A Look Back At Saddam's Reign

The Former U.S. Ally Became The Nation's Most Famous Enemy

(CBS)  Saddam Hussein first came to the attention of most Americans in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Early the next year, American, French and British war planes bombed Iraq for weeks. The world had joined forces to defeat Saddam Hussein and soon victory was at hand.

But the Persian Gulf War was not America's first encounter with Saddam.

Saddam Hussein was born dirt poor in 1937 in a small Sunni town outside Tikrit. Even after a rise to power marked by unbridled cruelty, the Iraqi dictator was considered a U.S. ally of sorts. In 1980 he declared war against his neighbor Iran and at the time, any enemy of Iran was a friend of ours. That's the way it started, anyway, for us and Saddam.

"Donald Rumsfeld famously visited him and there were other kinds of collaboration because we were so fearful of the Iranians after they were taken over by the Ayatollah Khomeini and this extreme version of Islam, not just in terms of capturing our diplomats but in terms of wanting to export revolution," CBS News consultant Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, told The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith. "So Saddam was seen as the lesser of two evils and so we did this very Machiavellian calculation that it was better to support him than to allow Iran to go forward."

When the Gulf War ended in 1991, Saddam was allowed to remain in power. But with severe limitations: U.S. war planes flew non-stop missions over Iraq to deny Saddam the ability to attack fellow Iraqis who opposed him. And the UN ordered him to use Iraqi oil money for badly needed food and medicine. Not weapons. But while Iraqis suffered, Saddam got rich selling oil on the black market, and used the money to build huge mosques and palaces — tributes to God and himself.

Saddam Hussein was defiant but contained and this might have gone on for years had Sept. 11 not happened.

"There would have been an argument that Saddam needed to be confronted but it would have been a much harder argument to make without 9/11 and I'm not sure that President Bush would have staked his presidency on an invasion of Iraq if it hadn't been for the tragedy of 9/11," O'Hanlon said.

But the old dictator had no nukes, had no deadly gas, and the minute U.S. forces knocked down his statue, America inherited the decades of hatred Saddam had sown between Sunni and Shia and Kurds. By the time Saddam had been found in a hole in the ground nine months into the war, a full blown insurgency was spinning quickly out of control and has only gotten worse.

"At this point U.S. intelligence estimates more than 1,000 foreign Jihadists are in Iraq and they are carrying out some of the most violent acts," O'Hanlon said.

Even as Saddam ranted in the courtroom against the U.S. and the legal proceedings that would lead to his conviction and execution, civilian casualties mounted. And in a country rife with conflict, Saddam Hussein's execution seems not so much a flashpoint of renewed violence, but a morbid footnote for a man for whom death was a way of life.

[mbburch06]

No one is claming that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. It was a wake up call that demostrated our vulnerability to terrorism. The "do nothing approach" of the 1990s was clearly not working.

Saddam's brutality was perhaps not on par with Stalin and Hitler, but it was close.

A single anthrax or chemical attack could have left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead. Is there any doubt that Saddam would have LOVED for this to happen?

Given his ties to terrorism and his undeniable HISTORY OF USING CHEMICAL WEAPONS, we had no choice but to act. Worthless UN resolutions were not getting the job done, nor have they ever.

The greater question is: why didn't we take him out 15 years ago?

[mick7744]

WHAT?

Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11...you mean he was framed? Oh well...it's not as if he were the first innocent man Bush has had executed.(although most of the others were Americans, mostly Texans)

Saddam was a murdering SOB who really needed to be dead, but when did that become our job? Does this mean that we have to kill all the other foul individuals in the world? Who should we start with...Robert Muggube...Kim Il Sung...the drug barons...all those annoying rap stars? Why stop there? Maybe we can execute all the surviving relatives of those monsters who took the Dodgers from Brooklyn...REAL criminals!

Who gets to decide (the Decider?)and where does it stop?

[id61231]

easy to forget that many of the leaders of the "1,000 foreign Jihadists" are CIA trained "Mujahadeen" from their successful campaign agsinst the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Social "toxic-waste" - our former tools turn on us.

When we hire, indoctrinate, train, and equip murderers, they remain murderers - but better trained, equipped, and vastly more capable of indoctrinating others.

A "social impact assessment", both immediate and long-term, should be a required portion of every long-term intelligence operation proposal.

[missamerica4]

"But the old dictator "

Sounds like good ole Uncle Fred..who never hurt anybody.
CBS revisionist

This article needs a disclaimer :
Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely accidental.

[missamerica4]

"I only get one channel "

Where?

[angelfire171]

Harry Smith certainly has a charming way of re-writing the history of Iraq and his leader. I only get one channel so I'm forced to see CBS and the fluff you posit as news. What a dis-service you do for the American people. The American media has taken a journalistic nose dive into the abiss of mediocrity since the Bush administration and I'm sure a lot of the Republicans at CBS are that much more pleased. Since the early retirement and deaths of some of your finest reporters...I find listening to Bob Schieffer and Andy Rooney my only reality check. Here's hoping the rest of you can get it right in the new year..but I'm not holding my breath.
Mary

[hindelible]

Why is it that you have chosen to omit the fact that Iraq and Saddam had NOTHING to do with 9/11? Further, your assertion that 9/11 was the reason we went into Iraq to stop Saddam continues to perpetuate the lie. Shame on you.

[hindelible]

Why is it that you have chosen to omit the fact that Iraq and Saddam had NOTHING to do with 9/11? Further, your assertion that 9/11 was the reason we went into Iraq to stop Saddam continues to perpetuate the lie. Shame on you.