Transcript
Mark Gagnon (0:00)
Saddam Hussein, one of the most ruthless dictators of the 20th century. He ruled Iraq with an iron fist for over two decades. And his story isn't just about one man's rise to power. It's about how the collapse of ancient empires, Cold War politics and the discovery of oil transformed the Middle east into a powder keg of conflict. And today, we go through the entire story. From an abused child who leaves home and tries to go to law school and then becomes a hired hitman that then fails, that then gets exiled and then comes and joins the government and then becomes the vice president, then becomes the supreme leader and then becomes a tyrant. And we will go through his transformation from leader into paranoid autocrat who uses chemical weapons and commits genocide and plunges his country into devastating wars with Iran and Kuwait. But we'll also go into the bizarre details of his final years, like the secret novels that he wrote and his son's reign of terror and his strange last days eating muffins and listening to Mary J. Blige. Yes, this is the complete story of how a shepherd's son became a dictator whose actions would reshape the Middle east for generations. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. This episode is brought to you by Liquid iv. In heart pumping moments, you need hydration that can keep up. That's where Liquid IV comes in. Scientifically formulated to quickly replenish electrolytes and fluids lost from your well earned sweat session. Hydrate your favorite mode of movement with Liquid iv, made with triple the electrolytes of the leading sports drink, plus eight vitamins and nutrients also available and sugar free tear pour live more. Visit liquidiv.com to learn more. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world, from all history of all time. Today I'm joined by my dear friend, the Greek Freak, the handsome 65 legend with a large wiener. Christos, how are you? Glad you asked. All right, all right, all right, all right. Enough. We don't have time to be dilly dallying because today we are talking about Saddam Hussein. Now, I'll be honest. Before doing the research for this episode, I didn't know much about Saddam, right? I was born in the 90s. I kind of grew up in the 2000s. I remember hearing about this guy that got captured in a country far away, but I didn't know the details of how a guy born in Iraq that, you know Grows up basically as an abused kid, escapes, leaves his family home, goes and lives with like his uncle, starts living his life, becomes a good student, you know, starts doing his thing, gets involved in politics, gets hired as a hitman, tries to kill a guy, gets exiled, goes to law school, comes back, joins this sort of like socialist political party, rises the ranks, becomes a tyrant. And before he becomes a dictator, he's actually like doing good stuff in the country, he's helping the economy, becomes a tyrant. And then everything goes off the rails, starts invading people, goes into Iran, goes into Kuwait. And I actually more understand why America actually, you know, why the situation politically was such that after 2001 and the terrorist attacks that happened in New York City, why America would want to depose Saddam as the tyrant of Iraq. It never made any sense to me. I was like, okay, you have these guys, some of them are Saudi, they're a part of Al Qaeda. They fly to do this terrorist attack here. And now we're in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. I'm like, what is going on? This doesn't make any sense. Well, this episode will contextualize everything you need to know about, you know, the late 90s to 2000s Middle Eastern politics, or at least I think so. And if I missed anything, please drop a comment. Again, I'm not a historian, I'm just a stand up comedian with a fascinated fascination and an interest in geopolitics. So Saddam hussein was born April 28, 1937, in a small village called Al Aja near the city of Tikrit, which is northwest Baghdad in Iraq. His father, Hussein Abd al Majid, was basically just like a sheep farmer. He a pretty poor family. And some stories say that his father left the family before Saddam was born. But other historians speculate that his father actually died from like a throat cancer or some other type of illness during the winter of 1936. Saddam's family belonged to the Albu Nasir tribe, which had moved from Iraq from Yemen many generations before. And Saddam's mother was named Suba Tulfa Al Musalat. And her family is more important and respected than his father's family. One of her ancestors was Telfa IBN Mus, who was the grandson of a regional governor named Omar Bey III of Tikrit. So on his dad's side, it's pretty poor. And on his mom's side, he has a little bit of a royal legacy. Very, very, very thin. Before Saddam was born, his parents had another son who died around the same time that Saddam was born in 1937. And after Saddam's father either left or died, his mother married another man named Ibrahim Al Hasan Muhammad. Through the second marriage, Saddam got several half brothers and half sisters, but he didn't spend much time with them. And so when his father's out of the picture, his mother actually tried to end her pregnancy with Saddam. Even after he was born, she never really showed him a ton of love or affection, probably, you know, due to the difficult circumstances of her husband's death and then, you know, dealing with the trauma of trying to raise a child alone and then being married into a new family. As you can imagine, this was pretty traumatic for young Saddam. And it doesn't stop there. He had a pretty difficult childhood because of all these family problems. So his stepfather was extremely strict and to a certain extent violent. He would beat Saddam so badly and so often that young Saddam eventually just runs away from home. He went to live with his uncle in Baghdad, which is the capital city in Iraq. And while living there, he went to Al Khara Secondary School in Baghdad. And despite the tough upbringing, he was actually a good student. And he started to do really well in school and later started studying to become a lawyer. And his uncle Karala Tal had a huge impact on Saddam during these important years of his life. Even though Saddam moved to, you know, the big city, as you could imagine, he never forgot where he came from in Tikrit. And many years later, when he becomes the leader of Iraq, he gave his family members from Tikrit very important and powerful jobs in the government. So just to put Saddam's sort of early life into context, he grows up during a time of huge changes, not just in Iraq, but throughout basically the entire Middle East. So since the 1500s, most of the region had been controlled by basically a few powerful Muslim empires, mainly the Ottoman Empire and the Persians. And the Ottomans controlled Iraq and all the areas around it that are now countries like, you know, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, all of these other areas in the region. And so by the early 1900s, the Ottoman Empire was, you know, getting weaker and losing control. But when they joined Germany and Austria, Hungary side in World War I, it basically wiped away the Ottoman Empire as we know it. So by 1918, the Ottomans were basically no longer. And after the war ended, the winning countries, you know, Britain and France, basically cut up the Middle east between themselves. And this is a massive topic that probably deserves its own 10 part series. But in short, they controlled these areas through something called mandates. And these mandates created new countries, but they didn't care about the different regions or the cultures or any of like the tribes or ethnic groups that actually lived in the region. And instead the British and the French leaders kind of maybe drew at random or perhaps intentionally forced different groups of people to live together, whether they wanted to or not. So in 1932, Iraq was supposedly given independence under King Faisal the First. But Britain still controlled most of the important stuff. As you can imagine, the empire of the English was not excited or enthusiastic to give up all of their access in the Middle East. So they controlled Iraq's valuable oil fields through a company that they called Iraqi Petroleum Company which was was mostly run by the British. This was still the situation when World War II started in 1939 and when Saddam was only two years old. Many political groups in Iraq actually worked with the Nazis during the war because they wanted to get rid of British control. They thought the Iraqi king was basically just a puppet for Britain, since he basically just went along with whatever the British Empire wanted. But again, this tactic of sort of post World War II British colonialism is not a new story. And you'll see this all throughout, you know, North Africa, Central Africa and the Middle eas, where basically the British are just playing sims and they kind of just put random people together. Imagine like your neighborhood, like, imagine like your house and stuff all of a sudden got reconfigured where like your house is cut in half and now you have to like live with the neighbors of the next house. But not all the neighbors, only the neighbors that live in the half that's near your house. And then your sister and your parents, they live with another family. And then that's just your country now. I mean, it's like crazy. But regardless, this is what happened. And there's another important part to understand when recognizing sort of the sort of context that Saddam came up through and how he rises to power. And basically what happens during the second half of the 1900s. You have to understand the Ba'ath Party, which started in Syria in 1947. And the party believed in two main ideas, basically Pan Arabism, basically uniting all the Arab nations and anti imperialism, getting rid of foreign control. So because of these popular ideas, the party spread quickly to other Middle Eastern countries. You can imagine if you're not familiar with, obviously, you know, the Middle east, there are many factions and different reasons for these Middle Eastern Arab nations to battle each other, right? Whether it's history or, you know, like land conquest or Sunni, Shia split, you know, you basically create this idea, this both idea that will connect all of these Arab states together to get rid of their colonizers. So it comes to Iraq in 1951, and Saddam's uncle, Kerala, was one of the early members. So from the beginning, the party was mostly connected to Sunni Muslims in Iraq. And Sunni and Shia are the two main branches of Islam. And they, you know, at times disagree with each other. However, Ba' athism wasn't really a religious movement. In fact, the party supported socialism and wanted a new way to run Arab countries that actually rejected having a theocratic religious control on politics. Instead, the Baath Party believes that every Muslim country in the Middle east should kick out and basically, you know, exile all the foreign influence and work together. Their goal was to make Arab people powerful and important to the world again, just like they were hundreds of years ago when Muslim empires were at their strongest in the region. So because of this, they were against the governments of Britain and France, who had set up in countries like Iraq and Syria when they had ended their mandate control between the world wars. So this put the Ba'ath party in Iraq on a direct path to conflict with the Iraq, Iraqi monarchy and the government that existed after World War II. I mean, to be honest, if you are, you know, someone in the Middle east and, you know, so say you're in Iraq and you hear about this bath idea and you're like, oh, we're all going to get together and just kick out the people that are trying to control and, you know, take our resources and give it back to, you know, their country instead of making our people rich. It's kind of fire, you know, I mean, it's basically make Arabs great again. Make. Yeah, it's Maga, dude. Make Arab. Make Arabia great again. That was the. It's Ba. Yeah, go back. Let's go back to the empire days. That's what they were trying to do. So Saddam hears about this and he joins the Iraqi Ba'ath Party in 1957 when he was just 20 years old. Back then, the party was pretty small. It had only like a few hundred members in Baghdad and some other big cities. But major changes were about to happen in Iraq right around the time that Saddam started getting seriously interested in politics. So by the mid-1950s, Iraq had become a place where people were really angry with their government. This was mostly because King Faisal II and his government officials were by all measures, not doing a great job at running the country. Iraqis were also inspired by what had happened in Egypt, where in 1952, the military officers had kicked out King Farouk and created a new government that wanted to get rid of British Control, just like in Iraq, the British had never really left, you know, Egypt completely, especially around the Suez Canal, because they want to control the shipping routes. So the Iraqi revolution that happened in July of 1958 was very similar to what happened in Egypt in 52. During this revolution, Iraqi military commanders like Abdul Salam Arif and Abd al Karim Qassam led a coup d' etat that started July 14th. And they basically overthrew King Faisal II's government. The king and several members of his family were killed. The government was basically completely taken over in just a few hours and a new Iraqi republic was announced. And really, if you're an empire in control, this is kind of the problem with letting any type of coup happen, you know, in the region of your influence. Because, you know, the Iraqis saw Egypt and it was basically, you know, that coup went viral and the, you know, Iraqis were like, dude, that, that shit looks fire, dude, let's, let's go do what they did, right? Copy paste. Let's take back our country. And so they did. And Even though the Ba'ath party was still pretty small, it had enough political connections in Baghdad that, you know, some of its important members helped form a new government with army officers during the summer of 1958. Because of this, even though Saddam was just, you know, a young 21 year old kid at this point, he was now connected to Iraq's most important political circles. By the late 1950s, however, the government that was created in 1958 was pretty unstable. There were many different political parties and groups fighting for power and most of them kind of hated each other. You know, like this is the old Game of Thrones line, right? Chaos is a ladder. So anytime you have a coup, even though you have all these different factions pushing for the coup, once the, you know, regent or the king or the monarch is ousted, all these other parties are now at each other because they're trying to seize control. For example, the Iraqi Communist Party quickly becomes a major enemy of the BAATH Party. Meanwhile, Qasem, the army commander who had led the revolution, was now basically running the new republic. And he refused to join something known as the United Arab Republic. This was basically a pan Arab organization that Egypt had created, which had even convinced Syria to politically unite with Egypt for several years. And the Ba' Athists were extremely angry that Qasem wouldn't join the Arab Union. The Arab Union was basically going to allow them to federalize. They were going to create a structured nationalized organization that was going, or international organization rather, that was going to unite all these different countries to officially oust their European colonizers. So what do they decide to do with Qasem? They decide to kill him. Yes. And who was going to be the one to do it? Saddam Hussein. That's right. Just a young Saddam picked to be one of the assassins of the new, you know, coup d' etat leader. So on October 7, 1959, while Qasem was driving in a car down Al Rashid street in Baghdad, he was attacked. Even though Kassem was only shot twice, the bullets only hit his arm and his shoulder, and he survived. Some people think that the attack failed because Saddam started shooting too early. He prematurely unloaded, which happens, right, Christos? All the time. We've been there. During the assassination attempt, Saddam was shot in the leg by Kassan's bodyguard, but he managed to get away. So after the failed assassination, Saddam and his boys were secretly moved out of Iraq to Syria, where Saddam quickly joined the Syrian branch of the Baath Party. Back in Iraq, several people were arrested for being connected to the assassination attempt. And they had some trials, and they basically wanted to make examples of all of them. So for a while, Saddam moved to Egypt and continued studying law at the University of Cairo, but he never finished his degree. But who needs law school, right? You know, who needs law school? And you're just like, dude, I'll just become a dictator, make my own laws. How about that? You guys read the laws that I made up. You know, you don't even need. Law school is for people that are trying to read other people's laws, trying to read what a man told you to do. Pretty gay. Not for Saddam. He was in Egypt in 1963 when two military takeovers happened in countries near Iraq. So in March of that year, Syrian military officers who belonged to the Baath Party staged a coup and took control of Syria, basically creating a Baatha Syria. Interestingly, eight years later, one of those military officers that did that coup was a gentleman by the name of Hafez Al Assad. Remember that name? Assad? Make any sense? He becomes the ruler of Baatha Syria, and the Al Assad family has basically continued to control Syria up until, you know, like a few months ago. So a few weeks before the Syrian coup, something called the Ramadan Revolution happens in Iraq. Ba' Athist members of the Iraqi army overthrow Qasem's government and they take power. But they only stayed in control for nine months before Abdul Salam Arif, who had been one of Qassem's allies in the 1958 coup, seized power in Baghdad and kicked out all the Ba' Athists from the government. So this is now a coup that then results in an almost assassination, that then results in, like, a. Another coup that then results in a counter coup. And this happens in November of 1963. I know it's confusing, but all you need to know is that there's all this chaos in the region. Everyone's trying to seize control, and Saddam is waiting patiently in the wings. So by 1963, Saddam comes back to Iraq after, you know, leaving Egypt, shortly after his party had taken power in February. And with this November coup removing the Ba' Athist from power, Saddam decided to stay there and continue working secretly in Baghdad with the other remaining Ba' Athists that basically were operating underground. He was arrested in 1964 and found guilty of being involved with an illegal political party, which got him sent to prison for several years. Saddam was also accused of planning to kill Arif, which led to his imprisonment in October. However, he didn't stay in prison for long, as the Iraqi government had originally intended. He escaped after serving only two years of his sentence in 1966. I mean, just picture this, right? Like, this guy is in Iraq. There's a coup. They hate the monarch. They get him out of there. The new guy comes in. Saddam tries to kill him. He then gets sent to Syria and then goes to Egypt. He's in law school, seeing what's going on in Syria, seeing what's happening in Iraq. Comes back, goes underground, gets arrested, gets thrown in prison, breaks out of prison. This all happens in, like, eight years. It's like. It's crazy. So by Now, Saddam is 30 years old, and, you know, he's had a pretty tough political career. But things start to kind of change because as he escapes, he becomes involved in the Iraqi Ba' Athist movement in a more formal way. So he's made the regional commander of the party. And people quickly realized that he was really good at organizing and growing the party, even during a time when party members were arguing about how closely they should work with the Soviet Union and other communist countries. It's also important to note that around this time, Saddam gets married, starts having kids. So in 1963, shortly after he came back from Egypt, but before he gets arrested and goes to prison, he marries his first wife and his first cousin, Sajida Talfa. This was an arranged marriage, basically, to his uncle's daughter. And I know that might sound a little weird, like, whoa, his cousin. This is Pretty common for most of human history and still occurs today in many places and especially at this time in Iraq. It was not crazy, right? You're trying to consolidate power within family lines. So he marries his uncle's daughter, and they quickly start having children. They have a couple, right? Their first son, Uday, was born in 1964, and then they have another son named Kusay in 1966. They went on to have three daughters throughout 68, 69, and then 72. But they weren't Saddam's only children. In 1986, he marries a second time to a woman named Samira Shabandar. And people also think that he may have had a third or a fourth wife, but no one really knows for sure. And through all these relationships, Saddam probably had several other children. But his first marriage and those five kids were the most important ones. Even though Saddam's political career was incredibly brutal and violent, people actually said that he was a decent dad, which is kind of ironic. This was the first of many contradictions about Saddam. He was someone who used chemical weapons, like regular weapons in wars, and committed genocide against groups of different people in Iraq, but, you know, was known for giving a charity and helping people. So, again, this is not atypical of, you know, you can think of, like, Mafia bosses, right, where, you know, they're killing people and doing shakedowns on business, but also doing, you know, big, like, turkey Thanksgiving giveaways and, you know, doing charity drives at Christmas time. So these contradictions tend to exist within people of great power. Another interesting note about one of Saddam's kids. We actually did an episode on UD Huss Hussein and sort of the unhinged brutality and violence that he carried out against the Iraqi people. Too much to really get into for this. If you're interested, check out that episode. But it is, needless to say, pretty grotesque. I mean, this guy would, like, go do raids on people's weddings, steal their wives, murder people. He ends up murdering the guy that introduced the Dom to his second wife because he thought it was. He thought it was basically, you know, disrespectful to his first wife and, like, his mom, that he would, you know, go off and marry another woman. There's a whole crazy thing. The guy's insane and unhinged. Needless to say, that's its own episode. Go check it out. So how does Saddam officially, like, climb to power? So this happens, really, in 1968 with something known as the 17th of July Revolution. Now, you can tell that a country has a lot of revolutions when they Start just naming them days of the week. And this is that moment. And this is basically the time when the Ba' Athists finally took complete control of the Iraqi government. So the whole Middle east had become very unstable because of the six Day war between Israel and several other Arab countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia. And at the same time, the Republican government in Baghdad was getting closer to the United States, which, as you can imagine, made many people angry because again, the whole idea is like, hey, we don't want these foreign Westernized people coming over into our country taking our resources. They've seen what the United States has done in other nations and, you know, around the region, they've taken their resources for themselves. The British, and now they see the Americans potentially as doing the same thing, and they get a little bit scared. So they don't want, you know, the Republican government getting close. So the Ba' Athists and others thought that Iraq needed a major change in its political system. So July 17, 1968, members of the Ba' Athist movement and the Iraqi military carried out what was basically a bloodless coup and took over the government in Baghdad. They criticized the country's growing friendship with the US and set up this Ba' Athist government led by Ahmed Hassan Al Baqir. And Ahmed was Saddam's cousin. And Saddam was quickly made the Vice president of Iraq. He got this important job partially because he had helped get rid of Ba' Athist leaders who disagreed with Ahmed's government and his plans in the late nineteen six. And this was basically the start of Saddam's journey to becoming the supreme ruler of Iraq. So over the next 10 years, Saddam makes himself essential to running Iraq under the Ba' Athist government. He was really good at managing things and oversaw some major changes in the economy that started turning the country into one of the richest nations in the Middle East. Most of this success comes from, you know, Iraq's huge oil reserves that we have mentioned. And the country has some of the biggest proven oil fields in the world. Makes Iraq's economy heavily dependent on oil even to this day. And when the Ba' Athists took power in 1968, Iraq's oil industry was still mostly controlled by Western companies, you know, the British Americans. And by the 1970s, Saddam aggressively took over these companies and made them Iraqi owned. This worked out perfectly because of the 1973 energy crisis, when the biggest oil selling countries in the Middle east cut off oil supplies to Western countries like the US And Britain because they had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, which again, another conflict between Israel and several, you know, Arab nations, mainly Egypt and Syria. Basically, oil prices shoot up by almost 300%, going from $3 a barrel to $12 a barrel, which is a massive jump. And because of these outside conflicts and because Saddam took control of the oil industry in Iraq at exactly the right time, Iraq made a massive amount of money from this crisis. What's up guys? 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