IN THE spring of 1990, Iraqi state television commemorated Saddam Hussein's 53rd birthday by playing, over and over, extended footage of the leader touring an art gallery. Room after room, the display consisted entirely of works sent as birthday tributes. To the jolly strains of Mozart's “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, Iraq's president and his train of uniformed henchmen nodded, smirked and gestured appreciatively before paintings featuring Saddam, Napoleon-like, atop a rearing white stallion, or Saddam, commanding a tank, gesturing towards a blazing battlefront, or Saddam, in profile, facing the Dome of the Rock, clad in the chain-mail tunic and spiked helmet that Saladin, the Muslim liberator of Jerusalem, was made to wear in Egyptian costume dramas.
This was springtime indeed for Saddam Hussein. He had recently emerged undefeated from the winter of a bloody eight-year war with Iran, and had just successfully crushed another Kurdish uprising. This fatherless son of dirt-poor peasants, raised by better-off relatives, who had been given the ungainly name of Saddam (a conjugate of the Arabic words for “shock” and “collision”), had already ruled Iraq for two decades. He had eliminated all rivals, cowed the potentially restless Shia majority and packed the state with his own trusted relations. Museums, hospitals, parks and whole cities bore his name.
And then he blew it all by invading Kuwait, the small, rich neighbouring emirate, on August 2nd 1990. Asked in later years, following his capture in a “spider hole” by American invaders, why he had done this, Saddam first blustered that it was because Kuwait was rightfully Iraq's 19th province. Then, in his slightly nasal whine, he growled, “When I get something into my head I act. That's just the way I am.”
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