Pyree :
1979 was the Vietnam War right? I wasn't born yet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/page/0,12438,793802,00.html
Also from Wiki:
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.
Shortly afterwards, he convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on 22 July 1979. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped (viewable via this reference[24]), Saddam claimed to have found a fifth column within the Ba'ath Party and directed Muhyi Abdel-Hussein to read out a confession and the names of 68 alleged co-conspirators. These members were labelled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one by one and taken into custody. After the list was read, Saddam congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty. The 68 people arrested at the meeting were subsequently tried together and found guilty of treason. 22 were sentenced to execution. Other high-ranking members of the party formed the firing squad. By 1 August 1979, hundreds of high-ranking Ba'ath party members had been executed.
The Al-Anfal Campaign was a genocidal[27] campaign against the Kurdish people (and many others) in Iraqi Kurdistan led by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid. The campaign takes its name from Surat al-Anfal in the Qur'an, which was used as a code name by the former Iraqi Baathist regime for a series of attacks against the peshmerga rebels and the mostly Kurdish civilian population of rural Northern Iraq, conducted between 1986 and 1989 culminating in 1988. This campaign also targeted Shabaks and Yazidis, Assyrians, Turkoman people and Mandeans and many villages belonging to these ethnic groups were also destroyed. Some reports cite Saddam Hussein's army as being responsible for 200,000 civilian deaths.