Saddam Hussein in 1957 at the age of 20 to join the revolutionary pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, of which his uncle was a supporter. During this time, Saddam apparently supported himself as a secondary school teacher. Revolutionary sentiment was characteristic of the era in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. In Iraq progressives and socialists assailed traditional political elites (colonial era bureaucrats and landowners, wealthy merchants and tribal chiefs, and monarchists). Moreover, the pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt profoundly influenced young Ba'athists like Saddam. The rise of Nasser foreshadowed a wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East in the 1950s
Trial of Saddam Hussein to sign the legal document confirming his understanding of the charges. In a leaked transcript of a February 2003 meeting between Bush and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar, Bush expressed a willingness to have Saddam tried at the International Tribunal of Justice in The Hague. In December 2004, Clive Stafford Smith prepared a 50-page brief for the defense team arguing that Saddam Hussein should be tried in the US under US criminal law. The London-based Arab-language daily newspaper "Al-Quds Al-Arabi" reported in early May 2005 that during a meeting with Donald Rumsfeld, "known only to a few Iraqi officials in