Saddam Hussein

[saluki_fan]

Did Saddam Hussein do anything good the people of Iraq? I once heard something about him providing a universal healthcare to the people of Iraq, but due to sanctions created by the United Nations he was unable to get the medicine needed for his people. Is any of this true, or did he any good for the people of Iraq? Thank You

[GorillaMan]

My aunt worked for several years in hospitals in Iraq, in the early years of Saddam’s rule. This was before the Iran-Iraq war, when Saddam was still considered to be a Good Guy. She says she has never worked in better-equipped, better funded hospitals, nor with better-trained or more dedicated staff, nor with more understanding managements.

Rather like working in Kuwait or Bahrain or Dubai nowadays.

Nowadays, these same hospitals (yes, she has identified more than one when she’s seen them on the news) are shown with empty stocks of drugs, bare wards, and perhaps no windows.
(caveat - yes, of course, Saddam was an evil mass-murdering fuckhead - but so are pretty much all the dictators of the world, including those of the other countries I mentioned. How the hell do you expect anyone to achieve absolute power?!?)

[Dahnlor]

It depends on what time frame you’re looking at.

From http://www.cbc.ca/news/features/hussein_saddam.html:

From 1969 to 1979 Saddam Hussein was the vice-president of Iraq and had a profound effect on his country. He nationalized the oil industry. He instituted a nation-wide literacy project, non-attendance punishable by three years in jail. Hundreds of thousands of illiterate Iraqi men, women and children learned to read.

He advocated the building of schools, roads, public housing and hospitals. Iraq created one of the best public-health systems in the Middle East. UNESCO gave him an award. It was during this time that Saddam appointed many family members to positions of authority in the government; he and his family began to control the country’s oil and other industrial enterprises.

Of course, before that he was a thug, and afterwards he was a tyrant.
D

[Early_Out]

The other thing Saddam managed to do was to keep the various ethnic groups within Iraq from slaughtering each other. His methods left something to be desired, of course, consisting largely of brutal repression, but they were effective.

It’s like Tito in Yugoslavia - once he was gone, it didn’t take long for the Serbs, Croatians, Albananians, etc., to start battling. I suspect we’ll see the same thing in Iraq in the not-too-distant future.

[LuckySevens]

OT: Mad with power is one of the theories behind Saddam. He wanted to become a player on the ‘scene’ (scene being the Arab world, being the overlord sort to speak), and he just wanted more and more.

Eventually it toppled on him.

But he wasnt a bad government official in terms of thouroughness of his policies.

He did do some good things; but hell so did Hitler (very very low unemployment, low crime rate, rescued country from hyper inflation etc).