Saddam Hussein

Yeah, that's the tragedy of Iraq. It's gone into one quagmire into another, all of the connected somehow to western meddling in their affairs. I suppose this is what happens when the entity of Iraq was created solely for the ease of operations for the Anglo-Iraq Oil company.

Unfortunately the one boon that Iraq had under Saddam, control of their oil, is now whored out to US and their contractors. AFAIK it isn't the nationalized form it used to be and they aren't receiving all the profits they used to from it. Never mind now they got to pay debts back to Kuweit, the Arab Gulf States, to the United States, etc...

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If he was concerned about that Saddam would have intervened to help the royalists of the Iranian monarch in the midst of the revolution- or better yet the communists and socialist who would lose their lives in the following months, that is if he is the good socialist you claim him to be.

Saddam came into power in the last year of the Iran revolution so he was busy with Iraq and if he supported the Iran revolution he knew the USA would of been after him.

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By the way, what are you trying to show me with the war memorial? How does that show what he was fighting for or make one socialist?

I don't know it just looks really cool.

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Saddam came into power in the last year of the Iran revolution so he was busy with Iraq and if he supported the Iran revolution he knew the USA would of been after him.

Saddam had long been in power in the Ba'ath structure- he was Vice President to begin with, and by the early 1970s he was essentially running the government anyways. He just officially got the position after the resignation of the old Ba'athist, al-Bakr. But for all intents and purposes Saddam Hussein was already running the show in Iraq- most of the major treaties and internal policy in Iraq was determined by Saddam Hussein. Al-Bakr during this time became a powerless figurehead.

If Saddam really was concerned about Islamic Radicalism, he would have intervened or at least done something while Iran was still in its early stages. What he was more concerned about however was to wait when Iran was fighting amongst themselves, so that the military could waltz on in and take them down a peg. It doesn't matter what he, in the eyes of the United States or the USSR, would have done so as long as he didn't support Khomeini.

We have seen past examples of regimes, building up on international opposition to a given country, hoping they could invade a country while it was divided and weak and reap rewards.

However, Saddam was not interested in the potential issue of Islamic Radicalism nor the stability of Iran, but rather his own long-term interests in securing the role of the helmsman of Arab nationalism. I don't see the former point as amounting to much because there wasn't much of an uprising by the Shi'a in Iraq at the time. In fact many of them were conscripted to fight in the war for the Iraqi army and did so without complaint.

The only "socialists" that Saddam harbored afterward the revolution was the People's Mujaheddin of Iran (who in turn eventually became useful pawns of the CIA to spy on Iran's internal affairs). Not the more Marxist ones such as Tudeh, the Communist Party of Iran, the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas, or for obvious reasons the Kurdish groups like Komala, because Saddam himself was a pronounced anti-Communist.

Saddam took U.N. sanctions and ignored them, allowing his people to suffer while he built a military machine.

He's not a socialist, and he was an awful imperialist leader (Kuwait hur dur)

I know that even a pro-Ba'ath Iraqi Communist Party existed for a while, although it was continuously repressed and then it was annihilated by Saddam himself when he took power.

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I know that even a pro-Ba'ath Iraqi Communist Party existed for a while, although it was continuously repressed and then it was annihilated by Saddam himself when he took power.

The Iraq Communist Party was in existence in the years leading up to that point. It had often been driven underground during the monarchy. When the Qassim coup overthrew the monarchy, it was unfavorable with them. The military governments that followed the short-lived Ba'ath coup that ended the Qassim government, dominated the remainder of the 1960s was more aligned to the positions of the Arab Socialist Union (i.e. nasserist) in nature, so they weren't warm to them either.

The ICP was warm to the concept of the Ba'aths because in Syria the Communists there were incorporated into the government. Naturally when the the Iraq Ba'ath carried out its coup for the second time, it followed along. The Iraq Ba'ath brought in various forces that had been neglected by the political system before, and the big ones here were the Communists and the Kurds.

As Saddam moved to consolidate his power though, he began to get rid of elements. This began with the Kurds and was completed by 1974-1975 when the bulk of their leadership fled to Iran. This was followed up by the removal of the Communists. During this point the Soviet Union was still eager to do arms deals with the regime.

The ICP was severely battered by this point, as it had barely come out of repression from the previous regimes when this came up. It only continued existing in Kurdish regions mostly, and this got the point that the Kurdish branch ended up becoming its own party. The ICP and its Kurdish partner got caught up in local bourgeois politicking though, barely communist anymore beyond empty words and the name. The other major ones (such as the Workers-Communist Party of Iraq) are minuscule in influence.

Interesting. Another reason not to support Saddam.

I've read that Saddam support Islamist-socialist anti-mullah faction named "MEK" (mujahideen e khalq) in Iran and gave them military base camp near Iran-Iraq border. Is that true?

That's the first I've heard of them so I did a quick search on Wikipedia. It turns out to be the case that Saddam did support them. If we're talking whether or not this gives him any socialist credentials or if he just did it out of pragmatism, however, I would say that he only supported them because they were opponents of the Iranian government and might have been ideologically more similar to him (in theory, at least, but the Ba'ath Party is only ostensibly left-wing but not so much in practice).

It sounds more like a case of the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend--for the moment" mindset. I'm sure Saddam would have gladly sent some small token of support even to the Iranian Communist party if it had been in a position of needing just an extra tiny push to overthrow the mullahs.

Yea, the PMOI, I mentioned earlier, was a faction in the Iranian revolution that had a cut of youth support but got pushed out in the infighting in the power vacuum that developed with the fall of the monarchy.

To that end many of their functionaries and cadres fled to Iraq and were used, more so in the earlier years, as allies against the Iranians. However they were never really that much influential to begin with and by the midpoint of the war weren't really much of an important factor. After the war some of them remained in Iraq as refugees of sort, though the status of this camp has become compromised by Shi'a hardliners who take the Iranian government's official line towards them.

I don't think they have much of a good image inside Iran, because of this collaboration. The only major change is that the EU removed the PMOI from a list of ascribed terrorist groups, presumably due to PMOI's role in gathering information inside of Iran through informants.

It was definitely a case of enemy of my enemy, because in the early years of the war a similar case was replicated with the Kurds on either side of the border. Kurds of Iraq who were returning from Iran were given safe passage and began to move back into Northern Iraq (KDP/PUK), while the Kurds in Iran (mainly KDP-I) were being spurred on by Iraq, though again by the mid point of the war this ceased to be a factor and the KDP-I stopped fighting with their counter parts from Iraq.

While the man may have made the country more secular his vast killings of the Kurds cannot be ignored along with his aggressive invasion of Kuwait. There is a reason why Iraqi people through flags over hist statue and cheered when it was toppled and he ran from his palace.

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There is a reason why Iraqi people through flags over hist statue and cheered when it was toppled and he ran from his palace.

And, what is the reason, comrade cootie?

From what I know, the radical Shiite was the happiest faction in Iraq when hear that Saddam falling down and executed.

I spoke with Iraqi refugees who had a worse opinion of the American army for "liberating" them. One was a government employee who was forced from his country because of the threats against him for his desk job.

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While the man may have made the country more secular his vast killings of the Kurds cannot be ignored along with his aggressive invasion of Kuwait. There is a reason why Iraqi people through flags over hist statue and cheered when it was toppled and he ran from his palace.

I don't think the two are exactly related. People might not have supported him not because he did those things, but because in doing them, he brought misfortune (to put it mildly) upon his own country.

As for the statue incident, I remember reading that it had been staged:
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jul/03 ... na-statue3
http://www.famouspictures.org/mag/index ... #Staged.3F

That obviously doesn't mean there were not a number of Iraqis who were happy to see him go, but I question if that incident really proves anything.