The portrait of a dictator

BEIRUT, Lebanon - For two decades, the most common feature of Iraq's barren landscape were heroic portraits of Saddam Hussein. He appeared as a Bedouin riding a white horse, a revolutionary in a black beret or a devout Muslim with his head bowed in prayer.

But the most popular image -- which hung along the sides of buildings, schools, airports, highways and desert roads -- was that of a smiling Hussein, wearing a fedora and firing an assault rifle into the air. In the more than 30 years he ruled Iraq, unchallenged and ever audacious, Hussein worked tirelessly to cultivate the persona embodied by that photograph: an urbane, modern and, above all, strong leader.

Hussein, 69, rose to power on a wave of nationalist, revolutionary sentiment sweeping the Middle East. With unprecedented oil revenue in the 1970s, he built Iraq into a modern state that became the envy of the Arab world. But he also ruthlessly suppressed all opposition, and dragged his country into two successive -- and spectacularly destructive -- wars with its neighbors. His regime executed, tortured, arrested or disappeared hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. His ruling Sunni Muslim minority persecuted the country's two largest communities: Shia Muslims and ethnic Kurds.

For much of his reign, and especially after he invaded Iran in 1980, Hussein was backed by the United States, Europe and most Arab governments. During the eight-year war with Iran, U.S. and other Western powers supplied him with weapons and military intelligence. It was only after he invaded Kuwait in 1990 that the West turned against him. Despite a disastrous loss to a U.S.-led alliance in the 1991 Gulf War, Hussein clung to power and survived more than a decade of United Nations sanctions and weapons inspections.

In 2003, Hussein became the first modern Arab leader to be deposed by a foreign power. After a trial punctuated by charges of U.S. interference and procedural flaws, he was convicted of ordering the killing of 148 Iraqi Shias in the town of Dujail and sentenced to death by hanging. That earned him another distinction: He was the first modern Arab ruler to be tried and executed for his crimes.

In a region filled with U.S.-allied dictators, many Arabs admired Hussein's willingness to challenge the world's sole superpower and his support for the Palestinians in their struggle with Israel. His rhetoric of "liberating" Jerusalem and restoring old Arab glories, much like his hero, the 12th century Muslim conqueror Salahuddin, resonated with the Arab masses. But some Arabs were repelled by Hussein's brutality at home and in wars with his neighbors.

"For a long time, Saddam was more popular in the Arab world than he was inside Iraq. That's because most Arabs did not grasp the full extent of his cruelty," said Zuheir Jazairy, a prominent Iraqi writer. "To them, he was an Arab leader who stood up to the West. To Iraqis, he was a tyrant."

Tough beginnings

Saddam Hussein's ascendance to power reflects the journey of a generation of Arab leaders: men from poor families and hardscrabble places who fought their way to the top. Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, to a peasant family in the village of Al Awja, about 100 miles north of Baghdad. Al Awja, which means "the crooked" in Arabic, is six miles from Tikrit, the regional capital from which Hussein drew his most trusted lieutenants.

To improve his social standing, Hussein claimed to have been from Tikrit -- and he was called Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti. He also understood the historical symbolism to declaring his roots in Tikrit: The city was the birthplace of Salahuddin, the revered Muslim warrior who recaptured Jerusalem from the Christian crusaders.

Hussein never knew his father, who left the family before his child's birth. After his mother remarried, Hussein spent much of his childhood under the care of a maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah, a fervent Iraqi nationalist who pushed his nephew toward a life in revolutionary politics. At age 20, Hussein joined the pan-Arab Baath Party.

It was an era of upheaval throughout the Middle East, where the merchant and feudal elites that had been allied with the old European colonial powers were losing their grip on power. In Egypt, a young military officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser had led a revolt against the British-backed king. Nasser's revolution inspired a wave of rebellions in the 1950s and 60s, stretching from Libya to Syria to Iraq.

In 1959, Hussein was wounded in a failed attempt to assassinate Iraq's ruling general, Abdul-Karim Qassem. Hussein, who had fled to Syria and then Egypt, was sentenced to death in absentia for his involvement in the plot. He lived for four years in Cairo, where he became more steeped in Arab nationalist politics. When he returned to Iraq, he quickly rose through the ranks of the Baath Party. In 1968, he took part in a bloodless coup led by Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who was named president. Hussein was appointed al-Bakr's deputy and soon became the regime's power broker.

In the early 1970s, Hussein oversaw the seizure of Iraqi oil assets from foreign companies just as oil prices were beginning to rise sharply. After nationalizing the oil industry, he used profits to modernize Iraq's countryside by distributing land to farmers and mechanizing agriculture production. He also led a campaign to expand free education and health care, build roads and highways and create new industries. Iraq became one of the richest and most developed countries in the Arab world.

By 1979, as he consolidated power through an elaborate web of security services answering directly to him, he forced al-Bakr to resign and appointed himself president. At the age of 42, Hussein "had triumphed by using the disconcerting combination of charm, generosity and ruthless terror that was to serve him so well in maintaining his position as ruler of Iraq for longer than any predecessor," wrote Charles Tripp, a British academic and leading historian of Iraq. "He incorporated all his associates into a web of obligation and surveillance to which he alone held the key."

Concentrated power

Because Hussein concentrated power among his closest relatives and distrusted those outside his Albu Nasir tribe, Tikritis formed the backbone of the Baathist regime and its military forces. In 2003, people named "al-Tikriti" peppered Washington's list of the most-wanted Iraqi leaders.

Worried about the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power in Iran, Hussein made the first major mistake of his rule in 1980 when he decided to invade his larger neighbor under the pretext of a border dispute. Hussein had feared that Khomeini would inspire the Shia majority in Iraq to rise up against the secular Baathist rule.

But despite weapons and intelligence support from the West, Iraqi forces became bogged down in one of the longest and deadliest wars of attrition of the late 20th century. On several occasions, Iraq used Western-supplied chemical weapons against Iranian forces. In March 1988, Iraqi troops attacked the town of Halabja -- in northern Iraq, where Kurdish separatists were waging an insurgency -- with a mix of mustard gas and nerve agents, killing about 5,000 civilians and injuring more than 10,000.

By the time the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, more than 1 million people were killed and both economies were in ruins. Hussein's government was also in debt for tens of billions of dollars to Arab countries, especially Kuwait.