The Tartars who descended on the near east in 1394 from their strongholds in western Asia under the leadership of Timurlane swept over Mesopotamia and took the trouble to stop and ravage a small provincial town on the Tigris river few hundred miles north of Baghdad where they erected a pyramid with the skulls of their victims.  The name of the town was Tikrit, and its choice for Timurlane’s ferocity was not accidental.  A small garrison in a formidable fortress protected the small city which has been a center of defiance to external invaders leading the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon to define it as an impregnable fortress of independent Arabs.  This was the place where Salahudin the legendary military commander who defeated the crusaders in the renowned battle of Hittin and liberated Jerusalem from Christian rule had been born in 1138. Eight Hundred years later it was to become the birthplace of a modern Iraqi ruler aspiring to don the mantle of his great hero and predecessor, the new Iraqi leader would be known to the world in time as Saddam Hussein. 

Saddam would always hold his birthplace in great affection and pride. The few men or women he would trust and be in his most inner circle would be from Tikrit who would share his strong attachment for the home of his and their formative years. Yet, despite his fond thoughts of Tikrit , Saddam’s was a poverty-ridden and a troubled childhood. His place of birth was a mud house belonging to his maternal uncle, his father a poor landless peasant died before he was born and his mother who was already married to his uncle was unable to support the orphan so she left him to be raised by the uncle’s family, the child was named Saddam which means the one who confronts a name which was to prove strangely prophetic.

At the time when Saddam was born Iraq was in a state of great turbulence and highly unstable, the country was since its creation at the end of the first world war by the British was run by them [the British] under various guises until they were forced out in 1958. In 1937 with a new global conflict looming between a fascist block headed by Nazi Germany and a so called democratic west led by Britain and France Iraq was a major center of contention between these two camps, a big chunk of the population made up of Arab nationalists, Nazi sympathizers and tribal heads who were backed by the army were creating a lot of headache to the British and the Hashemite monarchy which was installed by them, the situation was to serious for the British to ignore and they attacked, at the end of a short military campaign the leaders of the opposition were ejected from power, a great number of them were imprisoned and others were executed.    

A very basic tenet in developmental psychology is, what you are now is to a great extent the result of the experiences and events you have been through during the formative years of your life, the first ten. To grow into an average reasonably normal person stipulates that you were born carrying a normal set of genes, in a descent and loving family and at peace with your environment. The savagery of Saddam’s treatment at the hands of his stepfather and his feeling that everyone was against him had far reaching effects on his character, a predilection for compensatory violence, a sense that no one however close could be trusted and that he was a braver, more intelligent and more valuable than anyone around him. 

Saddam Hussein is a psychological and a cultural aberration which became a monstrosity. Saddam is often called mad, but he is not mad in the sense that he is deranged and disorganized and out of gear. Saddam is also not a psychologically normal individual even within the wide range of what is psychologically normal.  Saddam is a malignant narcissist [narcissism is derived from the Greek mythology, Narcissus is a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection in water].A narcissist is some one who is totally absorbed in his own self, with a paranoid reaction to those around him, a lack of interest in or awareness of the suffering of others, the absence of anything that might be called conscience in the pursuit of his own devices and impulsions, it very definitely a highly dangerous personality configuration but it does not necessarily include loss of control, on the contrary the sufferer will often show control and rationality in a high degree but in the pursuit of his own paranoid needs.

A great deal has been said and written about Saddam and his rule, but a great deal of that “heritage” is lies and pure fabrications which were created by his huge propaganda machine but now and with the demise of the man and his regime a more accurate picture is emerging but slowly. Saddam and his regime are an undeniable alas a very painful history, people are trying to forget the horrors of the regime and the miseries and destruction they suffered under Saddam for more than thirty years, but it is a very significant part of the history of modern Iraq and I very sincerely hope that people will never forget it and try to learn lessons from it for a better future. 

The official story is: Saddam was born at Al-Awja, a small village which is located at a bend of the river Tigris [awja, means a bend] 8kms south of Tikrit on the 28th of April 1937, in a poor but a very prominent family in the religious and political history of the Arabs, and that he was a descendant of no less a personality than Imam Ali the prophet’s son in law and the 4th Caliph of Islam. The boy the official story goes on was not born with a golden spoon in his mouth, he was an orphan, his father has died few months before his birth and that his mother was already re-married to his uncle as custom in those areas dictate. During his early years he sojourned between his maternal uncle’s house in Ttikrit and his stepfather’s, his early years were not easy, his family was very poor but in spite of his difficulties and abject poverty he was very generous and chivalrous.

But the official story is very strongly disputed, the realities are very different. Saddam was born in a family of crooks and petty criminals, his mother has already remarried his uncle before his birth. Every one calls our man “Saddam” meaning the one who confronts. The father had actually deserted his wife who was very assertive and domineering. The father’s history is but shrouded in even greater a secrecy than that of the son, but one thing is certain, no one is absolutely sure of the date of his death, Hussein [he father] was rarely mentioned and he was most probably killed during some kind of an illegitimate act. The stepfather was a rough ignorant peasant, he was known as Hassan the liar who was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet in the struggle of supporting a rapidly growing family which included three boys and two girls and was looking on the orphan as an unwelcome burden and used to call him the son of a dog, To make things even worse the child was showing at a very early age increasing signs of rebellion and antisocial behavior which did not endear him to those around him, he was unpleasant to all involved and invited very frequent beatings with an asphalt coated stick and severe punishments from the frustrated stepfather who tried to force him to steal like his own sons and their cousins. For his part SDAM was a loner, himself famous for carrying an iron bar wherever he went, he would collect wood and make a fire and heat the iron bar and when it is it red hot he would run and stab with it the dogs, cats or any other stray animal who was unfortunate enough to make the mistake of coming within his reach. He never knew any kindness except a little from his mother to whose memory he erected in her honor a big mausoleum in Tikrit when she died in 1982, the father was never honored like that, he was forgotten.

The boy had a maternal uncle in Tikrit who was at that time a junior army officer, this fellow will appear frequently in the later parts of this story, he will assume very important government positions become a millionaire and would very frequently regale the nation and the world with his philosophies and his publications, one of their most significant was a ten page pamphlet entitled ‘Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies. The uncle has spent the last few years of the Second World War in a British prison because of very strong and undisguised Nazi sympathies and active involvement in a coup attempt against the British in 1941 which was backed by the fascist regime in Germany. Hitler was exploiting the very strong anti British feelings in the Arab world including Iraq for their failure to honor their commitments to them [the Arabs]during the first world war and for helping the Jews in their efforts to establish a home in Palestine and their other efforts in frustrating the Arab’s dreams of independence and the unity of their divided lands, the Arabs were promised the moon by Hitler like what the British did to them before but of course all that came to naught with the destruction of Hitler and his 3rd Reich. In 1945 the uncle was out of prison and out of job, extremely bitter and frustrated, he has lost his dreams but he was still hopeful and waiting for another day. These frustrations and bitterness found a very good outlet in the young boy, a curious and an already pretty confused mind who was sojourning between the stepfather’s house and that of his uncle, the two in fact made a truly amazing couple, the embittered and greatly frustrated uncle had a very interested and attentive listener to his Shehrezedian fantasies of old triumphs and Don Quishotic victories And the greater ones which he promised the boy are coming soon.

By age ten the boy has become totally alienated to his home, his stepfather, his half brothers, and his life in the constricted environment in the Al-Awja so during one dark night when everybody was asleep he fled the stepfather’s house towards his uncle’s in Tikrit, en route during this fateful journey he passed through the dwellings of some of relatives, nomads who were greatly impressed by his single mindedness and courage and gave him a pistol which was his second and more prized weapon and officially inaugurated his entry into the profession he later on so efficiently mastered, Murder and Death. SADDAM grew up thinking that only his iron stick would protect him, he used it against the other village children who taunted him with accusations that he was illegitimate, accusations his political opponents used against him later during his career.

Young children start formal education in what is called a primary school at age 6, the uncle had a son [Adnan] who was then exactly six and was starting school, this fellow will reappear like his father in this story and very prominently but he will die in a helicopter crash engineered by our hero [this story is coming a bit later]. Adnan was able to convince his cousin to attend school with him, he was never greatly interested in formal education, he was a very mediocre student but he managed with difficulty to finish the first six years of schooling, the next phase is the secondary and because such level of schooling was not available in Tikrit the whole uncle’s family moved to Baghdad to allow their son to continue his studies and few months later their guest followed them there and settled in a part of the capital called al-Takarta at that time during the early 1950s Al Takarta was the natural home for the small time Tikriti crooks and thugs who had broken away from the bands of dacoits operating around their town and aggregated there. At school in Baghdad Saddam’s need to compensate for the cruelty and shame he had suffered in Tikrit showed itself in a more violent behavior he was now carrying his pistol around with him every where a former school fellow says the headmaster wanted to expel his violent student, but when Saddam heard about that he went into the headmaster’ office and threatened him with death, the headmaster withdrew his order.

Al-Takarta was also in those days a hot bed of the newly organized and rapidly gaining power forces of Arab nationalism which were greatly stimulated and encouraged by the recent emergence of Gamal Abd Al Nasser in Egypt following his successful overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt. In this atmosphere of brutality and lawlessness the young Saddam turned to political activism. One of the political forces which were appearing now on the fringes of the Nasser movement was Al- Ba’ath. The basic ideas of the Ba’ath originated during the late thirties of the last century in France by three young Syrians who were studying there, a Christian Michel Aflaq, a Sunni Moslem, Salah Bitar and an Alawi, Zaki Arsuzi. Aflaq was the leader, Arsuzi disappeared from the scene very early during the history of the Baath and the party was to be associated with the names of Aflaq and Bitar ever since.

Saddam’s secondary school “Al-Karkh” was a very active political center of the newly created Ba’ath, an activity into which he immersed himself at the expense of his studies. He was not was not by Nasser’s brand of Arabism he thought it was naïve and excessively romantic, but he was greatly impressed by the Ba’ath with its strong emphasis on discipline, its organizational skills and the aura of secrecy surrounding it, all of which greatly appealed to him. He joined the party in 1957.

Najeeb Hanoudi
Thursday May 1, 2008
Berkley/Michigan
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