|
The following pages are the first part from the three parts section of my book on Saddam Hussein with the above mentioned title. I was unable to find an interested publisher for my work, so I will be trying during the next few weeks to publish parts of the book on this website! The first part which is coming now is entitled the formative years, two segments of which appeared at the end of my last letter to this blog.
Saddam Hussein is a psychological and a social aberration which grew with power into a appalling monstrosity. 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 a normal person stipulates that you were born with 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 is often called mad, but he is not mad in the sense that he is deranged or outside 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 someone 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, a highly dangerous personality configuration but it does not necessarily include loss of control, on the contrary the sufferer will often show a high degree of control 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 fabrications which were created by his propaganda machine, but now after his fall a more accurate picture is emerging slowly.
The official story is; Saddam was born at Al-Awja, a small village which is located at a bend of the river Tigris 8km 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 telling us 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. This story is strongly disputed. 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 which was a much better appellation when he was trying his fortunes in the local games of power, when he was born he was called by his stepfather “SDAM” which does not have any meaning. The alleged father had actually deserted his wife who was very assertive and domineering and was not above suspicion about the fidelity of her marriage. The alleged father’s history is shrouded in a great secrecy which tends to fuel the rumors concerning the legitimacy of his birth, but one thing is absolutely definite, no one is absolutely certain of the date of his death, Hussein 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. Hassan was looking on the orphan (Saddam) as an unwelcome burden and used to call him the son of a dog, the child himself was showing at an early age increasing signs of rebellion and antisocial behavior and very frequently invited 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 it to the dogs, cats or any other stray animal who was unfortunate enough to make the mistake of coming within his reach. Saddam never knew any kindness except a little from his mother and his maternal uncle.
The maternal uncle was living in Tikrit he was a junior army officer, this fellow will appear frequently in the later parts of this story, he will assume very important government positions and become a millionaire and would very frequently regale the nation and the world with his philosophies and his publications. One of his most significant papers 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 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 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. 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. During the last meeting between the Kuwaitis headed by their crown prince and a delegation representing Saddam which included the famous chemical Ali and which was supposed to solve the escalating crisis between the two neighbors on the first of August. During a very heated debate the head of the Kuwaiti delegation shouted across the table, “if you are so poor that you needed the revenue from the Kuwaiti oil wells, why don’t you send your mothers and daughters to the streets to earn you the needed cash.” This was meant as a personal and a direct slight to Saddam, when he heard it he said the emir of Kuwait is not going to sleep in his palace tonight, at that very moment he gave the orders for the invasion of the smaller southern neighbor once again his response to the insult was by using the instrument that he has mastered, the iron stick.
YOUNG children start formal education in what is called a primary school at age 6, the uncle had a son named Adnan who was then exactly six years old and was starting school. Adnan will reappear like his father in this story and very prominently, but he will die in a helicopter crash engineered by Saddam [this story is coming a bit later]. Adnan was able to convince his cousin Saddam 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. 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 was appearing on the fringes of the Nasser movement was Al- Ba’ath, the word is usually translated by western scholars and writers as renaissance, the exact meaning of the word in Arabic is resurgence. 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 in the Sorbonne in Paris, a Christian Michel Aflaq, a Sunni Moslem called Salah Bitar and an Alawi called 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. The mystery of the early disappearance of Arsuzi is a very intriguing episode in what proved later on to be a story of continuing intrigue and conspiracies and bloody divisions.
AS the Second World War was impending, Arab liberation movements were stirring as a reaction to the British and French domination and political control of most of the countries in the region but they lacked properly formulated ideas and only Nazism and Communism offered an ideological and organizational ideas, but both were unacceptable in the Arab world. The Communist model was too international and against religion to appeal to the Arab’s mentality and Nazism was too extreme and its methods too harsh and inhumane to be acceptable even to the Arabs. Aflaq has tampered at one time or another with the two philosophies and was convinced of their unsuitability to the Arab world, so he started to talk about a marriage of the socialism of the Marxist philosophy which he called the body and the Nazi’s nationalism which was in his views the soul. Upon returning back to Syria in 1940, Aflaq began to preach his ideas to his students in Damascus and then shifted his base of activities to Beirut, which was more open and tolerant to new views and he was soon spending many hours in a café near the American university there preaching to students from all over the Arab world who were studying there and who became in due course the elements of the international network of the Baath party. Aflaq a thin pale slight man was the theoretician and Bitar backed him up with reason and organizational ability, by 1974 the party has gathered enough support to encourage them to apply for a formal declaration of the party which took place in Damascus on the 4th of April 1947 adopting an impressive slogan “unity freedom and socialism” the party was organized on the Communist model of cells of seven and it gradually spread in a semi clandestine network across the Arab world except Egypt, which did not appeal to the Egyptians because of its emphasis on ethnic Arabism. The party arrived in Iraq during the early fifties and by the middle of the fifties it become a very serious power in spite of the small number of its membership which was mainly located in Baghdad and coincided with the arrival of Saddam in the city to go to a secondary school.
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 in which he was again very disinterested and showed very clearly in his mediocre performance and his difficulties in getting through the years. Saddam was not was not greatly impressed 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. Saddam joined the party in 1957.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi,
Baghdad, Iraq
Tuesday, 15 November, 2005
|
Contact Us 
