but also of protection, he had to fend for himself from a very early age.
His formal education was skimpy and delayed -- a few years of primary school in Tikrit starting when he was 10, and secondary school between the ages of 16 and 24. By his late teens Saddam was living with his uncle in Baghdad and had become the leader of a youth gang. Soon, he and some of his pals moved into the orbit of the clandestine socialist-nationalist Ba'ath party, which found them useful as bully boys. In 1959, when the party turned on the recently installed dictator, Saddam participated in an attempt on the dictator's life and was forced to flee to Egypt. By this time, he had assimilated the lesson that power grows from the barrel of a gun, and he personally carried a loaded revolver under his shirt at all times.
Another lesson he acquired early was Arab nationalism and hatred of the West. In 1941, at a time when the German army's eastward advance across North Africa and in the Mediterranean seemed unstoppable, Saddam's uncle, a nationalist army officer, joined in a pro-Nazi revolt against the British, then in control in Iraq. The uprising was quickly put down, and Saddam's uncle was arrested, jailed briefly, and expelled from the army. This bitter experience was not lost on the young Saddam. Both at home and at school, he was drinking in his Arab-Islamic heritage, especially its history of conquest. War heroes like Khalid, al-Qa'qa, and al-Muthanna, who fought under the Prophet Mohammed and his immediate successors; Harun al-Rashid, who ruled the vast and glittering Abbasid empire from Baghdad in the 8th century; and Saladin, born in Saddam's own Tikrit, who defeated the crusaders in Palestine in 1187 -- all these fired his imagination and filled his emotional world. From elementary school on, he seems to have held the conviction that to be a great historical figure known to every schoolchild throughout the Arab homeland meant, by definition, to be a warrior.
Saddam's difficult background prefigures many patterns and themes of his later life. Thus, his craving for the emblems of accomplishment and the trappings of power seems a reaction against the constricted horizons of his childhood. As he rose in the Ba'ath regime, he had himself awarded an honorary Ph.D. in law, a subject he had scarcely studied. He made up for his lack of military service -- a serious handicap in Iraqi political life -- by the same expedient: One fine day in 1976, he gave himself the rank of four- star general; then he promoted himself to staff field marshal when he became president, in 1979. He had a set of military uniforms designed for himself that reflect the sunlight in a special way, and when he is photographed among his generals, all wearing ordinary olive garb, he shines like a Mesopotamian god. Indeed, in poems and on posters, he is often portrayed as Tammuz-Dumuzi, the Sumero-Akkadian god of fertility and rebirth.
In addition to the obvious professional risks involved in his job, it seems that the instability of Saddam's early life also feeds his adult obsession with his safety. Unlike some leaders -- Indira Gandhi comes to mind he never allows his sense of invincibility to undermine his personal security. Instead, his safety is his foremost preoccupation, with priority over normal affairs of state. He trusts no one, and any breach of security around him can be punished by death. He sometimes receives dignitaries, even foreign ambassadors, with a loaded revolver on his desk. His bodyguards are frightening characters, most of whom hail from the president's own tribe and are brought to the palace at age 13 to be trained and conditioned. They depend on Saddam, whom they call "our great uncle," for everything, and their loyalty is proverbial. But even they are kept in constant dread lest they make a mistake. They are rarely given a second chance.
Because he sees himself as entirely a self-made man, Saddam feels he owes nothing to anyone. On the contrary, he claims an absolute right to set his own moral code, even to ignore laws he himself has made and the practices of his own party. He alone in the universe is entitled to break promises, while from others, total obedience is exacted. Thus, he singles out for his pathological hatred not ethnic or religious groups like Jews, Kurds, or Shi'ites, but anyone he suspects of harboring ill intent towards him. Such people deserve to die, he feels, and he is willing to have them killed (or even, in a few known cases, to kill them himself) before they have made any move against him. He always gets even, a habit that surrounds him with a protective ring of physical fear.
Saddam's brutality, however, is not merely utilitarian. He seems to enjoy taking revenge. He seems to find pleasure in seeing his vanquished enemies suffer and die. He has often used charm to build up alliances, then turned around and stabbed his colleagues in the back. To cite just one example, he had five of his closest associates, men he personally had promoted to top jobs, executed shortly after he became president. Their crime? They had questioned his plan to have himself appointed president and urged him rather to follow the traditional pseudo-democratic procedure of election by the party congress. Saddam ignored their views, had himself appointed, and had the five done away with before they knew what had hit them.
As for the ends to which Saddam so cruelly builds his power, they could hardly be more inflated. Saddam Hussein is a man with a vision. He sees himself leading Iraq to supremacy in the Gulf, then to the "liberation of Palestine" and leadership of the Arab, and eventually the entire Islamic, world. Someday Saddam dreams, his Arab-Islamic empire will be a superpower to rival the United States.
The means for achieving such leadership -- thus the key to Iraq's glory -- is the fusion of military might, terror, and oil money. The oil wealth of the Gulf states is to fuel his rise, while his weapons of mass destruction, in addition to their purely military potential, are the ideal instrument of terror. This explains why Saddam so fiercely clings to his weapons programs. He learned long ago that by sending terror into the hearts of his opponents, he can paralyze them and bend their will. The method has worked wonders for him inside Iraq, and he believes it will serve him just as well on the international stage.
Saddam, in short, intends to make himself the successor to the "builders and swordsmen" of Mesopotamian and Muslim lore. He dreams of being remembered in history for his colossal construction projects -- not just roads, bridges, and electricity grids, but also countless magnificent palaces and a $ 200- million Cecil B. DeMilie remake of ancient Babylon, whose every tenth brick is inscribed, "Babylon was rebuilt in the reign of Saddam Hussein." At horrendous cost, he also has equipped Iraq with military industries unmatched in the Middle East, on which he lavished most of Iraq's oil revenues for a decade. That all this waste has condemned millions of Iraqis to poverty matters little to him: Immortalizing his and Iraq's name is his consuming goal.
How then can he proceed to achieve it, given the strictures of the U.N. sanctions that have hobbled Iraq since the Gulf War? Saddam has shown his limitations in foreign affairs, but also some ability to learn from experience. Even while continually obstructing the U.N.'s arms-monitoring operation, he has maneuvered so as to avoid meaningful U.S. military retaliation since 1993. On a few occasions he has even managed to embarrass Washington. Tactically, he is adept and flexible. But his attachment to his grand vision -- and with it, to his weapons of mass destruction -- is immutable.
Were it not for Saddam and his ruling elite, Iraq could have been the Japan of the Arab world. But Saddam values only military glory. Indeed, since 1980 he has rarely been seen out of his field marshal's uniform. After the eight- year Iraq-Iran war, in which Iraq lost at least 300,000 young men and suffered a million wounded, Saddam erected a victory arch in Baghdad. It depicts not wheat sheaves, date palms, and doves of peace, but two huge, crossed stainless-steel swords held by gigantic replicas of Saddam's own hands. The arch towers high above a military parade ground that was inaugurated in August 1989, one year before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
An elementary question for policymakers is whether Saddam can change, whether he could ever be tamed and his regime rendered harmless, even constructive. The answer is clear: There is no sign that change is possible -- nothing whatever to counterbalance the crushing weight of his consistently brutal ways. Instead, all the evidence confirms the continuity of his career. Consider two episodes that took place two decades apart.
In the mid-1970s, Saddam received a request from the mayor of Baghdad, the very uncle who had reared him and whose daughter by then was Saddam's wife. This uncle sought the president's pardon for an elderly friend who wanted to return to Iraq from political exile. The uncle vouched for his childhood friend's good behavior, and Saddam granted the pardon -- only to have the old man shot on the spot when he crossed into Iraq.
Twenty years later, in December 1995, Saddam extended an official pardon to his defector-cousin and son-in-law, four-star general Husayn Kamil. Gen. Kamil returned to Iraq from Jordan. Two days later, he and most of his family were dead.
Amatzia Baram is a professor of Middle East history at the University of Haifa and a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace.