Yep.
That plus the fact that, as I understand it, for many (maybe most) Iraqis, the true loyalty is first to the family, then the clan, then the village. It's difficult to to encourage widespread united action among a group of people whose personal worldviews are so local.
And there's also the fact that Saddam had money and weapons going his way for over a decade BEFORE the first Persian Gulf War. What kind of helicopters do you think he would dispatch to take out some shia resistance?
How could he afford to build the prisons where people were dissolved in acid? His apparatus of repression was enhanced in power - and would have had a lot less to work with - if he didn't satisfy the West's desperate efforts to put the Iranian regime down.
We forget the scale and the horror of the Iran-Iraq war, and the huge cost that took on both countries. Over a million soldiers and civilians died in both countries and it went on for eight years. Money poured in from all over the world to keep it going - mostly to Iraq, but Iran was able to squeeze in a few relationships to keep it alive during the darkest days. Western intelligence (read: US/UK) provided assistance, including the CIA providing Iranian troop movements that were later gassed.
What does a war like that do to any internal people who wanted Saddam out? Wars create a "rallying effect" around the leader of a country involved - whoever that leader is. We have to assume that any revolution against Saddam would find it difficult to succeed. Even if a part of the country, say a town or village, manage to take advantage of the chaos to temporarily establish a limited, local revolution - the state of war would permit a more terrible Saddam "response" than usual.
That only ended in 1988. Only three short years later, the CIA broadcast into the towns and villages of the Shi'a south: "Rise up" "Rise up". In 3 years time, there had built something of a little strength for change, in the wake of US Gulf War and the limited protection of a no-fly zone. "Police" (read military and domestic spies) had no trouble under the zones. But US contacts, a little money and this radio broadcast had their effect.
The Shia rose up. And certain towns were temporarily under the control of local revolutionaries, not Saddam.
But I guess the geostrategical implications kicked in - or should we say - deluded fear of Iranian power - and people started to wonder what might happen if the Shias actually pulled it off. There was probably a disconnect. One plan was going along, others disagreed with it - and once it started getting results the disagree-ers put a stop to it.
So Saddam asked for and received special permission to fly his helicopters (where did he get them?) in the no-fly zones - to put down this revolt.
These were the "mass graves" we heard so much about in the run up to the invasion of 2003.
After that brutal (and successful) repression, the life was wrung out of any effective resistance.
When subsistence conditions were the most to be hoped for under the sanctions regime for the next decade - you can understand why the Iraqi people were having trouble getting a revolution together (and this is just the sad Shia story, the Kurds weren't so lucky either).
So there's a pretty good reason why Saddam had such a stranglehold on power and why there was no revolution - because every step of the way, US policy has actually worked against that interest at every critical juncture.
There must be some people in the US government who tried to make it happen - but obviously they were overruled and/or marginalized by events.
