Saddam Hussein - Rise To Power

Rise To Power

Of the 16 members of Qasim's cabinet, 12 were Ba'ath Party members; however, the party turned against Qasim due to his refusal to join Gamel Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic. To strengthen his own position within the government, Qasim created an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which was opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism. Later that year, the Ba'ath Party leadership was planning to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was a leading member of the operation. At the time, the Ba'ath Party was more of an ideological experiment than a strong anti-government fighting machine. The majority of its members were either educated professionals or students, and Saddam fit the bill. The choice of Saddam was, according to historian Con Coughlin, "hardly surprising". The idea of assassinating Qasim may have been Nasser's, and there is speculation that some of those who participated in the operation received training in Damascus, which was then part of the UAR.

The assassins planned to ambush Qasim at Al-Rashid Street on 7 October 1959: one man was to kill those sitting at the back of the car, the rest killing those in front. During the ambush it is claimed that Saddam began shooting prematurely, which disorganised the whole operation. Qasim's chauffeur was killed, and Qasim was hit in the arm and shoulder. The assassins believed they had killed him and quickly retreated to their headquarters, but Qasim survived. At the time of the attack the Ba'ath Party had less than 1,000 members.

Some of the plotters quickly managed to leave the country for Syria, the spiritual home of Ba'athist ideology. There Saddam was given full-membership in the party by Michel Aflaq. Some members of the operation were arrested and taken into custody by the Iraqi government. At the show trial, six of the defendants were given the death sentence; for unknown reasons the sentences were not carried out. Aflaq, the leader of the Ba'athist movement, organised the expulsion of leading Iraqi Ba'athist members, such as Fuad al-Rikabi, on the grounds that the party should not have initiated the attempt on Qasim's life. At the same time, Aflaq managed to secure seats in the Iraqi Ba'ath leadership for his supporters, one them being Saddam. Saddam fled to Egypt in 1959, and he continued to live there until 1963.

Many foreign countries opposed Qasim, particularly after he threatened to invade Kuwait. In February 1960, the CIA created an unrelated plan to oust Qasim by giving him a poisoned handkerchief, although it may have been aborted.

Army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qasim in the Ramadan Revolution coup of 1963. Ba'athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. The governments of the United States and United Kingdom were complicit in the coup. Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba'athist leaders later that year in the November 1963 Iraqi coup d'état.

Arif died in a plane crash in 1966, in what was probably an act of sabotage by Ba'athist elements in the Iraqi military. Abdul Rahman al-Bazzaz became acting president for three days, and a power struggle for the presidency occurred. In the first meeting of the Defense Council and cabinet to elect a president, Al-Bazzaz needed a two-thirds majority to win the presidency. Al-Bazzaz was unsuccessful, and Abdul Rahman Arif was elected president. He was viewed by army officers as weaker and easier to manipulate than his brother.

Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964. In 1966, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr appointed him Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command. Saddam escaped from prison in 1967. Saddam, who would prove to be a skilled organiser, revitalised the party. He was elected to the Regional Command, as the story goes, with help from Michel Aflaq--the founder of Ba'athist thought.

In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif. Arif was given refuge in London and then Istanbul. Al-Bakr was named president and Saddam was named his deputy, and deputy chairman of the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council. According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba'athist government, which formed the basis for his measures to promote Ba'ath party unity as well as his resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social stability. Although Saddam was al-Bakr's deputy, he was a strong behind-the-scenes party politician. Al-Bakr was the older and more prestigious of the two, but by 1969 Hussein clearly had become the moving force behind the party.

Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, an Iraqi general and friend of Saddam who defected in 1991, has alleged that the Soviet Union covertly assisted the Iraqi Ba'athists in gaining and holding onto power in the sixties. "I was there helping with the revolution and worked on two occasions with Soviet KGB officials to help train us," he said. For thirty years, the KGB and FSB trained Iraqi secret police; some 70,000 Russian military advisors, many of them intelligence and security specialists, served in Iraq from 1973-2003.