Saddam Hussein

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Long live Iraq! Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!

Saddām Hussein `Abd al-Majid al-Tikrītī (Hussein also spelled Husayn and Hussain; Arabic: صدام حسين عبدالمجيد التكريتي; (28 April, 1937 — 30 December, 2006) was President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. After being put on trial for crimes against humanity, he was sentenced to death and executed.

Contents

Sourced [edit]

  • Traditionally Marxism attracts the oppressed. This, however, is not the case in the Arab nation... The socialist programs in Arab history did not always come from the poor, but from men who had known no oppression and became the leaders of the poor. The Arab nation has never been as class-conscious as other nations.
    • n.d., quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi
  • The ideal revolutionary command should effectively direct all planning and implementation. It must not allow the growth of any other rival center of power. There must be one command pooling and directing the subsequent governmental departments, including the armed forces.
    • Baghdad Domestic Service, March 20, 1971, quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi
  • Our children should be taught to beware of everything foreign and not to disclose any state or party secrets to foreigners... for foreigners are eyes for their countries, and some of them are counterrevolutionary instruments [in the hands of imperialism].
    • al-Dimuqratiyya Masdar Quwwa li al-Fard wa al-Mujtama, 1977, quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi
  • The most important thing about marriage is that the man must not let the woman feel downtrodden simply because she is a woman and he is a man.
    • Interview with the Al-Mar'a magazine in 1978, quoted in Price of Honor (2002) by Jane Goodwin
  • I know that there are scores of people plotting to kill me, and this is not difficult to understand. After all, did we not seize power by plotting against our predecessors? However, I am far cleverer than they are. I know they are conspiring to kill me long before they actually start planning to do it. This enables me to get them before they have the faintest chance of striking at me.
    • Summer 1979, quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi
  • The complete emancipation of women from the ties which held them back in the past, during the ages of despotism and ignorance, is a basic aim of the Party and the Revolution. Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.
  • You Americans, you treat the Third World in the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it's off to the fields
    • Meeting with US State Department officials (1985), as quoted in The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Gulf War (2002) by Charles Jaco, p. 23
  • The ruling family in Kuwait is good at blackmail, exploitation, and destruction of their opponents. They had perpetuated a grave U.S. conspiracy against us.... stabbing Iraq in the back with a poisoned dagger.
    • Radio Baghdad, July 1990, quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi
  • The great duel, the mother of all battles has begun.… The dawn of victory nears as this great showdown begins!
    • Broadcast on Baghdad state radio, January 17, 1991.
    • Comment on the beginning of Desert Storm, quoted in Washington Post (17 January 1991) "Iraqi Leader Remains Defiant Following US-Led Air Attacks" by Nora Boustany
  • Palestine is Arab and must be liberated from the river to the sea and all the Zionists who emigrated to the land of Palestine must leave.
    • On Iraqi Television, May 30, 2001; quoted in Robert Wistrich, Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger(2002), page 43
  • The United States reaps the thorns that its leaders have planted in the world. These thorns have not only caused the feet and hearts of certain people to bleed, but also caused the eyes of the people to bleed - those people who wept a lot over their dead.... This was the case in Japan, which was the first to suffer from the capabilities of nuclear destruction on which the United States prides itself. This also includes what it did in Vietnam and Iraq and wha it did against the Russian nuclear submarine... The United States has become a burden on all of us. It threatens our security and that of the world on a daily basis... Why do you drive the world to this point, and why do you stab the world with a dagger?
    • Baghdad Television, September 12 2001, quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi
  • Isn't the use by America and some Western governments of their fire against others in the world including, or in the forefront of whom are the Arabs and the Muslims, one of the most important reasons of the lack of stability in the world at the present time? Isn't the evil inflicted on America in the act of September 11, 2001, and nothing else, a result of this and other acts? This is the main question and this is what the American administration along with of the Western governments or the Western public opinion should answer in the first place with serenity and responsibility, without emotional reaction and without the use of the same old methods that America used against the world.
  • Long live Iraq! Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!
  • I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.
    • Saddam Hussein Farewell Letter (MSNBC online)
    • Statement in a farewell letter written to the Iraqi people, written Nov. 5, 2006, released Dec. 27, 2006
  • la ilaha il-Allah, wa Muhammadu... (There is no god but God and Muhammed [is His prophet])
    • Last words. [1]

Attributed [edit]

  • Hussein stated it is not only important what people say or think about him now but what they think in the future, 500 or 1000 years from now. The most important thing, however, is what God thinks. If God believes something, He will convince the people to agree. If God does not agree, it does not matter what the people think.
    • Interview by FBI Senior Special Agent George L. Piro (7 February 2004); National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 279 [2]
  • SSA Piro asked Hussein why Iraq was the only country to applaud the 9/11 attack, which Hussein immediately denied.… Hussein stated that he wrote editorials against the attack, but also spoke of the cause which led men to commit these acts. The cause was never reviewed which could create such hatred to kill innocent people.
    • Conversation with FBI Senior Special Agent George L. Piro (28 June 2004); National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 279 [3]
  • President Saddam, he always think about America, "They are foolish. They don't understand anything in this world. They never travel. They don't know anything outside the area. Just they believe what the president says. They are the dictatorship, not us." And about George Bush, the father, he always called him stupid.
    • Latif Yahia, double for Uday Saddam Hussein, in I knew… Saddam (31 July 2007) Al Jazeera English

About Saddam Hussein [edit]

I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.
  • We're dealing with Hitler revisited, a totalitarianism and a brutality that is naked and unprecedented in modern times, and that must not stand!
    • George H. W. Bush (23 October 1990), quoted in The Bush Dyslexicon (2002) by Mark Crispin Miller
  • I despised Saddam Hussein, because he attacked Iran when my hostages were being held. It was President Reagan who established diplomatic relations with Saddam Hussein after I left office.
  • Vous êtes mon ami personnel. Vous êtes assuré de mon estime, de ma considération et de mon affection.
    • Translation: You are my personal friend. Let me assure you of my esteem, consideration and bond.
    • French president Jacques Chirac in a declaration on September 5, 1974.
    • Source: Aeschimann, Éric & Boltanski, Christophe (2006). Chirac d'Arabie : Les mirages d'une politique française (in French), Grasset & Fasquelle, pp. 64, ISBN 2246691214.
  • Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and I want you to know that we are with you, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-Quds [until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem].
    • George Galloway, The Times, January 20, 1994, citing BBC monitoring service at 9 PM on January 19 as its source.
  • Should Saddam be considered a condottiere, once in the pay of the U.S. government and then rebellious against his former masters? When war constitutes the global order and when the generals become the highest magistrates, we cannot but expect such developments.
  • I managed to get to him the message that he will be executed, finally telling him that, "You are the last card to be played by Bush and Blair." He said, "I am the last card?" I said, "Yes, you are the last card, because Bush and Blair have no reasons to invade Iraq. All the claims were against Iraq — nuclear, link with al-Qaeda — all these stuff has actually disappeared, proved that they don't exist. But they have you. You are they one who they will claim, 'We have removed the dictator.' Do you think removed dictator will be for life sentence or for releasing?" He said, "I understand."
    • Najib al-Nuaimi, Saddam's attorney before the Iraqi Special Tribunal, in I knew… Saddam (31 July 2007) Al Jazeera English
  • The PR strategy worked; by the fall of 2002, a majority of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and at least 66 percent believed (falsely) that the Iraqi leader had been personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. Support for an invasion of Iraq — and Bush's approval rating — hovered around 60 percent. With an eye on the midterm elections, Republicans stepped up the attacks and pushed for a vote authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. And on October 11, 2002, twenty-eight of the Senate's fifty Democrats joined all but one Republican in handing to Bush the power he wanted.
  • The images of Saddam Hussein endlessly repeated on our screens before the war (Saddam firing a rifle into the air) made him into some kind of Iraqi Charlton Heston — the president not only of Iraq, but also of the Iraqi Rifle Association. The true interest of these images, however, is that they remind us how the ideological struggle is fought out not only at the level of arguments but also at the level of images: which image will hegemonize a field, and function as the paradigmatic embodiment of an idea, a regime, a problem.

See also [edit]

External links [edit]

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