It is clear, however, that despite his status as the eldest son, and despite the obvious delight he would later take in the mechanisms of official torture, Uday was never really destined to replace his father as the head of the Iraqi state.
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| Uday Hussein graduation |
He had made a halfhearted attempt at higher education, of course. In 1984, Uday, who was by then fluent in English graduated from the University of Baghdad's school of engineering. It goes without saying that Uday graduated at the top of his class, with a 98.5 grade point average. Though Uday would later be targeted as one of the chief enemies of American interests in the Middle East, as a teenager, it seems, he harbored an ambition to become just another American college student. In an Oct. 2, 2002 interview with the British newspaper The Independent, Uday Hussein claimed that he had traveled to the United States when he was 16, and even took the SAT's so that he might some day matriculate at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ""I did my SATs. I did well. Passed with high marks," Uday reportedly told the newspaper. But the eruption of the bloody and prolonged Iran-Iraq War, a conflict during which Saddam enjoyed the measured support of American officials, scuttled his ambitions. "I wanted to do nuclear studies, and at that time there was a problem with Iraqis doing that," the paper quoted Uday as saying. "It was a bitter blow. I wanted to go to MIT." It's interesting to note that Uday seemed to have maintained a passion for certain aspects of popular American culture. Before his death, he had had several email addresses, three of them on Yahoo. But email addresses do not an American make.
Frustrated in his hopes of becoming an American student, Uday Hussein, it seems, ways to assuage his disappointment.
By 1990, Uday Hussein had become infamous for his lavish, almost Caligula-like lifestyle. He had a collection of hundreds of expensive world-class cars, a livery so vast that it had to be stored at various secret locations throughout the country.
He lived in one palace, and as Time magazine reported in April 2003, he maintained a lavish play place in the fashionable Baghdad suburb of Karada. It was, by all accounts, an unambiguously garish place, a monument to almost unimaginable excess, a palace built with gilt and no shame. And it was only one of the palaces Uday inhabited. At the Qadasayiah Palace, where Uday lived just before the American invasion, records were uncovered indicating, according to a June 2003 story in Time, that Uday kept a personal staff of 68, including body guards, seven chefs and two trainers for his pet lions.
His homes were stocked with every imaginable luxury, including an ample supply of top grade alcohol, a commodity hard to come by, particularly after international sanctions were leveled against Iraq following Saddam's invasion of and expulsion from Kuwait in 1990.
More than anything else, Uday Hussein's lavish digs were proof that the sanctions, while they may have made life difficult for the already suffering masses in Iraq, had little impact on the ruling class. In fact, it seems, that the sanctions may have actually made Uday more powerful.
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