The invasion’s purpose, per Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was to blunt the edge of Iranian Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement and thwart his attempts to export Iran’s Islamic Revolution to Saddam’s secular Iraq and the Persian Gulf states.

The US stated that the intent was to remove “a regime that developed and used weapons of mass destruction, that harbored and supported terrorists, committed outrageous human rights abuses, and defied the just demands of the United Nations and the world.” For the invasion of Iraq the rationale was “the United States …

Saddam was convicted of crimes against humanity—including willful killing, illegal imprisonment, deportation, and torture—and was sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam’s half brother (an intelligence officer) and Iraq’s former chief judge were also sentenced to death.

Succession. In 1976, Saddam rose to the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces, and rapidly became the strongman of the government. He was the de facto leader of Iraq some years before he formally came to power in 1979. He slowly began to consolidate his power over Iraq’s government and the Ba’ath party.

Operation Red Dawn was an American military operation conducted on 13 December 2003 in the town of ad-Dawr, Iraq, near Tikrit, that led to the capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. A continued search between the two sites found Hussein hiding in a “spider hole” at 20:30 hrs local Iraqi time.

President George W. Bush

Iraqi troops overran the country shortly after midnight on 2 August 1990. The United Nations Security Council and the Arab League immediately condemned the Iraqi invasion. Four days later, the Security Council imposed an economic embargo on Iraq that prohibited nearly all trade with Iraq.

Saddam Hussein