Seven Things You Never Knew About Saddam Hussein

Saddam was an unwanted child. He never knew his father, who left six months before Saddam was born. His mother, depressed over the death of her 13-year-old son from cancer, tried very hard to have a miscarriage by hitting and bumping her stomach. Saddam grew up a poor peasant whose education came from the streets. It appears that his upbringing had a lot to do with his temperament as a head of state. In Arabic, his name means "one who confronts."

Saddam Hussein was not a dictator. He was the President of a single-party state in a system of government that was installed by the British at the end of World War I. After serving as Vice-President to Hassan al-Bakr for 13 years, he assumed power in 1979 when al-Bakr was too old and frail to run the country. He most certainly ruled with an iron hand, accusing 68 party members of being conspirators on his first day in office and eventually executing 22 of them. Given Iraq's history of coups and insurgencies, he most likely considered this maneuver necessary to discourage any potential challenges to his rule.

Saddam was not a radical Muslim. He was a secular ruler who believed very strongly in pan-Arabism, a movement for unification among the Arab peoples and nations of the Middle East. In fact, he opposed the rigid brand of Islam practiced in countries like Iran. During his rule, women were given much more freedom and opportunity than they had in other Muslim nations. One of the reasons he waged the 8-year war with Iran was to prevent the spread of radical Islam, which why he received considerable support from the United States.

Saddam initiated many effective social and economic programs. Under Hussein, the Baath Party modernized Iraq and diversified the country's economy, which at the time was almost exclusively based on oil. He built roads, brought electricity to rural areas and mechanized agriculture on a large scale. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He also established and controlled literacy and education programs. Thanks largely to his influence, Iraq's economy was flourishing until it started piling up massive debt during the war with Iran.

The U.S. did not arm Saddam. He was part of a 1958 assassination attempt supported by the U.S., and he also received support from the U.S and other western nations in the war with Iran. But during the 1970's, when he was building up the Iraqi army, the country's primary benefactor was the Soviet Union. Iran's chemical weapons were developed using German and British technology, and could be developed by any nation that uses pesticides.

Saddam was given tacit approval for his ethnic cleansing of the Kurds. It was well-known that Iraq was using chemical weapons in the war with Iran, but, using the philosophy that the enemy of an enemy is an ally, the U.S. turned a blind eye. With considerable influence from the White House, the United Nations rejected a resolution condemning Iraq for its use of chemical weapons. The Kurds have long sought independence from Iraq, and Kurdish militants fought alongside Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war. When the ceasefire was declared, Hussein brought the full force of his his military to bear on the northern Kurds as retribution. Once again, the Western world remained silent. Years later, George W. Bush cited Saddam's use of chemical weapons as proof that he had weapons of mass destruction and used it as a reason to invade Iraq. And the rest is history.

Saddam was a family man. But definitely not in the "Mike Brady" sense of the word. He had three wives, the first of which was through an arranged marriage. The two others were forced to divorce their husbands in order to marry him. He executed his own brother-in-law and childhood friend, allegedly due to his growing popularity. His two favored sons, Uday and Qusay, who were both killed in a July, 2003 gun battle with U.S. troops. In 1996, his first wife Sajida and two of his daughters, Raghad and Rana, were once put under house arrest under suspicion that they were involved in an assassination attempt of Uday. Nonetheless, in a 2003 interview with CNN, Raghad described him as a "good father."