A Dictator's Arc of Power Ends in Utter Ignominy

In 1980, Hussein tried to take advantage of instability in neighboring Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution had recently ousted the shah, by bombing Iranian airfields and sending his troops over the border. The eight-year Iran-Iraq war that ensued cost hundreds of thousands of lives on each side and left Iraq staggering under a debt estimated at $75 billion. It was in this war that Hussein first used the chemical weapons he would later turn on his own people in Kurdistan.

Over the course of the war, the U.S. government under presidents Ronald Reagan and later George H.W. Bush sought to weaken Iraq's bonds with its rival, the Soviet Union, as well as to prevent Iran from expanding its power in the region. It provided Iraq with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, along with weapons and military intelligence.

Near the end of the war, Hussein inaugurated another bloody campaign, this time against the Kurds in northern Iraq, who were aligned with Iran. During the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, a systematic effort to destroy rural Kurdish life, the Iraqi military dropped poison gas on villages, bulldozed homes and killed, tortured and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The Kurdish government estimated that 182,000 people died in the campaign.

To carry out these exploits, Hussein built an army, including the elite Republican Guard, that became one of the world's largest.

War and Retribution

After the financial and military strain of the Iran-Iraq war, Hussein decided to invade oil-rich Kuwait in August 1990. The invasion was immediately condemned by the United Nations, and in January 1991 a coalition led by the United States attacked Iraq. The coalition quickly liberated Kuwait and defeated Iraq but stopped short of removing Hussein from power.

Shiites and Kurds rebelled after the Gulf War in an attempt to overthrow Hussein. But in the absence of U.S. military support, they were brutally crushed. His forces killed thousands of Shiites in southern Iraq and forced waves of Kurds to flee north into the mountains of Turkey, where many died of exposure.

"Saddam's retribution was swift and terrible," former ambassador Peter W. Galbraith wrote. "Republican Guard tanks blasted apart ancient city centers. Shiite shrines became battlegrounds and then slaughterhouses as rebels, clerics, and unlucky civilians were massacred. The Republican Guard attached nooses to the gun barrels of their tanks, hanging Shiite men -- several at a time -- by elevating the gun."

Iraq entered a period of more than a decade of U.N. sanctions that restricted imports of sensitive materials and further impoverished the Iraqi people. The country's economy worsened, and shortages of food and medicine reportedly caused widespread suffering and malnutrition.

In the 1990s, U.S. and British aircraft enforced no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq and bombed military targets in repeated attempts to destroy Hussein's weapons arsenal.

Endgame

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States moved again to attack Iraq, this time citing Hussein's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, which U.S.-led forces failed to find after they invaded in March 2003.

The first salvo of the second Iraq war aimed straight at Hussein. Aircraft dropped cruise missiles and powerful bombs onto a group of houses in southern Baghdad where intelligence reports had suggested he was hiding. He survived that attack and eluded a massive manhunt for 38 weeks, until U.S. troops found him Dec. 13 in a cramped burrow on a farm near Dawr, a hamlet not far from his birthplace.

"I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq," he said in English upon emerging, according to Bremer's account. "I want to negotiate."

Hussein went on temporary hunger strikes while in custody and remained defiant during his first trial, on charges of crimes against humanity for orchestrating the killings of 148 Shiite Muslim men and boys in an Iraqi village in the 1980s.

On the day he was convicted and sentenced to death, Hussein wrote a letter to the Iraqi people, according to his attorneys.

In the document, he asked Iraqis not to hate the foreign peoples who had invaded their country, just their leaders, because hatred "will blind your vision and close all doors of thinking."

"I say goodbye to you, but I will be with the merciful God who helps those who take refuge in Him, and God won't disappoint any honest believer," the letter said.

Hussein was hanged early Saturday Baghdad time, the start of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, while his country remained at war.

Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason contributed to this report.