IN EARLY 1969, less than a year after his Baath Party seized power, Saddam Hussein spoke to an aggrieved family who complained that one of their number had been unjustly executed. Spurning a suggestion that they settle for diaya (blood money), they demanded justice and retribution.

“Take the money,” Saddam said quietly. “Do not think you will get revenge, because if you ever have the chance, by the time you get to us, there will not be a sliver of flesh left on our bodies.” In other words, should he ever fall from power, there would be too many others queueing up to tear him and his fellow Baathists apart.

Whatever other misconceptions he may cherish, the Iraqi dictator has never fooled himself that he is loved by his people. Saddam likes to emphasise his unsentimental toughness, nurtured, he has let it be known, by the rigour of his upbringing.

Born in 1937 and brought up in the village of al-Ouija (“the crooked one”), just outside the decayed textile town of Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris 100 miles north of Baghdad, he was, so he later claimed, bullied and abused by a cruel stepfather, who would rouse him at dawn with the injunction: “Get up, you son of a whore. Go tend the sheep.”

Certainly it was a clannish, violent society, in which practically everyone carried a gun. Relatives who approved of his determination to defy his stepfather and run away to school in Tikrit at the age of eight sent him off with a pistol as a parting gift, so his official biography records.

Later in life he developed the habit of recording demonstrations of his ruthlessness, such as his purge of the Baath Party’s higher echelon in 1979, on film and video and distributing them widely, the better to terrify opponents into paralysis. His most important assignment as a young Baath Party hitman — the attempted killing in 1959 of Abd al-Karim Qassem, then the Iraqi ruler — and his subsequent escape became the stuff of state-sponsored legend, complete with an epic film, The Long Days.

But there is and always has been more to Saddam’s grip on power than mere thuggish ferocity. Despite his apparently miserable origins, he had the advantage of useful social connections, thanks to so many Tikritis haing gravitated to jobs in the Government and especially the army.

One such was his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, once jailed as an anti-British rebel, who was an early leading light of the Baath Party. Another was his cousin, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a brigadier who took over as Prime Minister when the Baathists briefly took power in 1963, and President after their more enduring coup in 1968.

Saddam was content to be the hard-working “Mr Deputy”, an unobtrusive second-in-command, while building his power base in the party and, most crucially, the security services.

Potential threats to his power, such as rivals in the Baath Party, the still potent Communist Party and the religious hierarchies of the Shia South, not to mention the perennially disaffected Kurds, were successively emasculated. On a theoretical level, while paying obligatory deference to the woolly precepts of Baathism, Saddam displayed a keen interest in Stalin as a source of political inspiration. In the early 1970s he published a treatise on Building Socialism in One Arab Country, an echo of Stalin’s maxim of the 1930s.

On the other hand the Soviet dictator might not have approved of Saddam’s taste for making sudden, unpredictable gambler’s throws, which he once described as the essence of politics. Later, this habit of rolling the dice was to get him into deep trouble. But in July 1979 he had certainly succeeded in surprising his rivals by pushing his cousin aside and seizing supreme power, presiding over a gruesome ceremony in which scores of his Baathist opponents were dragged out to be shot.

For most Iraqis his ascent was not unwelcome. Not only did he abandon al-Bakr’s habit of altering Iraqi television’s programme schedule for programmes of the gypsy dancing beloved by all Tikritis, Saddam had already displayed considerable management skills in running the country. In 1972 he had masterminded the takeover of Iraq’s oil assets from the rapacious Western consortium that had exercised control.

The consequent revenue flowing into government coffers, boosted to fabulous heights by the 1973 oil price rise, allowed the regime not only to promote far-reaching education and health programmes but also to create a loyal constituency of newly prosperous middle-class city dwellers.

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