Saddam Hussein To strengthen his own position within the government, Qasim created an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which was opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism. Later that year, the Ba'ath Party leadership was planning to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was a leading member of the operation. At the time, the Ba'ath Party was more of an ideological experiment than a strong anti-government fighting machine. The majority of its members were either educated professionals or students, and Saddam fit the bill. The choice of Saddam was, according to historian Con Coughlin, "hardly surprising". The idea of assassinating Qasim may have been Nasser's,
Interrogation of Saddam Hussein became President, and Saddam became his deputy. In 1979, Saddam Hussein displaced General Bakr, and a little more than a year later, he ordered Iraqi troops to invade Iran, starting the Iran–Iraq War that would continue until 1988. Iraq's 1990 Invasion of Kuwait led to the 1991 Gulf War. In 1998, Saddam halted Iraqi cooperation with the United Nations Special Commission weapons inspections imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War, and kept U.N. inspectors out until 2002. In March 2003, the United States led an invasion of Iraq that quickly toppled the government. Saddam fled the capital of Baghdad shortly