Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein was President of Iraq until the 2003 invasion led by the United States. This page covers him only as a subject of American political argument: the claims Congress made about him in authorizing war, what the postwar federal investigations found those claims to be worth, and what the American public believed at the time. It is not a biography of Iraq or of his rule.

What Congress Asserted in 2002

The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 — Public Law 107-243, approved 16 October 2002 — is the document in which the United States government set out, in statute, its case against the Iraqi government. Its preamble states that Iraq “remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations.” It states that “members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States … are known to be in Iraq,” and that the regime had attempted in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush.

Section 3(a) authorized the President to use the armed forces “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate” to defend against “the continuing threat posed by Iraq” and to enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions.

The House passed H.J. Res. 114 on 10 October 2002 by 296 to 133, with Republicans voting 215-6 in favour and Democrats 81-126 against. The Senate passed it at 12:50 AM on 11 October by 77 to 23.

What the Postwar Investigations Found

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction — the Robb-Silberman commission — reported to the President on 31 March 2005. Its transmittal letter states: “We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure.” The same letter records the Commission’s finding of “no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” adding that the intelligence professionals “were simply wrong.”

The report summarises the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate as having judged that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear programme, possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, had renewed chemical weapons production with stockpiles of up to 500 metric tons, and was developing unmanned aerial vehicles probably intended to deliver biological agent. “These assessments were all wrong.”

Against them the Commission sets the findings of the Iraq Survey Group, the body that searched Iraq after the invasion:

• On nuclear weapons, the ISG concluded that Iraq had not tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991, that gas centrifuge and other enrichment work essentially ended in 1991, and that the aluminium tubes at the centre of the prewar case were “best explained by its efforts to produce 81-mm rockets.” The ISG did find indications that Saddam Hussein remained interested in reconstitution once sanctions were lifted.
• On biological weapons, the ISG concluded that Iraq had unilaterally destroyed its stocks and probably its remaining bulk agent in 1991 and 1992, had conducted no research on such agents since, and that there was no evidence of a mobile programme. The prewar mobile-laboratory judgment rested almost exclusively on a single human source, codenamed “Curveball,” whose credibility collapsed under scrutiny.
• On chemical weapons, the ISG concluded that Iraq had unilaterally destroyed its undeclared stockpile in 1991 and that there were no credible indications of resumed production. The only chemical weapons recovered had been manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War. The ISG nonetheless concluded that “Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a CW effort when sanctions were lifted and conditions were judged favorable.”

The Commission notes one prewar judgment that held up: that Iraq had deployed missiles with ranges exceeding United Nations limits.

The al Qaeda Question

The 9/11 Commission examined the reported contacts between Iraqi officials and Osama bin Laden’s organisation during the 1990s, including a 1998 Iraqi delegation to Afghanistan and reporting that Iraqi officials offered Bin Laden a safe haven, which he declined. Its conclusion: “But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Asked about the matter on 17 September 2003, President Bush said: “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September the 11th.” In the same answer he maintained that “There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties.”

What Americans Believed

Pew Research Center’s surveys are the clearest measure of the gap between the public record and public belief. In October 2002, the month Congress passed the authorization, 66% of the American public said that “Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks”; 21% said he was not involved. In February 2003, a month before the invasion, 57% still held that belief. Pew’s own account notes that neither Bush nor senior administration officials directly linked Iraq or Hussein to the planning or execution of the attacks.

On weapons, an October 2002 Pew survey found 65% saying Hussein was close to having nuclear weapons and a further 14% volunteering that he already had them, against 11% who said he was not close.

Support for the war was broad and then reversed. In Pew’s final prewar survey in mid-February 2003, 83% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents favoured using military force to end Hussein’s rule, as did 52% of Democrats and Democratic leaners; men favoured it by 71% to women’s 61%. Clear majorities backed the decision to use force through the war’s first two years. By Pew’s survey of 20-24 February 2008, 54% said the United States had made the wrong decision and 38% said it was the right one.

Capture, Trial and Execution

American forces captured Saddam Hussein on 13 December 2003. President Bush announced it the following day: “Yesterday, December the 13th, at around 8:30 p.m. Baghdad time, United States military forces captured Saddam Hussein alive. He was found near a farmhouse outside the city of Tikrit, in a swift raid conducted without casualties.”

He was tried by an Iraqi court and executed. The White House statement announcing it, released 29 December 2006 Washington time, said: “Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial — the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime,” and called it “an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy.” The Library of Congress name authority record gives his years as 1937-2006.

What Is Not Established Here

This page was reduced to what the American federal record supports and no more.

The Iraq Survey Group’s own report — the Duelfer report of September 2004 — could not be retrieved. The govinfo package identifier GPO-DUELFERREPORT returns the site’s error page with an HTTP 200 status, which is a trap this pass has been warned about. Every ISG finding reported above is therefore quoted at second hand from the Robb-Silberman commission, which read and cited the ISG report directly; the page says so rather than citing a document it did not open.

The two Senate Select Committee on Intelligence prewar-intelligence reports (S. Rept. 108-301 of July 2004 and S. Rept. 109-331 of September 2006) are listed in the sources as pointers only. Their govinfo HTML renditions return “TEXT NOT AVAILABLE” and their PDFs are page scans without an extractable text layer, so nothing on this page is attributed to them.

Removed for want of a source meeting this project’s standard: the previous page’s framing of Hussein’s “removal” as a stated central objective of the invasion, which is not the language of Public Law 107-243 (the statute authorizes force to meet a “continuing threat” and to enforce Security Council resolutions; the separate Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 is what the preamble cites for regime change as a policy goal). Also absent, deliberately: any account of his rise to power, the Iran-Iraq war, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the Anfal campaign, the specifics of the Dujail trial and its verdict, and the manner and exact local date of the execution. These are matters of Iraqi rather than American political history, or could not be tied to a primary source read for this pass.

The senate.gov roll call page refuses automated clients outright; the Senate vote total was read from a Wayback capture of that page. congress.gov returned HTTP 403 and was not used.