Saddam was fairly good with ruling by absolute terror and internal Iraqi politics up to the point he started becoming convinced the best way to revolution proof his country was to religiously radicalize the Sunnis. After the war the Sunni community in Iraq dumped him for a younger flasher Jordanian who promised to take the war even more directly to the hearts of the West and the Shia.
Saddam was always horrible at misreading external military and political issues. He sensed Iran was weakened after the revolution which it was and invaded without getting a the Gulf States behind him first. In doing so he bankrupted his country and spilled a river Iraqi of blood for nothing. Then he asks our ambassador of Iraq what the U.S. position is on Kuwait and she demurs and thinks he is talking about saber-ratting for concessions when he is talking about invading and annexing the country.
He invades and annexes the country and lines his whole army up in the desert in a way that sets the Iraqi Armed Forces up like a T to be wacked and wacked it gets. He becomes convinced by trying to bomb and gas Israel their retaliation would bring the whole Arab world into the war against the West which was idiocy. If his Air Force general didn't convince him none of the planes would get though to gas Jerusalem and they were sent and some of the planes got though Baghdad might not have survived.
Saddam gets out of the war barely after Bush called on the people to rise up and ended the war before the US pocked the majority of his Republican Guard and he ends up with a cease fire with stringent conditions and decides to follow the terms only when he feels like it abide by and goes ahead with an idiot revenge plot idea against Bush 41.
April 13, 1993: Fourteen men believed to be working for
Saddam Hussein smuggled bombs into
Kuwait to assassinate former President
Bush by a car bomb during his visit to
Kuwait University three months after he had left office.
The plot was foiled when Kuwaiti officials found the bomb and arrested the suspected assassins. Two of the suspects, Wali Abdelhadi Ghazali and Raad Abdel-Amir al-Assadi, retracted their confessions at the trial, claiming that they were coerced. Bush had left office in January 1993. The
Iraqi Intelligence Service, particularly
Directorate 14, was proved to be behind the plot
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots
After that 70% of Americans supported a second war to topple Saddam himself. Instead Clinton orders a bombing campaign. In the meantime Saddam comes to love being the big bad standing up to America and the Faith movement hits in high gear. In 1998 he sees Clinton being impeached and weakening and believes it his chance to start playing games again with the inspectors.
Bill Clinton says to the public Saddam is reconstituting his WMD program and isn't complying with inspectors and signs the Iraqi Liberation Act with the support of Congress making regime change the policy of the US government.
Bill Clinton: Iraq admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production....
Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq's remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits.
It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them. The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons....
Now, let's imagine the future. What if he fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act
Saddam decides at the end of 1998 to call Clinton's bluff and he boots the inspectors. About 60% of the public supports a second war to topple Saddam after booting the inspectors, Clinton mulls it over but decides on a bombing campaign instead and Saddam believes he won and America is weak and won't touch him.
He declares he will no longer follow the No Fly Zone period and US and British planes are fair game to shoot at and Iraq tries.
Then comes September 11th. Gaddafi and Iran are freaked out thinking they are next and play ball with the US with candle light vigils in Iran and Arafat is giving blood for 911 vicitims. The first response Saddam has to the attacks is order his country to publically celebrate the attack. Posters go up in Baghdad.
80% of the US public in November 2001 supports a second war to topple Saddam.
One member of Bush's team Wolfowitz wants to do Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time, the rest are worried it would mess up the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Saddam is acting extra plus billigerent in a lot of ways he came to love being enemy number one standing up to America and suddenly Bin Laden has taken his place.
Spring 2002 it's clear that Bin Laden and his aids are now living in Pakistani cities and it's going to be a long shadow war by the CIA and SF to find them. Meanwhile in Iraq Saddam is giving speeches that he has a right to chemical weapons. Over 70% of the US public supports a second war and Europe at this point is ambivalent and Bush is thinking about it, but Blair says to him to stop that he will get the whole UNSC aboard.
Meanwhile Putin gives Bush Russian intelligence that Saddam is planning attacks on the US and hints he may support a UNSC resolution for war (he doesn't), meanwhile US weapons inspectors are still out since 1998 and in their absence the Intel community is convinced Saddam is reconstituting.
Putin: We Told U.S. Saddam Was Planning Attacks
ASTANA, Kazakhstan – Russia gave the Bush administration intelligence after the September 11 attacks that suggested Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was preparing attacks in the United States, President Vladimir Putin said Friday. Putin said he couldn't comment on how critical the Russians' information was in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/06/18/putin-told-us-saddam-was-planning-attacks.html
In the meantime Saddam is convinced America will back down again and if not he will win and invites in jihadists and starts having them train with his troops on video as part of defending Iraq. That adds to the certainty in Washington that this guy might support the next major attack on America.
In the run-up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Saddam publicly invited foreign mujahedeen to come to Iraq to resist the invaders. Thousands came and Iraqi officials showed them off to the media as they were trained by Iraqi instructors. Many stayed, eventually joining the insurgency against American troops and their Iraqi allies.
One initiative that eventually fed Saddam veterans into IS came in the mid-1990s when Saddam departed from the stringent secular principles of his ruling Baath party and launched the "Faith Campaign," a state-sponsored drive to Islamize Iraqi society. Saddam's feared security agencies began to tolerate religious piety or even radical views among military personnel, although they kept a close watch on them and saw to it they did not assume command positions.
At the time, the move was seen as a cynical bid to shore up political support among the religious establishment after Iraq's humiliating rout from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed. "Most of the army and intelligence officers serving with IS are those who showed clear signs of religious militancy during Saddam days," the intelligence chief said. "The Faith Campaign ... encouraged them."
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/...-dominated-ex-officers-saddams-army/31332975/
From Iraq Zarqawi manages one failed attempt to strike Germany and he manages in 2002 to kill a US Marine in Kuwait and the US envoy to Jordan. The US is listening to where he is and gives the intelligence to Jordan who tells Saddam where he is and to get him, but Saddam does nothing.
As Bush tries to push Europe for a UNSC resolution to topple Saddam anti war fever starts gripping Europe and Saddam becomes more convinced without a UNSC resolution America won't topple him. Meanwhile in 2002 new Intel comes in from a lying Iraqi chemist and defector from Germany that Saddam is moving his weapons program around the country via mobile labs.
The French and Russians opposes the US and British UNSC resolution and in the 11th hour before it's clear America is going in Saddam allows the inspectors back in, but Bush already made the decision to invade and what's more is now convinced Saddam is now moving his biochem facilities around the country on trucks that the inspectors will never find.
America invades and finds nothing at first, but a few thousand serin gas rocks and mustard gas shells in the dirt a few years later, but not the biochemical program they were looking for. Saddam couldn't afford a major one because of sanctions. But, jihadists and a radicalized Sunni Arab cadre that we found.
In the end he wanted to be a great conquer and after the West stopped him he wanted to be a great Islamic leader that stood up to America, but unlike the Iranians Saddam never had any sense where America's line in the sand was.