A Brief History of the Iraq War: Gains, Defeats and Miscalculation

Saddam’s model was Stalin—in repression, in the establishment of an Iraqi gulag, in torture meted out to victims, in the scale of executions. It is difficult to exaggerate the breadth of his brutality. “The terror,” New York Times reporter John Burns wrote in 2003, “is self-compounding, with the state’s power reinforced by stories that relatives of the victims pale to tell—of fingernail-extracting, eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning. Secret police rape prisoners’ wives and daughters to force confessions and denunciations. There are assassinations, in Iraq and abroad, and, ultimately, the gallows, the firing squads and the pistol shots to the head.” Estimates of the number of people killed during Saddam’s regime have ranged anywhere from 300,000 to 1 million. Human rights organizations estimate that the “disappeared”—those killed in Saddam’s prisons and rogue executions—number 200,000 or more. Some 500,000 Iraqis were killed in the eight-year war with Iran during the 1980s. Iraqis say 100,000 died in the first Gulf War (almost certainly an exaggeration, but tens of thousands just as certainly died in that war).