1. He made Iraq more a client state of the USSR in terms of its oil industry and in military procurement (though to be sure, when you needed reliable but not over-priced weapons, the Soviet Union always outdid the US, whose weapon systems have always been overpriced, unreliable, and burdened with years and years of costly service agreements, which is how US military contractors make a lot of their money, both in the US and from the countries the US supplies, like Saudi Arabia). Still that always makes you a potential enemy of the US national security/permanent war federalist state. If you use 'threat' equipment, you look like a 'threat'.
2. He was always stridently anti-Israel and pro-PLO. Since at least Reagan II (with some complications during Poppy Bush's presidency), this also makes you a potential enemy of the US national security/permanent war federalist state. Especially if you happen to have a lot of oil, located strategically close to the 'perfidious' Persians and 'connivingly dark' Syrians--and close, also, to King David's tribe of Godly warriors for freedom, righteousness, and uncontrolled nuclear proliferation (who knows what these Godly warriors of might and right might do when pushed to it by those irrational, wild Arabs or those perfidious Persians?).
3. His Iraq was too much of a wildcard for the US geopolitical strategists. Not only did the Iraqi oil production and military not fit with the system the US was peddling (quite profitably) to countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc., but his economy didn't fit either. Saudi Arabia was busy building an oddly consumerist but thoroughly veiled Disneyesque Wahabbiworld out of its society and imported everything it needed wholesale, including, of course, labour. Meanwhile, oil-rich Iraq seemed more inspired by Yugoslavia (which is a very good country to compare Iraq to, because of the way both countries were used as 'expedient allies' then thoroughly destroyed through outside manipulation). The last, most desperate phase of this attempt at self-sufficiency (or at least independence from the US and its Gulf State, but also independence from populous Persia) was in trying to secure economic and cultural ties to the EU, including switching currencies for the oil trade and the recirculation of surpluses. When Jacques Chirac is your last hope, at last you have no hope at all.
4. Saddam didn't really understand til too late or perhaps just couldn't do anything about how fucked up and sinister the UN actually is--and how thoroughly overrun and controlled it is by the Americans, pro-American Canadians and pro-American Europeans from the US NATO client national security states.
5. Having got their consumerist Wahhabi worlds in place, Saudi Arabi and the Gulf States decided they really didn't want to quarter and subsidise the overfunded, underworked US military--that is all that forward-positioned stuff that CentCom had been putting in Saudi Arabia since the Reagan era. So some guys from Reagan II got to Bush 1.1 and sold him on the idea of making a 'free and democratic' Iraq the best place to put permanent US military facilities, either to replace or enhance and multiply the stuff on the Arabian peninsula. And the brilliance of the scheme was supposed to be how Iraq oil production would be quickly revived enough to pump enough oil to pay profits to the corrupt collaborationist puppet governments while also funding the cost of building the new bases (and the police to protect the peripheries). One reason why this was supposed to be practical was because of the pre-existing military infrastructure already in Iraq.
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Now that Saddam's gone, let's ponder the mess the US national security state has got Iraq into:
Politically for post-Saddam Iraq, the US plan seems to have been a very weak federation--to the point that it really isn't even that. The Kurds could have, in effect, their Kurdistan and a few oil pipelines--oh, and a loving bond with Israel. The oil fields they want to claim (and kill each other, and Turkomen, if they happen to be in the neighborhood, fighting over on a daily basis) are largely clapped out and unproductive, even with prices at 50 dollars a barrel.
The Shia were supposed to form the key puppet state. The major US miscalculation there (so long as you believe the US planners really wanted to avoid a 'civil war' while preserving a strong central government, and to avoid the sort of chaos which allowed them to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis, no questions asked) seems have been to think of the Shia in Iraq as one solid unified group, when in fact they run the gamut of former Baathists (secular, nationalist, pan-Arabist, though perhaps Shia chauvinist) to religious conservatives who think of themselves as moderates (pro-Sistani) to Shia radicals (the Sadrists, who are also Arab-Iraqi nationalists)--to all-out schemers and criminals, like Chalabi. The US Occupation (if you believe its stated intentions) also, by the way, miscalculated over how much of a unified group the Kurds form. They are multi-factional, but perhaps the most important opposition within them now is radical Islamic (but Iraqi nationalist) vs. the majority secular and Kurdi-secessionist.
The Sunni, if they failed to cooperate, I guess, were supposed to go to hell or the desert between Iraq and Jordan. So, basically, a weak, centrifugal 'federation' that, if it couldn't be held together by brute force, would be allowed to fall apart, with the undesirably parts destroyed.
That really is the plan in place, it seems to me, but al-Sadr, who is an Arab nationalist with radical Shia Islamic credentials as well (remember, Sistani is Iranian), complicates things. He doesn't want Iraq to fall apart, but he can not accept permanent occupation. He most definitely would cooperate with the religious Sunni to make sure it stays together. This is not an easy goal to achieve because the Sadrists would have to eliminate Sistani's influence. Understanding Sistani's influence is complicated because he is person non grata in clerical Iran, but he seems to represent the views of quite a few Shia religious conservatives in both Iraq and Iran.
It's quite apparent just how much of a threat Sadr, not just to Sistani but also to the US. The US risked their whole occupation by first destroying Najaf and parts of Baghdad in the fight against Sadrist forces before it went and decimated Sunni-Iraq (such as Fallujah). There is still too much that we can't understand based only on the limited amounts of information and near unlimited amounts of propaganda about Iraq. But it seems to me, in a place like Occupied Iraq, you don't really know what a person stands for or believes in until they show you what they are willing to die for. The Sunni resistance and the Sadrists seem to be the only ones who have shown us.
F
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