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Naked force and utter ruthlessness were Saddam's preferred methods for staying atop his country's turbulent politics. From the day Saddam at age 20 launched his career as a gunman for the nationalist Baath Party, he knew what it meant to be in an enemy's cross hairs. When Iraq's military toppled the monarchy in 1958, mobs dragged the mutilated bodies of the regent and Prime Minister through Baghdad's streets and hanged them from city gates. Saddam himself tried--but failed--to assassinate the leader of the coup, Abdul Karim Qaseem. And when Baath plotters did murder Qaseem five years later, his bullet-riddled corpse was shown to the nation on Iraqi TV.
Those experiences taught Saddam that politics was a no-holds-barred struggle for survival amid a ceaseless threat of plots, feuding and betrayal. He rose swiftly in the Baath Party by specializing in the dirty work of security and soon turned himself into a shaqawah, or man to be feared. "He killed lots of people to get to the top," says Con Coughlin, author of a recent Saddam biography, all the while knowing that "they could get to the top by killing him." According to another biographer, London professor Efraim Karsh, Saddam once told a visitor he could see betrayal in a man's eyes before the man had planned anything. "This enables me to get them before they have the faintest chance of striking at me," Saddam reportedly said. Bush himself has recently been watching a notorious videotape made in 1979 that suggests Saddam personally orchestrated the execution en masse of close party colleagues who had just helped him into the presidency. Ever suspicious of rivals, he filled key posts in his government with family and clan loyalists from Tikrit.
Saddam expected unconditional subservience from his inner circle. According to another oft told story, he asked his Cabinet for candid advice when Iraq was faring badly early in the war against Iran. The Health Minister spoke up to suggest that Saddam resign temporarily to appease Iran until peace could be reached and then return. After thanking the minister, Saddam ordered his arrest. When the minister's wife pleaded for her husband's life, Saddam sent him back in pieces, stuffed in a black bag. Advisers learned better than to contradict.
As a result, Saddam came to live in hothouse isolation, in limited contact with any ideas but his own. Except for 3 1/2 years in Egypt, to which he fled in 1960 after the failed assassination, and brief visits abroad in the early '80s, he knew little of the world outside Iraq. During a 1990 interview, Saddam twice expressed amazement that the U.S. had no laws to jail people who insulted the American President--as Iraq does.
As Gulf War II approached, Iraq's leader was surrounded by the same clique of toadies who advised him in 1990, with the addition of his son Qusay, 37, the putative heir apparent. They operated like a Mafia family, deeply secretive and mistrustful of outsiders. The members of the inner circle all staked their fortunes long ago on Saddam's policies, even if it meant that when he went, they would go too. None of them would risk their life to tell Saddam the truth. He probably didn't care. As he wrote in one of his autobiographies, "I've always preferred to make my decisions without the involvement of others. My decisions are harsh, just like my desert."