Saddam returned to Iraq after the overthrow of Qasim in a military-Baathist coup less than three years later, in February 1963, and was immediately engaged in plots against the Baathists' partners in the new regime. He also enrolled at Baghdad university's law faculty and turned up for final examinations in military uniform and carrying a pistol. He was promptly granted a degree.
During the next four years, after the military had thrown the Baathists out of the government in November 1963, Saddam was engaged in racketeering and in accumulating secret caches of arms for his Party's street fights with opponents. He rose quickly through the party by intimidating or eliminating his rivals. He also planned for the eventually successful recapture of power in July 1968, immediately upon which, he and his groups of street fighters shot or stabbed to death over a thousand shopkeepers belonging to a rival union.
In the following months, he became deputy chairman of the Command Council of the Revolution under the nominal leadership of his kinsman, president Colonel Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. He took charge of internal security and became the chief-interrogator, effective strongman of the regime. A year later he was vice-president.
One early decision of the new government was to arrange a truce with Kurdish autonomists in Kurdistan and to align the country with the Soviet Union in order to improve the Iraqi army's equipment supply position. Another radical measure was a decree forbidding the use of surnames by citizens. Thus Saddam Tikriti, as he had until then been known, reverted to the traditional Saddam Hussein, meaning Saddam the son of Hussein.
The generally accepted explanation for the new law was that Saddam wanted to hide how many members of the Cabinet were his relatives from Tikrit. Yet another radical departure was the nationalisation of the British-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company, which had managed the northern Kirkuk oil fields. The act gave the government widespread powers in the oilfields to sack Kurdish workers and begin the ethnic cleansing of the province.
In 1972 Saddam, who had executed many leaders of the pro-Soviet Communist party, brought the remainder of the emasculated movement into the government and also gave four ministries to the Kurds, with a charter that gave most of Iraqi Kurdistan a measure of self rule. But the non-Baathist ministers had little executive power and Baghdad continued to interfere in the affairs of the Kurds, arresting unfriendly citizens wherever its troops had the power to do so.
An incident from this period of "peace" with the Kurds that typified Saddam Hussein's methods occurred when a group of Muslim clerics were urged by the government to visit the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani in his mountain stronghold "to build goodwill between Arabs and Kurds". The secret police persuaded the clerics to conceal small cassette recorders under their robes and switch them on as soon as Barzani spoke. The devices exploded, killing the clerics and a Kurdish soldier serving them tea.
The government, as usual, denied responsibility, but by early 1974 it was clear that the two sides could not coexist. By then the Iraqi army had acquired large numbers of modern weapons and was being trained by thousands of Soviet military advisers, while the Kurds were given some military aid by Iran and the United States. Thus began the first military aggression of Saddam's career. It lasted a year and appeared to be a stalemate when, in March 1975 in Algiers for a meeting of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Saddam struck a deal with the Shah: Iraq would share navigational rights in the Shatt al Arab waterway at the head of the Persian Gulf with Iran and promise to reduce its alignment with the Soviet Union, while Iran would immediately cut off all aid to the Kurds and close its border to them. The Kurdish movement in Iraq collapsed and an estimated 300,000 Kurds were deported to desert camps in the south. Many vanished.
Elsewhere in Iraq, the Government began a programme of rapid industrialisation, particularly in the manufacture of arms, and based mainly in the Sunni strongholds of Baathism in central Iraq. These were the years of escalating oil prices and the surplus of the Government's new revenues was spent on more arms and on raising living standards, especially among the minority Sunni Arabs from among whom the Baath party arose.
In the Arab world at large the net effect of the Baathist seizure of power was beginning to become clear: while the Baathists had denounced Qasim for his refusal to unite Iraq with Egypt, they now revealed themselves as even more narrowly jealous of Iraq's sovereignty than Qasim had been. Their forces along the Jordanian border with Israel refused to help the Palestinians in their war with King Hussein in 1970, and they became fiercely hostile to Syria, ruled by another wing of the Baath party.
Saddam became president in July 1979, after he forced the retirement of Hassan al-Bakr, and he immediately executed 22 high-ranking members of the party as punishment for opposing his elevation. He also began to plan the invasion of Iran, then in the throes of revolutionary chaos under Ayatollah Khomeini, whom, ironically, Saddam had sheltered for years prior to expelling him in the previous year to please the Shah.
Motivated by the prospect of humiliating "the ancient Persian enemy" and increasing his chances of becoming the overall leader of the Arab world, Saddam declared the agreement he had signed with the Shah in 1975 invalid, saying that he had signed it when Iraq was militarily weak. On September 22, 1980, Iraqi tanks rolled into Iran and attempted to cut the southern oil fields of Khuzistan from the rest of the country. It proved to be a costly mistake. The initial advance by Iraq came to a halt in weeks and the tide turned in favour of the Iranians to such an extent that, by the spring of 1982, the Iraqis were close to being completely expelled from the territory they had gained.
