Saddam's Growing Radicalism

TinyTartar

Banned
A lot of people talk now about how Saddam Hussein was a secular, albeit dictatorial influence on the Middle East and how his deposition created a very unfortunate power vacuum. I would say that it is clear that he had become deeply Islamist during the late 90s and was making some dangerous links with terroristic groups, but I cannot say how far he would have gone.

Had Saddam never been deposed in 2003, say that Bush's advisors are more from the Compassionate Conservative field and while he does react to 9/11 as OTL and kick the Taliban out of power, he does not see a need to invade Iraq, things might have been different.

But essentially, Saddam's growing radicalism is something that I think could only have bad consequences in the future, and I'd like to know what people see happening long term.

Does he start a war with Iran at some point, or does he somehow openly link himself to Al Qaeda and therefore provoke the West? Or would he somehow regain his sanity and decide to preserve himself by kowtowing to NATO? Do you think Saddam would do alright in the Arab Spring, or do you think that the Arab Spring is butterflied away by him still in power? How would you see this going down? Is he still in power today?

And what would be the result of one of his sons taking control of more state functions? Does a radical Saddam favor Qusay or Uday more?
 
I don't think post Gulf War Iraqi has the power to attack anyone. As I understand it Saddam was starting to lose it by that point, I doubt he was going to be around for much longer.
 
Didn't he only pay lip service to radical Islamism when it suited him?

Does getting your blood drained daily for two years to have the "most holy" of all Qur'an's sound like lip service to you?

Qur'an etched in Saddam Hussein's blood poses dilemma for Iraq leaders

It was etched in the blood of a dictator in a ghoulish bid for piety. Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur'an. But since the fall of Baghdad, almost eight years ago, it has stayed largely out of sight - locked away behind three vaulted doors. It is the one part of the ousted tyrant's legacy that Iraq has simply not known what to do with.

The vault in the vast mosque in Baghdad has remained locked for the past three years, keeping the 114 chapters of the Muslim holy book out of sight - and mind - while those who run Iraq have painstakingly processed the other cultural remnants of 30 years of Saddam and the Ba'ath party.

"What is in here is priceless, worth absolutely millions of dollars," said Sheikh Ahmed al-Samarrai, head of Iraq's Sunni Endowment fund, standing near the towering minarets of the west Baghdad mosque that Saddam named "the Mother of All Battles". Behind him is the infamous Blood Qur'an, written in Saddam's own blood.

Even to get to this point - the last step before entering the forbidden vault - has been a tortuous process.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/19/saddam-legacy-quran-iraqi-government

Saddam was slowly turning Sunni society into something very religious, very ethno-nationalist and very ugly. Even the Taliban were not dumb enough to praise the 911 attacks and put up posters around their country praising it.

hussein_poster_911sm.jpg


Iraq hails attack on US

The entire world - almost - has reacted with horror to the news of Tuesday's terrorist attacks against the United States - the entire world except for Iraq.

As condolences poured in from everywhere - even from Libya and Iran - Iraq rejoiced, saying the terror attacks were a "lesson for all tyrants and oppressors" and the fruit of American crimes. "America burns," read the headline of the country's official al-Iraq newspaper, which declared: "the myth of America was destroyed with the World Trade Center in New York."

Elsewhere in the Gulf, newspapers were unanimous in their condemnation of the attacks, but al-Iraq wrote: "It is the prestige, arrogance and institutions of America that burn." The paper said it would be difficult for the US to find the perpetrators of the attack, since America has made so many enemies. "Thousands if not a million or billion hands were behind these attacks," it said. "Brutal America, suffering from illusions of grandeur, has inflicted humiliation, famine and terrorism on all of the world's countries and today it reaps the fruits of its arrogant and stupid policy," said an official Iraqi statement.

The official statement, read on television Tuesday night, said: "the American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity. "The statement said the attack was, among others, a result of America's support of Israel. "The destruction of the centres of American power is the destruction of American policy, which has veered from human values to align itself with the Zionist world, to continue to massacre the Palestinian people."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1540216.stm

The Iran/Iraq War and then the Gulf War changed Saddam from a brutal Stalinist type of leader to something far worse. He really created the conditions in Iraqi Sunni society that AQI now IS find fertile ground by ethno-religiously radicalizing the Sunni population against Shia as well as the Western world.

Look at it this way al-Baghdadi who currently leads IS was a Masters and PhD student during Saddam's religious insanity movement and was by the accounts I have seen motivated towards his view that Saddam was starting to get it right that Iraq needed to return to the way things were in the 600s and needed to be at war with the world. Obviously Zarqawi and then al-Baghdadi took things a step further.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
Didn't he only pay lip service to radical Islamism when it suited him?

I think it was genuine up to a point, and his 9/11 reaction was basically all that there was that needed to be known.

Of course, what I am interested in is if eventually, his overt Sunni preferences gets him in good with Erdogan and he finds a backer in Turkey, or if he takes it way too far and eventually has to crush another Shiite rebellion.

And where do the Kurds come in on this?

Basically, what is the most amount of assholery that he could get away with before Bush, without Cheney and Rummy, and with an outlook that was more akin to his campaign, sees a need to take any action?
 
Didn't he only pay lip service to radical Islamism when it suited him?
Depends what you mean by lip-service. IIRC he subsidised (or at any rate claimed to for propaganda purposes, one should never assume the money ever actually got through) the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.
I personally remember driving past the 'President Saddam Hussein Mosque' in Birmingham in the '90s, though I think they changed the name later; I presume that was funded by him, a fairly non-secular thing to do.
 
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