Army officers, including some with the Ba'ath party, came to power in Iraq in a military coup in 1963. However, the new regime was kicked out quickly. Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964 when an anti-Ba'ath group led by Abdul Rahman Arif took power. He escaped from jail in 1967 and became one of the leading members of the party.
In 1976, Saddam was made a general in the Iraqi army. He quickly became the most important person of the regime. He slowly began to gain more power over Iraq's government and the Ba'ath party. As Iraq's weak, old President, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, became more unable to do the duties of his office, Saddam began to take on an more important role as the head of the Iraqi government. He soon became the creator of Iraq's foreign policy and represented the nation in all diplomatic situations.
In 1979, Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution, giving way to an Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The influence of revolutionary Shi'ite Islam grew in the region, particularly in countries with large Shi'ite populations, especially Iraq. Saddam was afraid that radical Islamic ideas were quickly spreading inside his country among most of the Shi'ite people. He worried that these ideas would go against his leadership.
There had also been a rivalry between Saddam and Khomeini since the 1970s. Khomeini was exiled from Iran in 1964. He began living in Iraq, at the Shi'ite holy city of An Najaf. There, he became involved with Iraqi Shi'ites and gained many religious and political followers throughout the world. Under pressure from the Shah, who had agreed to a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran in 1975, Saddam agreed to kick Khomeini out in 1978. After the Islamic Revolution, Khomeini thought defeating Saddam's government may have been the second most important thing to do, only behind keeping his power in Iran.
After Khomeini gained power, small battles between Iraq and revolutionary Iran happened for ten months. The two countries were fighting over who controlled the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides Iran and Iraq.
Iraq and Iran officially went to war with each other on September 22, 1980. Saddam used the disagreement over the waterway as an excuse to go to war with Iran. However, the war was more likely an attempt by Saddam - supported by both the United States and the Soviet Union - to have Iraq stop radical revolutions like the one in Iran from spreading any further.
In the first days of the war, there was heavy ground fighting around major ports as Iraq launched an attack on Iran's oil-rich, Arab-populated province of Khuzestan. After making some gains, Iraq's troops began to suffer losses from human-wave attacks by Iran. By 1982, Iraq was looking to end the war.
During the war, Iraq used chemical warfare against Iranian forces and Kurdish separatists. On March 16, 1988, Saddam ordered Iraqi troops to stop a Kurdish uprising. Iraq attacked the Kurdish town of Halabjah with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents, killing 5000 people, mostly women and children.
Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political help. The Iranians, hoping to bring down Saddam's non-religious government and start a Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq, refused a cease-fire until 1988.
The eight-year war ended in a tie. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties. Perhaps 1.7 million died on both sides. Both economies, previously healthy and growing, were left in ruins.
Saddam was also stuck with a debt of roughly $75 billion. Borrowing money from the U.S. was making Iraq into its client state, embarrassing a strongman who had sought to define and dominate Arab nationalism. Saddam also borrowed a large amount of money from other Arab states during the 1980s to fight Iran. Faced with rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, Saddam desperately sought out cash once again, this time for postwar reconstruction.
Saddam was pressuring Kuwait to forgive its share of his debt, some $30 billion. (This would mean Iraq would not have to pay back Kuwait's $30 million.) Saddam argued that the struggle with Iran had been fought for the benefit of the other Persian Gulf Arab states as much as for Iraq. Because of this, he said, a share of Iraqi debt should be forgiven.
Saddam had pushed oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices and cut back production. Not only did Kuwait refuse to do this; they also helped support OPEC's opposition to the production cuts that Saddam had requested. Kuwait was pumping large amounts of oil, and keeping prices low, when Iraq needed to sell high-priced oil from its wells to pay off a huge debt.
The fact that Kuwait had so much oil made the region even more tense. Even though Kuwait had fewer people, it had about as much oil in reserve as Iraq. Together, Iraq and Kuwait had 20 percent of the world's known oil reserves.
The Kuwaiti monarchy made Saddam even angrier by drilling oil out of Iraqi wells. At the time, Saddam's regime was not disliked by most of the world. Saddam complained about the drilling to the United States State Department. Although this had gone on for years, Saddam now needed oil money to get rid of a looming economic crisis. Saddam still had an experienced and well-equipped army, which he used to influence regional affairs. He later ordered troops to the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border.
As Iraqi-Kuwaiti relations rapidly grew worse, Saddam was getting different information about how the United States would respond to an invasion. The United States had been working on starting a good relationship with Iraq for roughly a decade. The Reagan administration gave Saddam roughly $40 billion worth of arms in the 1980s to fight Iran, nearly all of it on credit. The U.S. also sent billions of dollars of food and arms to Saddam to keep him from forming a strong alliance with the Soviets.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with Saddam in a meeting on July 25. Saddam said he wanted to keep talks going. U.S. officials tried to take a calm, relaxing tone with Iraq. They explained that neither President George H.W. Bush or Secretary of State James Baker wanted military force to be used. However, they also said that they would not take any position on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti dispute and did not want to become involved.
Later, Iraq and Kuwait met for a final negotiation session, which failed. Saddam then sent his troops into Kuwait.
In August 2, 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, causing an international crisis. The invasion of Kuwait gave Iraq, with its own substantial oil fields, control of 20 percent of the Persian Gulf oil. The U.S. helped Saddam Hussein in the war with Iran, but with Iraq's take over of the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait in August of 1990, the United States led a United Nations force that drove Saddam from Kuwait in February 1991.
Because the United States and the Soviet Union were cooperating in the United Nations Security Council, the Security Council was able to pass resolutions. These resolutions gave Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait.
Saddam ignored the Security Council deadline. On January 16, 1991, coalition of U.S. and Security Council troops launched missile attacks on Iraq. The United States and a group of allies it had quickly gathered, including Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, made Saddam's army move from Kuwait in January 1991.
Israel, though Saddam attacked it with Iraqi missiles, did not fight back. It did not want to anger Arab states into leaving the coalition. But Saddam had focused attention on the Palestinian problem by promising to make his forces leave from Kuwait if Israel would leave the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. Saddam's proposal further split the Arab world, pitting U.S. and Western-supported Arab states against the Palestinians.