Real Dictators - Saddam Hussein Part 3: Oil and the Ayatollah

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Saddam nationalises the Iraq Petroleum Company and clashes with the new leader of Iran. A man called ‘Chemical Ali’ commits one of the most heinous atrocities of modern times. Meanwhile, sculptures of the Iraqi dictator are commissioned across the land. With his personality cult firmly established, Saddam is ready for war… A Noiser production, written by Duncan Barrett. For more on Saddam and his cook, listen to our bonus episode on Dictators’ Chefs. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support, so whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. It's April the 9th, 1980. It's April the 9th, 1980. We're somewhere in Baghdad, in a dungeon of the Muqabarat, the Iraqi secret service. Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr has been held here for the past three days, along with his sister Amina. They're both outspoken opponents of Saddam Hussein. The al-Sadr siblings have been arrested before for preaching against the regime. Several times, in fact.

They've always been released, eventually. Recently, however, things have changed. Their political party, Dawah, has just been banned after its militant wing tried to assassinate the deputy prime minister. Driven out of Iraq, Dawah is now headquartered in Tehran under the watchful eye of Iran's new leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Unfortunately for the al-Sadr's, that puts them at the very top of Saddam Hussein's wanted list.

This time around, there is no way out. The best they can hope for is a speedy death. But the Muqabbarat are in no mood to oblige. Over three horrific days, brother and sister are subjected to the most unspeakable tortures. Setting fire to his long bushy beard is the least of it. When the moment of martyrdom finally comes it's a relief in some versions of the story it's Saddam himself who puts them out of their misery

whoever it is who pulls the trigger it's a crime that al-Sadr's followers will not soon forget a quarter century later, the Iraqi dictator, finally deposed and convicted, will face his own execution. As he steps up to the hangman's noose, a triumphant voice in the crowd will call out, Long live Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr. These will be almost the last words that Saddam Hussein ever hears. From Noiza, this is part three of the Saddam Hussein story. And this is Real Dictators.

In 1979, Saddam Hussein is recently in power in Iraq. He's taken over from President Hassan al-Bakr, pushing his old boss and mentor into early retirement. Now, in neighboring Iran, another larger-than-life figure is emerging. The new leader in Tehran, Ayatollah Khomeini, could scarcely be more different from Saddam. His Islamic revolution, which brought an end to the Iranian monarchy, contrasts markedly with Iraq's secular Ba'athist regime. Already Khomeini has called for Saddam's overthrow. In his words, the Iraqi strongman is a traitor and a parasite

who deserves to be cut down by his own people. For Saddam, the Ayatollah isn't just a political rival. He's nothing less than a personal nemesis. At times, his obsession with Khomeini verges on the deranged. Professor Joseph Sassoon. There is this guy that I met in a conference in Birmingham a long time ago. And he told me he was in prison. He was introduced to this guy. And this guy proceeded to tell him his story that he and four of his mates used to meet

for coffee and play backgammon four or five days a week. And one day he arrived at the coffee shop and kind of giggling said to his mates, you're not going to believe what I dreamt last night. I dreamt I was in Tehran with Ayatollah Khomeini. The next day he was arrested and they kept beating him and tell him, tell us the truth. He says, I am telling you, I had a dream. They said, well, if you had a dream, that means you had the intentions. Confess that you were planning to go to Iran and meet Khomeini. Saddam has seen enough coups and assassinations in his time to know that holding onto his position will require extreme, even paranoid, vigilance. Author Will Bardenwepper.

He, for three decades or more, went to bed every night knowing that there were, you know, thousands of people who would love to kill him, whether domestic or international. I mean, enemies were everywhere. And he could never really, I think, let his guard down. Dr. Ali Ali. He's a man who's come to power through plotting.

So he knows, he understands that a small group of successful, secretive plotters can take over. And as time passes, the stakes get higher and higher. Saddam's approach is not so much to keep his enemies close,

but rather to stop his friends from talking to each other. There was never a meeting of all the heads of security services. Each security services reported directly to Saddam and would have a meeting on a one-to-one with him only. So no one can garner a huge amount of power and influence at one time. The paranoia extends to almost every aspect of Saddam's life. An energetic and robust man, as proven by his annual swim across the Tigris River,

he is also a notorious germaphobe. If someone has a cold, you're supposed to tell his guards before and not shake hands. You're not allowed to present your hand to him. Only him can present his hand to you if he wants. You never hug him. He can hug you if he wants. So it was all at his own discretion. But even when there was these huge parties to celebrate his birthday, they would cook the cake,

but he would not eat. Fear for assassination, fear of dirt, fear of any microbes or anything, because he was really horrendously scared about getting sick. Unsurprisingly, the job of cooking for Saddam is a stressful one. Fytold Shapohovsky is the author of How to Feed a Dictator. You're the best chef or one of the best chefs in your country. And one day the security service comes to your door, they make knock, knock,

and they give you an offer that you can't really refuse. Bittl spent many hours talking as well as cooking with Saddam's former chef, a man called Abu Ali. And he told me about his first meeting with Saddam's former chef, a man called Abu Ali knew that it's going to be a horrible job. But he didn't know if this kind of offer from a president is an offer he could refuse. So just in case, he said yes. Saddam's new hire finds himself in a precarious situation. One night, when the health-conscious president feels a little peaky after dinner, Abu Ali is arrested by the secret police.

He's held in custody while the whole residence is searched for poison. Fortunately, the president soon starts to feel better, and Ali is released. Then there's Saddam's capricious sense of humor. One day he invites a group of friends to join him for a day out on his boat. As usual, Ali comes along for the ride. But as they set off on a cruise along the Tigris, Saddam tells him to take the day off. Today he plans to make the lunch himself, a simple dish of kofta kebabs. He plans to make the lunch himself, a simple dish of kofta kebabs.

What Abu Ali doesn't know is that Saddam has a new ingredient to add to the recipe, a bottle of hot sauce. He recently received it as a gift, but Saddam hates spicy food, so he's decided to use it up on his guests. All of it. Of course, the president has no intention of sampling the meal himself, but he laughs heartily at the sight of his guests running up and down the boat, gasping for breath and guzzling vast quantities of water. Clearing up in the galley, Abu Ali has brought a plate of kebabs by one of the president's bodyguards. He tucks in and feels as if his mouth is on fire. Ali's first thought is that the boss must have poisoned him. A good 15 minutes later, once fully recovered, he grumbles that Saddam's prank was a waste of good meat. Comments like this are foolhardy. No one else on board has dared

to criticize the president's cooking. Ali is summoned up on deck. He finds Saddam surrounded by open bottles of whiskey, along with his still sweaty, red-faced associates. I hear you didn't like my koftas, Saddam says sternly. All eyes turn to the chef, who stands frozen to the spot. You didn't like them, Saddam repeats, even more threateningly. He then starts to laugh, and soon everyone on deck is laughing with him. Abu Ali doesn't know how to react. I'll cook you some more koftas, his boss promises him, but without the sauce.

This time when the food arrives, Ali scoffs it down enthusiastically. Saddam's actual cooking, it turns out, isn't bad at all. Not that anyone would tell him if it was. That was the proof of his power. He makes you a horrible meal, which is very spicy. Saddam made it, so you cannot even really complain

about the taste of that food. And that was the same game that Stalin was playing with his comrades, asking them to drink a lot, to eat a lot, and to dance for him. So that's humiliating, but that's the way they prove their power. For all of Saddam's successes, both political and financial, on a personal level, he remains a fairly approachable figure, just as long as he's sure where your loyalties lie.

I spoke to some people, Iraqis who were closer to him from when he was in power, and they said for someone that had as many palaces as he had and had access to as many creature comforts as he could ever want, he was still kind of a simple person and didn't need that much to be content. Now in his early 40s with a wife and five young children, Saddam cultivates the image of an ordinary family man. He's pictured taking his kids swimming and boating with them on the river. But like his personal hero, Stalin, Saddam aspires to fold his entire country into his familial embrace.

Alex von Tunzelmann is the author of Fallen Idols, 12 Statues That Made History. Saddam even grew quite a similar moustache to Stalin. So, you know, kind of adopted that look a little bit and very, very much bought into that same sort of tradition of portraying himself as a benevolent uncle, as this kind of kindly leader, as this big brother without irony. He can be stern when he needs to, but he's also known for his generosity, somewhere between Father Christmas and Oprah Winfrey. between Father Christmas and Oprah Winfrey. Almost every day he would meet with about 10 people from across the population.

A thousand people for every day wanted to see him because he was winning a lottery ticket. You never left empty-handed. They meet the president and he asked them, you know, what do you need? Are you hungry? Is your house okay? Do you need a car? And, you know, he would grant them something, grant them their wish. And it's not just adults who are the beneficiaries of Saddam's munificence. Children are encouraged to work hard in school to earn his approval.

are encouraged to work hard in school to earn his approval. I met a young Iraqi in the States, and he's what is called the generation of Saddam, Jil Saddam. And he said at primary school or one day he did very well, and the teacher gave him a prize and said, this is from Baba Saddam, Daddy Saddam. And he went home and told his parents and they started laughing and he got very upset. There is that feeling that he's everywhere and he is the father. You know, you're the father of the nation.

You're the father of the nation. You're the father of... Everyone is your child. As Saddam's personality cult becomes more and more ingrained, he seems to buy into the myth as well. He's soon lecturing the Iraqi people on every subject under the sun, with the wisdom and authority of a revered expert. Journalist James Hyder. He saw himself as so successful that he could weigh in on any subject.

He would give a two-hour lecture on TV on the best way to brush your teeth or something. He would weigh forth on morals, toothbrushing, food, whatever, stuff that he just happened to be in the mood for talking about. In one broadcast, a germaphobic president encourages citizens to bathe twice every day. A father who stinks, he warns, risks losing the love of his children. As strange as it might seem, to some Iraqis, Daddy Saddam really has become the font of all knowledge. There is, in the archives, citizens writing to him.

They say in the beginning of the letter, I prayed to God for so long to help me, but I didn't get anything. Now you're number two. He's just literally after God, which tells you where the mentality was going. For a lot of dictators, how they're represented is something that they just have incredibly strong personal feelings about. The iconography has to be very grand. And of course, these things are always somewhat on the edge of ridiculous, you know, Saddam being depicted being powered by rocket propelled horses. But at the same time, he obviously found that sincerely

wonderful and inspiring. He'd have had to be a very brave person to have laughed at it in front of him. Such is the thirst for new images of the president that successful Iraqi artists find their phones are ringing off the hook. Mural's poetry, the whole art scene was really captivated for him. If you are a good poet, it was a curse because you will get a phone call from the Ministry of Information and say, well, when are you going to write a poem? And saying, well, I write only about scenery or love scenes is not going to help. Well, this is your time. If you're a playwright, when are you going to write a play about him and songs? I interviewed a woman who worked on Baghdad television, and it seems someone saw her singing, and they called her and they said, we would like you over the next two or three weeks to write a song and play it on television.

Busiest of all, though, are the sculptors, those whose job it is to populate the whole country with replica Sadams. We don't really have precise numbers for how many statues he put up, although there were hundreds of Sadam statues in Baghdad alone, so we can perhaps extrapolate that across Iraq there were probably thousands.

This army of effigies ranges from the human-sized to the positively gigantic. At least one bronze Saddam is more than six times the height of the flesh-and-blood president. And he's keen to ensure the artists get every detail right. And that includes sometimes controversial decisions about costume. Saddam wasn't a religious leader. He was quite secular,

but he was quite into using religious iconography. And he invoked those sorts of Islamic imagery. So he would portray himself in statues with elements of Saladin or even of Muhammad. Not as much as having a statue of Muhammad, but certainly of recalling him even of Muhammad. Not as much as having a statue of Muhammad, but certainly of recalling him kind of through a statue and also of Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi and all sorts of other figures from Mesopotamian and biblical history. So he was buying into not just into

kind of Islamic iconography, but also into this much deeper iconography. So very much kind of digging into all forms of Iraqi history and culture. Saddam may be happy to appropriate religious imagery for his statues, but his militantly secular regime risks pitting him against not only the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, but many of his own citizens. He talked in the early 1970s in a speech to the Politburo saying, we're losing our young in Iraq. They're going to the Communist Party because of stronger philosophy,

stronger writings, more powerful. In the 1980s, he gave the same speech and he said, we're losing our youth to religion. And that is more dangerous even than communism. A decade earlier, the Ba'ath Party cracked down on Iraq's communists. Next, it was the turn of the Jews. Now, that same brutality is turned on young Muslims, whose religious devotion is considered a threat to the regime. Professor Juman Kuba. The Ba'ath is a secular regime, and secularism throughout the Middle East over the past century

really doesn't mean secularism. It's a very anti-religion. They banned the calls to prayer. They restricted the religious schools dramatically. You couldn't see any person on television with their head cover as I am, for example. That was impossible. In fact, you couldn't even see them in the street. They were accused of being against the government, so most people were afraid to practice.

Despite the restrictions, Juman's own brother Ahmed decides to participate in a major religious festival, the Ashura. For Iraq's Shia population, this procession commemorates the 7 century battle of Karbala in which the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussein ibn Ali was killed. Shia Muslims survived with Sunni Muslims for over a millennium. The majority of Iraqis are Shias so too is the Ayatollah Khomeini and most of Iran but Saddam and his fellow Tikritis is the Sunni. When Juman's brother travels to Karbala to take part in the festival, he's hauled out of the crowd and arrested.

So they took a lot of young people, and they dumped them into these rooms filled with people. They beat them up. They torture them. They can't sit. They can't lie down. They can only stand. They hang some people from the... I mean, it's horrible torture.

Horrible. For Ahmed's family, the news comes as a terrible shock. It's not long ago that his father was finally released from prison after his own detention by the Mukabarat. Ahmed is lucky. Unlike his father, he's released after a month behind bars. But already the treatment he received has left a lasting impact. He was really in a poor health.

He was really in a poor health. You know, it was really hard for him to adjust back to normal life. And at that time, my father was seriously thinking about what are the ways to take him out of Iraq. You see, since the Ba'ath came to power, travel became restricted. And sometimes you needed connections, you know, quote unquote, to get an exit visa permit to travel. In the end, Ahmed finds a way across the border. It's some time before his family learn of his whereabouts. But in the meantime, the Muqabarat are searching for him again.

But in the meantime, the Mukabarat are searching for him again. They came storming to our house to look for him. So all of a sudden there are like 30, 40 armed men in our house. They're all with guns and we can't talk, we can't use the phone. As the families sit cowering on the floor, the secret police begin asking questions. Where's Ahmed? Where is he? We are going to kill him right away if we see him.

And we said, we don't know where he is. And my dad was pleading with them and trying to calm them down. Juman's father agrees to sign a document stating that he has no idea of his son's whereabouts. But the Mukabarat insists that he puts pen to paper down at the police station. At that moment, I thought they will take my father again. And not only my brother is missing, now my father is going to be gone too. Fortunately, this time at least, the officers prove as good as their word. They brought him back, but it was a very shaking experience to us. We were all shaken.

And at that moment, my father really decided that he has to take us girls too out because we were hearing about girls and women being taken also. Women were raped, women died in the prisons, and sometimes women were just killed and returned to their home as a body. When the Mukhabarat return to the house yet again, issuing their latest threats, it's the final straw. Juman's father resolves to get the whole family out of Iraq for good. The younger generation will find it easier than their parents to make the move a permanent one. We traveled to London and then they had to go back.

You know, it's difficult for older people just to jump and leave. I mean, it was difficult for us kids. So you can imagine for older people, it was much harder. They had a medical doctor write that my father needed medical treatment for his previous stroke and its aftermath. And so they were able to leave for that medical leave. And then they stayed in London for a few years and they passed. Living in the West, Juman and her siblings join the growing ranks of the Iraqi diaspora. But even thousands of miles from Baghdad, Saddam's intelligence operatives are active. Ali Ali grew up in London in the 1980s, around the same time that Juman and her

family left Iraq. There are assassinations of opposition figures in London, Switzerland, Italy. He doesn't want you to feel secure in your opposition to him when you're abroad. And this has also the effect of silencing many ordinary opposition voices in the diaspora. You know, you had to be really careful what you said. It wasn't just, you know, when you're on the phone to family saying hello, you can hear the clicks always being recorded, you know, calling relatives in Baghdad. You always kept it to how are you doing? How's the family? Is everyone all right?

Never talk about anything sensitive. It's part of creating this idea that they can get to you. Saddam's regime, at least in the early days, has registered some successes, even if they've come at a staggeringly high price. And that's down in large part to the personality of the president himself. Saddam is nothing if not hardworking. You know, he had a huge, huge stamina for work. You know, he had a huge, huge stamina for work.

Look, the first 15 years, I think even his most critique within the regime were overwhelmed by the amount of hours he spent working and reading documents and studying subjects, there is a book about the oil negotiations and all the foreigners were flabbergasted that Saddam, who didn't know anything about oil, is coming to negotiate. But yet he spent a lot of time studying it and learning about it. And obviously, he was a reader and a good learner. He was a workaholic. He'd be working, you know, 15, 20 hours a day. He saw Iraq as an extension of himself, and so he wanted it to be a successful, thriving country. He worked very hard to try to make that happen.

Already huge strides have been made towards eliminating illiteracy in Iraq. But Saddam's educational ambition goes further. And thanks to the nationalization of Iraqi oil, he's able to fund it. He wants an educated Arab population, an Iraqi population that leads the way in science, medicine and in many ways it does. There's a big investment in mass education, schooling, university, in the sciences, in the curriculum around maths and science. Iraq really kind of accelerates quite impressively in terms of the healthcare it provides and at some point it's exporting doctors. During the 1980s

it's possible for Iraqi doctors to go and work in the UK without any kind of conversion course. They can just be hired directly. And, you know, you have this healthcare system that's free, it's paid for by oil wealth. There's a real sort of desire for national development in the country across the different segments of Iraqi society. And oil wealth is used to that aim as well as to other aims.

But having tapped into unprecedented wealth, Saddam soon finds another way to spend it. Fueled by his hatred of the Ayatollah, he makes a decision that will haunt his regime for decades to come. his regime for decades to come. On the 22nd of September 1980, Iraq invades Iran. It's a gamble that will cost Iraq big time.

It will virtually bankrupt the country. And for Saddam, who has so far kept his country on the tightest of leashes, it's the first real error of judgment. Ultimately, as it turns out, the first of several. Saddam had nationalized the oil industry and obviously Iraq has a lot of oil and did very well, became very rich very briefly, but unfortunately then invaded Iran after the revolution and triggered an eight-year war. If perhaps the Iran war hadn't happened, then it would have been quite a different story. The problem with Saddam was he was master of the inner universe. He would figure who's the loyal, who should be closer, who should he bring in, who should he push out, all masterfully.

What he didn't realize is that he misread everything in world affairs. Iran and Iraq have long been rivals, and Iraqis haven't always looked kindly on their Persian neighbors. In fact, Saddam's own uncle, Kerala, the man who raised him, once wrote a pamphlet with an extraordinary title, Three Whom God Should Not Have Created, Persians, Jews, and Flies. It's perhaps no surprise that Saddam should have inherited some of his uncle's prejudices, and since the Islamic revolution in Iran, regional tensions have been inflamed. There'd been this kind of geopolitical balance. Iraq is aware that it's a powerful player in the region,

but it can never really dominate or be dominated completely by Iran. They've got this equilibrium. The Iranian revolution completely upends that. The revolutionaries calling for all these regimes to be toppled. So Saddam goes to war. He wanted his own six-day war, you know, that within six days the regime will collapse. Eight years later on, he didn't achieve anything. But the country paid a huge, huge price. He's presented with this plan to have this kind of lightning strike invasion of Iran, go straight for the oil refineries and oil infrastructure, occupy those areas.

You'll cut off the Iranian economy and you'll crush the revolution. And he falls for this idea. It's appealing, partly because the Iranian regime appears to be weak at this time. The revolutionaries have imprisoned all of their top generals. They're purging their opponents. The expertise isn't there. The revolution is not supported internationally.

It's quite an isolated regime. And it's calling for the overthrow of every Western, Soviet, allied regime in the region. But Saddam underestimates the Iranians. And, perhaps more importantly, he overestimates himself. The man who failed the entrance exam for the military academy now seeks to rebrand himself as a hands-on commander-in-chief, because, as all Iraqis know, Saddam is the expert on everything. He has no military experience. He pretends to be the supreme or general, and if you talk to Iraqi officers who were involved at the time,

they would tell you it was so irritating, frustrating that they would come to these bunkers and look at the maps and couldn't even read that there is a mountain. You know, and say, why can't we send tanks this way? This looks shorter. Well, hello, there is a range of mountains. Oh, okay. At the same time, he would be so micromanaging, he decided how big the tunnels that should be built for soldiers digging in front of Iran. that should be built for soldiers digging in front of Iran. I mean, the width, the height. He has never been in a tunnel like that, in a ditch.

But he wants to tell them how long is the ditch and how wide the ditch is. I think the country paid a very, very huge price for this lack of military experience. And the unwillingness to accept this is not about gut feelings when you're doing military strategy. Before long, the conflict has descended into a stalemate. There were some airstrikes on the capital, on Iraq cities, but their capability was taken out early on. So it was really about this attritional warfare, almost like the First World War. You have these Iranian soldiers charging at the front lines en masse and just kind of being gunned down. And then some counter-offenses that kind of grind to a halt.

To some outside of the region, the war serves a purpose. With both Khomeini and Saddam devoting their energies to fighting each other, they're too busy to cause trouble elsewhere. This idea of the two kind of bad guys of the Middle East at the time, Saddam and Khomeini, having their armies go to war with each other, grind each other down, weaken each other militarily, is useful for all kinds of geopolitical players in the region. In its way, the war has recreated the old equilibrium

between their two countries, but at a terrible expense. One and a half million casualties, mostly on the Iranian side, and a total cost to Iraq of almost $100 billion. For Saddam, the failure to conquer Iran is a huge embarrassment. And yet he's determined to celebrate. In 1986, he commissions a victory arch for a war he hasn't yet won. This is basically a kind of two cross swords held in two burly forearms. So it's just the arms. It's not a whole statue of a person.

But Saddam worked very closely with the sculptors of this statue. So they are his forearms. They were modelled pretty exactly on his own to the point where actually you can see his own authentic thumbprint on one of the arms. Saddam may have modelled for the statue himself, but the unusual way that the arms are posed has led to a speculation that there was another source of inspiration. A promotional poster for the Empire Strikes Back, in which Darth Vader wields a pair of lightsabers above his head. It's not as outlandish a theory as it sounds. Saddam's son, Uday, is a massive Star Wars fan. A decade later, when he's given command of a new paramilitary unit,

Uday will outfit them with black fiberglass helmets, designed explicitly to mimic Darth Vader's. Either way, the arch is a typically grandiose gesture from a dictator who's spent six years failing to win his first war. But Saddam is still confident he'll triumph. In an effort to break the stalemate, he steps things up a gear. stalemate, he steps things up a gear. By 1987, his military purchases have made Iraq the largest importer of weapons in the world, many of them state-of-the-art. Now he unleashes this vast arsenal on Iran's civilians. Starting in February 1988, Saddam begins bombing Tehran.

Iraq had these Scud missiles they could fire. It didn't have to be very accurate to just land in Tehran. It's a big, sprawling city. But the Scud missiles are only part of the equation. Saddam has also been building up supplies of chemical weapons, weapons outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Six weeks after launching his bombing campaign, he decides to prove just how far he's willing to go.

The target? The Kurdish city of Halabja. Technically, this is Iraqi territory, but Halabja has become a base of operations for Kurdish resistance fighters who oppose the Baath regime. And situated right by the border, there's speculation that they've been working with the Iranians. Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, is put in charge of the operation. It will earn him a ghoulish nickname, Chemical Ali. foolish nickname, Chemical Alley.

They did not know, the Ba'ath regime did not know the extent to which those fighters were coordinating with Iranian forces. So what it does is it just decides to murder everybody. You know, this chap, Chemical Alley, makes the order to drop chemical weapons on Halabja. So whether there are any fighters in there or not, everyone's killed, women, children. Combined with the bombing of Tehran, the chemical attack at Halabja sends a clear message. There is no line Saddam won't cross. This was a big incentive to accept a ceasefire and to end the war. This was a big incentive to accept a ceasefire and to end the war. No one could really win it, but I think Halabja was a message to the Iranians that the regime is prepared to use these weapons.

It has them, it's prepared to use them. Four months after the attack on Halabja, the Ayatollah announces that he is prepared to end the war. He's not happy about it, though. Making this decision was deadlier than swallowing poison, he declares. Nevertheless, a ceasefire agreement is eventually signed, a month shy of eight years since the start of the conflict. This is one for the record books,

the longest conventional war in the 20th century. The longest conventional war in the 20th century. Saddam declares the result an Iraqi victory. But few outside his country are convinced. And for many in the West, the genocidal attack on Halabja is a wake-up call. During the past few years, relations between Iraq and the United States have actually been improving. In 1982, President Reagan removed the country from a U.S. terrorism watch list. American companies, including General Electric, Lockheed, and Halliburton, began doing business in Iraq.

In 1983, Reagan's special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, was photographed warmly shaking hands with Saddam. Now, though, the US government is growing increasingly wary, and the feeling is very much mutual, especially since the Iran-Contra affair came to light, exposing US arms sales to Tehran. Iraq and the United States may not yet be enemies, but they're far from unfriendly terms. That said, Saddam is more concerned with his neighbors in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait. These wealthy monarchies had been in the Ayatollah sites. The Iranian revolution has this position, neither East nor West, we're an Islamic revolution. And these regimes, whether they're Gulf monarchies or the Iraqi Ba'ath, are illegitimate and they must be overthrown.

It calls these Arab monarchies and Arab secular movements as corrupt, lumps them all together as clients of the West. As far as Saddam is concerned, in taking on Iran, he's just won a massive victory on his neighbour's behalf. Eight years of fighting a war have left a major hole in Iraq's finances. Why should he alone foot the bill for the war? This war takes Iraq from having somewhere in the region of $30 billion of foreign currency surplus to something like $70 billion of debt. And the regime is almost bankrupt. And it's in a lot of debt, particularly to the Gulf monarch monarchies saddam believes that he's been fighting on their behalf that iraq has paid a heavy price not just financially but in terms of

deaths and casualties and that they should write off their debts unsurprisingly saddam's creditors see things differently and to make matters worse the kuwaitis have begun flooding the international market with cheap oil, bringing down the price of Iraq's most important asset. To Saddam, this is nothing less than economic warfare. In the Arab summit in 1989-90, he said, reducing oil price equal to us as a rocket fired on Baghdad. You reduce the oil price, you're at war with Iraq. The tiny oil-rich country of Kuwait, it seems, has become the latest thorn in Saddam's side. And compared to a giant like Iran, it's pretty much defenseless.

Saddam begins hurling accusations. He claims that Kuwaiti rigs on the border with Iraq are slant drilling, deliberately poaching from his oil fields. When you have a neighbor who's richer than you and so much smaller and weaker because of the size of the country, the appetite grows. They don't really take it seriously. They think it's just bluster and rhetoric. And then there's this infamous meeting between the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and Saddam and Tarek Aziz, the foreign minister, where she says something along the lines of, the United States doesn't have an opinion on your conflict and has no desire to intervene in any inter-Arab conflicts, basically.

After two years in the job job it's the first time ambassador glaspy has actually spoken to saddam face to face someone to the presidential palace at short notice she's speaking off the cuff but saddam takes her words extremely seriously iraqi ambassadors would never say anything like that without authorization from the president. So they take this as a green light to invade Kuwait. He doesn't have people around him telling him, no, nobody challenges him. People are afraid to challenge him. There was not a lot of discussions about it. It was one of those so-called brilliant ideas by him.

Ambassador Glaspy's first encounter with Saddam will also be her last. Within a week, a deputy, Joe Wilson, has taken over, and Saddam's troops are marching across the Kuwaiti border. People didn't see the invasion of Kuwait coming. It took everyone by surprise. Everyone was on holiday. It was August, hottest month of the year in the region. Everyone kind of switches off. And then all of a sudden, you see Iraqi tanks in Kuwait City.

Predictably, it's a walkover. The Iraqi soldiers take the Emir's palace with ease. Kuwaiti radio broadcasts a last-ditch appeal. Your country is being subjected to a barbaric invasion. It's time to defend it.

But they don't stand a chance. It will take a much bigger army than Kuwait's to put an end to this invasion. The ball is now in the court of US President George H.W. Bush. In the next episode... The first Gulf War begins, as US forces are deployed to the region. For some Iraqis, it seems like the perfect time to rise up against their dictator. As economic sanctions bite, Saddam treats himself to

a bit of retail therapy. All the while his sons are becoming terrifying figures in their own right. So much so in fact that Saddam will come to see even close family members as avowed enemies. That's next time.