The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

It was during the tumult and enthusiasm that accompanied Nasser’s victory at Suez in 1956 that Saddam Hussein, while still a teenager, was recruited into the Ba’th party. The Nasserite anti-imperialistic rhetoric of the 1950s remained with him ever after. Shortly after joining the party, it is said, he carried out his first assassination—of a local political figure in Tikrit. His commitment to Ba’thism was sealed and the foundations of his reputation established. In 1959, he had been one of the assailants in the assassination attempt, on Baghdad’s main street, on Iraq’s ruler, Abdul Karim Kassem. The attack failed, and Hussein, wounded in the gunfire and under a death sentence, fled to Egypt. He did not return to Iraq until 1963. Thereafter, he took charge of organizing the Ba’thist party’s underground militia. Though already the strongman for several years in the Ba’thist regime that took power in 1968, he assumed the Presidency—replacing Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, cousin of his uncle—only in 1979 in the course of a purge in which many members of the Ba’thist party were executed. In order to assure that the imprisoned Ba’thists provided the appropriate confessions before their executions, Saddam Hussein took some of their families hostage. By 1979, he had already long since come to be seen as a shaqawah, an implacable tough, a man to be feared. He was ruthless and emotionless when it came to those he considered as enemies, threats, obstacles to his objectives, or simply useful ...