Today, more than ever, youth from across the Muslim world idolize former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. While in the West, Saddam represents tyranny and evil, his legacy in the Middle East is far more complicated due to the interplay of reflexive anti-Americanism, pro-Palestinianism, and nostalgia. But how could so many be nostalgic for a man whose wars and massacres killed upwards of one million people?
Cult of personality tyrants typically use utopian propaganda and resistance to hostile foreign actors to unite the citizenry around their oppressive rule. Saddam was no different; his face was plastered everywhere in Iraq, and he utilized anti-Iran, anti-Israel, and anti-American propaganda throughout his rule to cement himself as a “man of resistance” to the broader region and to distract from his actual rule in Iraq. His execution by the US-backed Iraqi government only amplified the image of Saddam as an anti-imperialist icon martyred by the West.
The past twenty years in the Middle East has seen the demand for such anti-American nostalgia to dramatically increase, especially in light of the constant defeats inflicted on anti-American movements by the United States and its allies.
Yet, in contrast to the Iran’s 1979 revolutionary government, Saddam’s reign was not born with anti-American ideology in its DNA. A few months after his rule began in 1979, he dragged Iraq into an 8-year-long war of conquest against Khomeini’s Iran. While the United States wasn’t too fond of Saddam, Khomeini forced American intervention by attacking international shipping. This culminated in the United States obliterating the Iranian Navy in 1988 in retaliation for an Iranian mine hitting the USS Samuel B. Roberts. The war’s result was a bloody, inconclusive stalemate with over 450,000 people dead on both sides. Support from the United States disproves the notion that Saddam Hussein was always fervently anti-American. He was perfectly content with accepting support and being allied with the United States so long as it benefited him. Not exactly the principled anti-American his latter-day acolytes make him out to be.
Following the unsuccessful war with Iran, Saddam grew increasingly frustrated with neighboring Kuwait over its oil market practices and the constant reminders of Iraq’s financial debt owed to Kuwait. In 1990, he made a decision that would help secure his legacy in the Middle East as a figure of anti-American resistance: he invaded and occupied Kuwait. The invasion drew the ire of the United States, which created a coalition of Arab and non-Arab states to push Iraq out of Kuwait. But over 2,000 miles away in Tunis, Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, declared his support for Saddam’s invasion and occupation of a fellow Arab state. The PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) supported Saddam’s war because he harbored Palestinian militants like the Abu Nidal Organization, spewed anti-Israel rhetoric, and because of Washington closes ties with Kuwait. As the plight of the Palestinians taken on symbolic value as the ultimate symbol of anti-Westernism, Saddam has been deified as the ultimate symbol of resistance.
Saddam exploited the tension generated among Arabs by his invasion of Kuwait; while nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt opposed him, the PLO and other avowedly anti-American Arabs supported him. In an attempt to break the US-led coalition by inciting Israel to attack Iraq, Saddam launched Scud missiles at the Jewish state. Palestinian crowds praised these attacks, further enabling Saddam to portray himself as a hero for the Palestinian people. To this day, Saddam Hussein is viewed positively in the Palestinian Territories, with a memorial erected to him in the West Bank town of Qalqiya in 2017.
In reality, Saddam was trying to play geopolitical chess by dragging Israel into the conflict, which could have led to other Arab nations to withdraw their support from the US-led coalition rather than partner with the Israelis. This effort failed, and in the aftermath of the war, Saddam turned on the West for their rejection of his territorial ambitions. He added the words “Allahu Akbar” to the Iraqi flag to appeal to Islamists (despite being a secular Ba’athist), ramped up his anti-West rhetoric, and paid the families of Palestinian terrorists during the Second Intifada. All these actions have contributed to his modern deification by many in the Middle East.
That being said, for all Saddam Hussein’s brutality in foreign affairs, domestically he was just as cruel. His rule was marked by the killing of innocent Iraqis, particularly against Shias, Kurds, and political dissidents, dispelling the image of a benevolent ruler. At the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, Saddam’s military began the “Al Anfal Campaign,” named for the 8th chapter of the Quran. The campaign was a genocide of 50,000+ Kurds disguised as a simple counterinsurgency operation. At Halabja, Saddam’s army, led by General Ali Hassan Al-Majid, conducted the largest chemical weapons attack on a civilian population in history. Over 3,500 Kurds perished, and thousands more were injured.
Iraq’s Shia population fared even worse. Iraq’s defeat following the Gulf War gave the oppressed Shias in the South the opportunity to seize power and topple the regime. President George H.W. Bush called on the Iraqi people, using leaflets and VOA radio broadcasts to “take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Shia militants and former Iraqi army soldiers took up arms and took control of Iraq’s major cities. At one point, Shia and Kurd rebels controlled 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces. But military support from the United States never materialized, causing the rebellion to lose steam. In a grave mistake, US General Norman Schwarzkopf, instead of upholding the no-fly zone established just after the Gulf War, gave the Iraqi army permission to fly helicopters to transport Iraqi officials under the impression that this was necessary because of Iraq’s destroyed infrastructure. In reality, Schwarzkopf had signed the rebels’ death sentence, and the Iraqi military’s helicopter gunships mowed down rebels and civilians alike. Saddam’s response to the uprising entailed the indiscriminate massacre of civilians and the desecration of Shia holy sites, resulting in over 100,000 dead. Infamously, during intense fighting at Karbala, Iraqi General Kamal Hussein Majid, while leading the army assault, stood on top of his tank outside the Shia shrine of Imam Hussein and said, “Your name is Hussein and so is mine. Let us see who is stronger now.” After saying this, he gave the order to fire at the shrine.
Unfortunately, support for tyrants or terrorist organizations in the Middle East isn’t uncommon. The horrifying sins of dictators are often disregarded as mere Western propaganda or justified to portray a romanticized image of said dictator. Saddam Hussein is no different. While his legacy in the Middle East remains disputed, he will remain undoubtedly one of modern history’s most tyrannical despots, no matter the mythology.
