World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

by Henry Kissinger

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein, of comparable humble origins, practiced a more extreme version of secular military governance: ruling by intimidation and brutality from the early 1970s (at first as de facto strongman, then as President beginning in 1979) to 2003, he sought to overawe the region with his bellicosity. Both Hussein and his ideological ally, Syria’s shrewd and ruthless Hafez al-Assad, entrenched their sectarian minorities over far-larger majority populations (ironically, of opposite orientations—with Sunnis governing majority Shias in Iraq, and the quasi-Shia Alawites governing majority Sunnis in Syria) by avowing pan-Arab nationalism. A sense of common national destiny developed as a substitute for the Islamic vision.