Not only did he admit ordering the attack against Kurds in the north of the country, but he boasted that the killings were legal and justified.
This is a reference to the al-Anfal campaign of 1987-88, which occurred during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam felt the Kurds (whose territory takes up parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia, and Turkey) were insufficiently loyal to Iraq. So, he gassed them with the chemicals that Donald Rumsfeld (most likely) gave him, and whose use he certainly failed to condemn..
We shouldn’t have been surprised that Saddam didn’t trust the Kurds. After all, Henry Kissinger:
But when the Ayotollah overthrew the Shah, we urged Saddam to wage war on Iran. Yet, simultaneously, Ollie North was selling Iran TOW missiles. This, in spite of the fact that Iran kidnapped our Beirut CIA chief of station, broke every bone in his body, beheaded him, and then sent us a tape of the proceedings.
If you want to know why people hate us, it’s for the same reason that Saddam hated the Kurds. We make lousy allies. Saddam is learning that now.
We facilitated Saddam’s rise to power, gave him WMD, provoked his Kurds to attack him, encouraged him to attack Iran, abandoned the Kurds, armed the Iranians, and then made war on Iraq using his attack on the Kurds (that we provoked) with weapons (we supplied), as the justification.
And that only covers our duplicity in the first Gulf War.
