Iraq and the US had been allies since WWII. I sure this relationship had its ups and downs over the years. In the late 1970’s, Iran hurt America’s pride with the hostage thing. (I am not picking on Carter. I actually like President Carter- the most decent Democratic President of our time, and one of the most decent Presidents ever, IMO).

Reagan wanted an ally against Iran, (It also didn’t hurt to have one against the nearby U.S.S.R.). He found that ally in Iraq. But Iraq/American relations turned sour in the late 1980’s.

In hindsight, supporting Iraq was a bad move, but if we hadn’t who knows what the present would be like? Would we still have a USSR (Say we had stayed out of the Middle East and the USSR had taken over the region)? Would Iran control Iraq? Who knows?

The future is now. Now we have a free Iraq and in a couple of months, the US will be handing the country over to its people.

I think you are right about the gassing figures. I have seen all kinds of figures from 4000 Kurds to hundreds of Kurdish villages. Over all, Saddam is responsible for hundreds of thousands of death, by many different methods.

Then there were his sons

And more;

From Time Magazine
Saddam's nastiest biological weapons may have been his sons Uday and Qusay.
TIME takes an exclusive look inside their reign of terror

By BRIAN BENNETT AND MICHAEL WEISSKOPF I BAGHDAD
After months of recovering from an attempt on his life that put eight bullets in his left side, Uday Hussein, the eldest son of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was ready to party. At his first outing in 1998, at the posh Jadriyah Equestrian Club, he used high-powered binoculars to survey the crowd of friends and family from a platform high above the guests. He saw something he liked, recalls his former aide Adib Shabaan, who helped arrange the party. Uday tightened the focus on a pretty 14-year-old girl in a bright yellow dress sitting with her father, a former provincial governor, her mother and her younger brother and sister.

Uday's bodyguards picked up the signal and walked through the darkened room, flicking cigarette lighters as they approached the girl's table. Uday, then 33, flipped on his too, confirming they had identified the right one. When the girl left the table for the powder room, Uday's bodyguards approached her with a choice, says Shabaan, who was Uday's business manager. She could ascend the platform now and congratulate Uday on his recovery, or she could call him on his private phone that night. Flustered, she apologized and said her parents would allow neither. One of the guards replied, "This is the chance of your life" and promised she would receive diamonds and a car. "All you have to do is go up there for 10 minutes," he urged. When she demurred again, the bodyguards pursued Uday's backup plan. They maneuvered the girl in the direction of the parking lot, picked her up and carried her to the backseat of Uday's car, covering her mouth to muffle her screams.

After three days the girl was returned to her home, with a new dress, a new watch and a large sum of cash. Her parents had her tested for rape; the result was positive. According to Shabaan's account, Uday heard she had been tested and sent aides to the clinic, where they warned doctors not to report a rape. Furious, the father demanded to see Saddam himself. Rebuffed, he kept complaining publicly about what Uday had done. After three months, the President's son had had enough. He sent two guards to the man to insist that he drop the matter. Uday had another demand: that the ex-governor bring his daughter and her 12-year-old sister to his next party. "Your daughters will be my girlfriends, or I'll wipe you off the face of the earth." The man complied, surrendering both girls.

It has long been known in Iraq and beyond that as venal and vicious as Saddam Hussein was, Uday was worse. Now that the regime has fallen, the quotidian details of the son's outrages are beginning to emerge. With Iraqis free to speak more openly, it has become clear that the malignancy of Uday's behavior actually exceeded that of his reputation. At the same time, new hints are emerging about his psychological state. Uday, now 38, suffered not only from the anguish of Saddam's disapproval—the son was too unprincipled even for his father—but also often from physical pain as a result of the 1996 attempt on his life. TIME has obtained a three-page medical report that lays out the until now undisclosed gravity of Uday's injuries, which nearly killed him and resulted in a stroke, brain damage and seizures in addition to the wounds to his torso and left leg. Uday displayed a compulsion to control the tiniest of details in his life, perhaps with the hope that he could stave off the situation in which he finds himself today. According to both a family servant and another source familiar with communications from Uday, despite two U.S. attempts during the war to kill Saddam as well as Uday and his younger brother Qusay, all three survived. Even now, says this other source, Uday, from a hideout near Baghdad, has reached out to the U.S., hoping to strike a deal for his safe surrender. A relative, says the source, has approached an intermediary asking, "What are the chances of working out something? Can he get some kind of immunity?" The U.S., naturally, has no intention of pardoning a man with Uday's record. The first son of Saddam Hussein seems to be the last to know he is irredeemable.

And what of the supposedly more civilized Qusay, who in recent years usurped his older brother's position as Saddam's heir apparent? Specific tales of Qusay's transgressions are rarer, but it is only in comparison with Uday that Qusay, 37, could be regarded as a moderate man. He, too, had an eye for women, though he is not known to have raped any. Like his brother and father, he lived extravagantly, even as Iraqis survived on government food rations. And he did his share of killing.

While the regime held power, few dared to speak of any discord between the brothers, who have three sisters and a seldom-mentioned half-brother from Saddam's second marriage. But insiders are now opening up with tales of great strains between them. These tensions may help explain why, according to both a family servant and the source familiar with Uday's surrender bid, the brothers went separate ways when it came time to go into hiding. Uday, the second source says, is laying low with a number of aides, while Saddam and Qusay remained together, until recently at least, in a separate location near Baghdad.

To get a closer look at the brothers Hussein, TIME interviewed dozens of sources with knowledge of the two men—butlers, maids, business associates, bodyguards, secretaries, colleagues and friends, most of whom insisted on anonymity for fear the Husseins are somehow still capable of taking revenge. We visited the sons' homes and sifted through raw material, including scores of documents, photographs, videotapes and recordings of phone taps. Here's what we found: As the first-born son, generally an unassailable position in an Arab family, Uday was seen as his father's natural heir. But he lost that status when his brutal tendencies directly touched his father. In 1988 Uday clubbed to death Saddam's favorite food taster, bodyguard Kamel Hanna Jajjo, because the man had introduced Saddam to the woman who would eventually become the President's second wife. Furious, Saddam had Uday jailed for 40 days and beaten after he struck a prison guard. The jailing fueled Uday's anger. "Your man is going to kill me," he wrote his mother, according to a copy of the letter obtained by TIME. He demanded that she find someone who can "release me from this torture." Uday said he had not been given anything but water for eight days and had spent four days in iron handcuffs. "I will either die, or I will go crazy," he wrote.

Eventually, Saddam would soften and allow Uday to return to his duties as head of Iraq's Olympic Committee. But it was only after Saddam's humiliating defeat in the 1991 Gulf War that he would begin to carve out a significant role for Uday and his younger brother. In them, Saddam found complementary strains that reflected elements of his psyche. Uday was cunning, cruel, ambitious and headstrong. Qusay was secretive, politically ruthless, hardworking and so idolatrous of his father that he aped his clothing style, bushy mustache and choice of cigar, Cohiba Esplendidos. "Saddam himself couldn't kill everyone he wanted to or spy on everyone he needed to," says Kenneth Pollack, an ex-CIA and White House expert on Iraq who works for the Brookings Institution in Washington. "Having those two boys to do it for him was a critical element in his reign of terror."

Qusay had been working for his father in small jobs in internal security when his big break came. Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, who make up a majority in the country but have long been repressed by the minority Sunnis, revolted against the regime in dozens of cities when Gulf War I ended. Saddam gave Qusay broad authority to oversee the crushing of the uprising. He did not entirely delegate the task. An eyewitness recalls watching Qusay, dressed in gray trousers and a blue jacket, arrive in Suera, where armed guards herded 300 Shi'ite detainees onto a field. The President's son, dangling a pistol in his right hand, walked up to the men and shot four of them in the head, according to a military officer at the scene. As he pulled the trigger, Qusay screamed out, "Bad people! Dirty criminals!" Qusay then ordered the execution of the remaining prisoners, got into his car and drove back to Baghdad. It was just one of many Shi'ite exterminations that Qusay ordered or personally performed in 1991, the ex-officer told TIME. The same source, one of Qusay's security commanders, said Qusay, for example, directed the execution of 15 families in Saddam City, a Shi'ite enclave in Baghdad.

His loyalty and ruthlessness proved, Qusay would move on to other assignments. He became commander of the Republican Guard and head of the Special Security Organization, which was part secret police, part security detail for Saddam and part umbrella group for his elite military forces. Before the regime collapsed, Qusay was widely regarded as the second most powerful man in Iraq.

Uday held less impressive posts. Apart from heading the Olympic Committee, he supervised various Iraqi media outlets and oversaw the Fedayeen Saddam, a ragtag band of armed militants, mostly ex-felons, that eventually became part of Saddam's security apparatus. Whereas Qusay would icily and efficiently murder for his father to further a political aim, his brother pursued a brand of terror that was personal, arbitrary and spontaneous. He was a threat to any father whose daughter might cross his path, to the women themselves, even to his own friends, who, it turns out, were subjected to torture and humiliation at his hands just as his perceived enemies were.

Uday demonstrated an insatiable sexual appetite. Five nights a week, some two dozen girls, all of them referred to him by his friends, were taken to the posh Baghdad Boat Club on the bank of the Tigris to meet Uday, close associates of his confirm. After drinks, music and dancing, the young women would be lined up like beauty queens for Uday's approval, and all but one or two would be dismissed. Those who stayed would join Uday in his bedroom at the club and leave with a gift of 250,000 dinars ($125), gold jewelry or sheer lingerie. "He never slept with a girl more than three times," says a former butler. "He was very picky." Uday took two days a week off from girls. He called it "fasting," his close associates say.

A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. "The bodyguards closed all the doors, didn't let anybody out," the chef remembers. "Women were yelling and crying, 'What happened to her?'" The groom knew. "He took a pistol and shot himself," says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin.

Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting, into a guardhouse on one of Uday's properties, according to a maid who worked there. The maid says she saw a guard rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The body of the woman was carried out in a military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder and the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday's mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom. A guard told her, "Don't say anything about what you see, or you and your family will be finished."