Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (; Arabic: ""; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was President of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organization the Iraqi Ba'ath Party—which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and socialism—Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup (later referred to as the 17 July Revolution) that brought the party to power in Iraq. As vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and at a time
Arab socialism coin, The goal of the Arab liberation struggle was to fight imperialism, opposing the ruling classes and to fight for social justice. He further noted that "the social economic question is the issue of prime importance in our life, but it is directly related to the wider issue of nationalism" and "we want socialism to serve our nationalism." The socialism envisaged in the party's constitution of 1947 and in later writings up to the establishment of the United Arab Republic, is moderate and shows little, if any signs of Marxism. In the party's 1947 constitution it reads "socialism is a