As a result of the Gulf War in 1991, the United Nations has enforced sanctions on Iraq to limit their ability to make more weapons of mass destruction (WMD). These sanctions are based on an oil-for-food system. Iraq can export limited amounts of oil to buy food and medical supplies

At the age of 42, Saddam Hussein forced current President Al-Bakr to retire and he was sworn in as President of the Republic of Iraq. President Bakr officially stepped down, allowing Saddam to take over. At this point, Saddam now held the post of President of the Republic of Iraq, Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Secretary-General of the Ba’th party, Regional Command, Prime Minister, and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. That was still not enough power for him, so he named himself the Staff Field Marshal of the Armed Forces. In order to hold onto his power, Hussein went on a purge in which party members were accused of being involved in a Syrian plot to place Iraq under Syrian ascendancy and remove Iraq’s leadership. By the end of this “cleansing” purge, hundreds of top-ranking Ba’thists had been executed including five members of the RCC.

Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937 in a village called Ouja, near Tikrit in Northern Iraq. He grew up in a broken home. His family was a poor peasant family that did not have a place to call home. He also had to grow up without a father, who had either died or disappeared before Hussein was born. When he was still a child, he was sent to live with his maternal uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, who had a tremendous influence on what Hussein later did in his life. There is proof that he had started his record of violence at an early age. There are several reports that link him to the murders of a school teacher and/or a cousin.

Iraq is banned from most international commerce because of its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Under a United Nations resolution, Iraq is allowed to sell up to $5.2 billion worth of oil every six months, provided that the profit is used to buy food, medical supplies and spare parts to rebuild its oil industry. Saddam knows very well about this resolution, but in deliberate contradiction to the U.N., he has been smuggling oil out of Iraq for quite some time. Smuggler tankers have floated right by United States destroyers in the Persian Gulf completely unnoticed. “The amount of oil smuggled out of Iraq has doubled since August of last year, when oil prices began to increase, “ said Jeff Gradeck. Smugglers have brought in about $50 million worth of crude oil every month. Every dollar of that $50 million goes straight into Hussein’s pocket. This very significant increase of income is disturbing because Saddam can do whatever he pleases with it. There is nothing to keep him from makin!

At this point in history, Hussein‘s repression of the Iraqi people had not stopped. He was, and is still violating human rights. He is still forcing people out of their homes and denying their citizenship, and he has been doing so for decades. He is still using military power to forcibly relocate people in both northern and southern Iraq. Iraq has refused to allow the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for Human Rights to return to Iraq since his first visit in 1992. The Iraqi government has also refused to allow human rights monitors as required by the resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. They have been executing people who get in their way on a regular basis. The total number of prisoners that have been executed since the autumn of 1997 exceeds 2,500 and the number is slowly rising. This includes hundreds of arbitrary executions in the last months of 1998 at Abu Ghraib and Radwaniyah prisoners near Baghdad.

On May 11, 1999, Larry Johnsone, who is the Seattle Post Intelligencer Foreign Desk Editor wrote an article about the health crisis in Iraq. He tells about malnourished children covered with flies, lying on stained mattresses in Al Mansour Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad. Parents sitting on the beds next to their children periodically swatting at the flies. The hospital is dark because electricity is shut off at intervals to save energy. The doctor moving from bed to bed i

Some topics in this essay:
Saddam Hussein, United Nations, Considering Iraq’s, War Hussein, Kurdish Turkomen, Dozens Shi’a, William Cohen, Nemya Nemya, Ba’thists Spring, Arab Nationalist, saddam hussein, united nations, human rights, revolutionary command council, revolutionary command, command council, chemical weapons, northern iraq, own people, medical supplies, iraqi president, chairman revolutionary command, food medical supplies, past current crimes, mulla mustafa barzani,