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

by Daniel Yergin

Saddam Hussein’s father had died just before his birth in 1937, and as he grew up, he found his identity in extreme nationalism and the violent, conspiratorial world of Ba’thism. The decisive influence on him was his uncle Khayr Allah Talfah, who raised him and became his guardian. A fervent nationalist from the Sunni Arab minority, Talfah hated and despised the European culture. For both uncle and nephew, the lodestar event was the pro-Nazi nationalist Rashid Ali coup of 1941, in the course of which German planes attacked British forces in Iraq. When Iraqi troops threatened to fire on a plane evacuating British women and children, British soldiers attacked them and the coup collapsed. Talfah participated in the coup, and when it failed, he was imprisoned for five years, leaving him with a lasting sense of bitterness, resentment, and hatred that he communicated to his fatherless nephew. The Rashid Ali coup became a central myth for the Ba’thist movement. Saddam Hussein was also shaped by the culture of his hometown of Tikrit, which was remote from the national life of Iraq and oriented instead to the harsh desert. Tikrit’s values of desert survival—suspicion, stealth, surprise, and the unalloyed use of force to achieve one’s objectives—were the ones that Saddam Hussein absorbed.