War Stories Read Free Page B

itself thrown out in yet another coup. This one was led by a junta headed by General Abd al-Salam Arif, a friend and admirer of Egypt’s Nasser. Al-Salam survived two Baath-inspired countercoup attempts in September 1964 and in 1965 only to die in a helicopter crash on April 13, 1966.
    General Abd al-Rahman Arif succeeded his elder sibling as the head of Baghdad’s military government. He fared even worse than his brother. Humiliated by Israel’s defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 Six Day War, in which Iraq’s contingent never even engaged the “Zionist enemy,” the resurgent Baathists tried again. This time it worked.
    On July 17, 1968, a decade and three days after the military had destroyed Iraq’s constitutional monarchy, the Arab Baath Socialist Party, a highly disciplined and secretive political entity of no more than eight thousand members, threw out the military dictatorship. General Arif was allowed to flee. In his place the Baathists installed the machinery that would eventually be seized by the most brutal ruler the land between the rivers had ever seen—Saddam Hussein.
    Â Â Â  Modern Eden
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  July 1968–September 2002
    If the land between the Tigris and Euphrates is an unlikely place for the start of human civilization, then Saddam Hussein is an equally improbable person to become its head of state. Born on April 28, 1937, to a dirt-poor, illiterate family of shepherds, Saddam was apparently raised by a stepfather, his biological father having either died or run off before his son was born. By the age of ten, Saddam was attending school in Baghdad and living with his mother’s brother.
    Lacking the social contacts to get an appointment to the military academy in Baghdad, and too poor to attend a university, Saddam decided, at the age of twenty, to join the outlawed Baath Party. Two years later, in 1959, he was part of the hit team that tried to assassinate General Abd al-Karim Qasim. Though slightly wounded in theencounter, he managed to flee Iraq and spent the next four years on the run—first in Damascus and eventually in Cairo, where he studied law on a stipend and scholarship provided by Nasser’s government.
    In 1963 the budding Baath revolutionary dropped out of school, returned to Iraq, married his first cousin, Sajida Tulfah, and helped to plot another abortive coup later that year. Jailed in the aftermath, Saddam was released after signing an oath promising never again to participate in antigovernment or Baath Party activities. He immediately went underground and rose rapidly within the clandestine Baath organization, establishing a reputation for two qualities: intelligence and brutal ruthlessness.
    On the seventeenth day of July 1968, when the Baathists took over in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein was the enforcer for the tightly organized party—a post for which he was uniquely suited. As the head of the Jihaz Haneen —the Baath security apparat—Saddam had the job of imposing discipline within the party’s regional cells and to intimidate, coerce, or “remove” obstacles to consolidating control over the machinery of government. Immediately after seizing power, the governing Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) authorized Saddam to employ “terror and coercion” to “remove enemies of the revolution,” and he bent to the task with zeal.
    Two weeks after the coup, Baath Party leader Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, the acting president of Iraq, gave his cousin Saddam the privilege of escorting Abd al-Razzaq al-Nayif, the head of Iraqi military intelligence and a potential rival for power, into exile and out of the way. Saddam immediately set about organizing a new intelligence service, the Mukhabarat , and staffed it with thugs from the Jihaz Haneen—many of them clansmen from Tikrit, the impoverished city on the banks of the