Saddam Hussein

Fifth president of Iraq, from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. Leading member of the Ba'ath Party, a revolutionary group that espouses a mix of Arab socialism and Arab nationalism. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, and nomad versus peasant. When Saddam came to power, he worked on fixing it and modernizing Iraq. Unfortunately, his way of fixing it involved being as brutal as possible. Over the next three decades, Saddam would proceed to modernize the Iraqi economy, but also order brutal persecution against ethnic minorities, particularly against the Kurds, who he ordered to be exterminated with chemical weapons. Also famous for launching the 1991 Gulf War and the Iran-Iraq War. He was executed in 2006 by the new Iraqi government following a US and British invasion of Iraq.


 * Authority Equals Asskicking: Averted. When he was captured, the soldiers who captured him noted that he did have a pistol, but didn't try to use it.
 * Arch Enemy: George H. W. Bush
 * Badass Mustache: Minus the badass.
 * Big Bad: For a long time, he was seen as this in the Middle East. While he wasn't responsible for all the bad things going on in the Middle East, he did start two wars (and got toppled in a third) that involved hundreds of thousands of troops, and provided support to Egypt, Syria, and Jordan when they attacked Israel, meaning he did do a lot of bad in the region.
 * Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: However, for a long time he was also seen as a useful foil for Iran, which was also highly aggressive and feared by many other powers in the region. This is arguably why Saddam survived so long despite being loved by none of his neighbors; until he ruined all his good karma in the endgame, Saddam was still more useful to the other regional powers alive than he was dead.
 * Curb Stomp Battle: He got handed two: both times he went to war with the western powers, particularly the USA.
 * Elite Mooks: His Republican Guard units, while they were better trained and equipped (not to mention better paid) and more loyal than his army of conscripts, were still no match for the forces of NATO and the Arab League during the 1991 Gulf War.
 * Gas Mask Mooks: Due to his tendency to use chemical weapons against his enemies and sometimes his own population, many of his soldiers wore this.
 * Gone Horribly Right: By his own admission after being captured, Saddam's strategy for deterring an Iranian invasion after Gulf War One had severely depleted his resources was to launch an extensive disinformation campaign to convince them that his WMD programs not only hadn't been wrecked after the UN inspections and sanctions of the 90s, but were in fact secretly remilitarized and stronger than ever. This worked so well that he also convinced most of the intelligence agencies in the Western World of the same thing, which got him invaded in 2003.
 * To head off the obvious politlcal meme before it starts remember that the US government took the official position that Saddam Hussein's WMD research had been dangerously restarted as far back as 1998, i.e., three years before someone else took office. It's just that one President took the approach 'any means short of war', and his successor took the approach 'any means, period'.
 * General Failure: He was a notoriously incompetent general in all of the wars he was involved in.
 * One famous quote concerning the 1991 Gulf War was "Saddam Hussein went from having the fourth-largest army in the world to the second-largest army in Iraq in 72 hours."
 * Karmic Death
 * Kick the Dog: His absolutely horrifying campaigns against the Kurds.
 * To underline that, Saddam Hussein is the only head of state in the 21st century to have used WMDs against a civilian population -- and the only one to have done it to his own population.
 * Politically-Incorrect Villain
 * President Evil
 * The War on Terror: Not involved in it much himself, but was the leader of Iraq at the time of its invasion, and his overthrow was tied to it.
 * What Could Have Been: It's often debated whether the messy US war in Iraq throughout the 2000s could have been avoided if George H. W. Bush had chosen to overthrow Hussein at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
 * That was never an option. Saudi Arabia, whose assistance was essential in the Gulf War (not in a military sense, but with Kuwait already occupied without Saudi Arabia we'd literally have had nowhere adjacent to land our army), made it an absolute condition of their assistance that the US not attempt to depose Saddam Hussein, merely to repel the attempted invasion of Saudi Arabia and expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Before you wonder what the Saudis were smoking consider that Iraq is between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the Saudis had historically used Iraq as a buffer between them and the Iranians that they didn't have to pay for. While they didn't want an aggressive or expansionistic Saddam Hussein, because they'd be one of his first targets, neither did they want him so reduced that the Iranians would move any closer to their border.
 * Considering what happened later on with ISIS, the Saudis were more perceptive re: "what happens if you wreck the strength of Iraq and don't replace it with anything" than we'd thought. Ultimately the US had to go back in and start bombing shit again before ISIS was finally put on the back foot.