Ahead lies a rocky road to salvation. There is still no sign that Sunni can live in peace with Shia; the Kurds are well on their way to achieving autonomy; the security situation is so bad that the US is on the point of ordering a fresh deployment of troops to try to restore order. One of President George W Bush's first actions in the new year will be a decree ordering more troops to Baghdad in a big bang'' bid to crush the insurgency. It seems to have escaped the president's attention that the presence of US troops simply exacerbates the situation by providing a focus for the country's humiliation. Against that background, Saddam's execution was almost irrelevant. As Iraq expert Professor Toby Dodge of London University put it yesterday, the act completes the Islamicisation of the insurgency'' and shows the new regime to be little better than those that preceded it.
By Trevor Royle, Diplomatic Editor
IN DEATH, as in life, Saddam Hussein is destined to leave more questions than answers about his role in the politics of the Middle East. His career included three wars in which his forces failed to achieve any kind of success and his name has been blackened by crimes that defy reason. By any standards he was a wicked ruler who grabbed power with both hands and then used the armed forces to consolidate an increasingly authoritarian rule. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the US-led invasion of 2003, he is the real author of his country's misfortunes and it is down to him that today Iraq is a broken nation, hovering on the brink of civil war. That is how history will remember Saddam, and he deserves nothing more.
as in life, Saddam Hussein is destined to leave more questions than answers about his role in the politics of the Middle East. His career included three wars in which his forces failed to achieve any kind of success and his name has been blackened by crimes that defy reason. By any standards he was a wicked ruler who grabbed power with both hands and then used the armed forces to consolidate an increasingly authoritarian rule. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the US-led invasion of 2003, he is the real author of his country's misfortunes and it is down to him that today Iraq is a broken nation, hovering on the brink of civil war. That is how history will remember Saddam, and he deserves nothing more.
Worse, his passing from the scene settles nothing other than a visceral desire for revenge. As a dictator with blood on his hands, he must have expected the death sentence when it was handed down to him, but he went to the gallows not as a hero but as a lamb to the slaughter. There could be no mercy for a man who had tried to wipe out the Kurds and the Shi'ites and who attempted to impose order on Iraq's fractured and artificial society by producing a ruthless oligarchy. Tyrants can create omnipotence but it is always finite. Either their grip is loosened by the passing of the years and the inevitability of death, or they have it removed from them and end up like Hitler, with a self-inflicted bullet in the head, or join Mussolini in facing death at the hands of their own countrymen. History is rarely kind to the despot, and Saddam was no exception.
However, the removal of Saddam has done nothing to bring peace to this troubled nation. Far from it: when he was forcibly removed from power it was as if Pandora's box had been prised open. It was one thing for the US and its allies to topple a troublesome dictator who flouted the rule of international law, but quite another to bring peace and stability to his country. In the aftermath of the invasion, just as Saddam had predicted, Iraq went into freefall, and despite the best attempts to impose order, it is difficult to see how the present regime can put matters to rights.
Ahead lies a rocky road to salvation. There is still no sign that Sunni can live in peace with Shia; the Kurds are well on their way to achieving autonomy; the security situation is so bad that the US is on the point of ordering a fresh deployment of troops to try to restore order. One of President George W Bush's first actions in the new year will be a decree ordering more troops to Baghdad in a big bang'' bid to crush the insurgency. It seems to have escaped the president's attention that the presence of US troops simply exacerbates the situation by providing a focus for the country's humiliation. Against that background, Saddam's execution was almost irrelevant. As Iraq expert Professor Toby Dodge of London University put it yesterday, the act completes the Islamicisation of the insurgency'' and shows the new regime to be little better than those that preceded it.
As for Saddam, the hangmen ended his dream of emerging as an Arab hero whose place in his country's history should have been wreathed in glory. On the surface, his story is unremarkable enough to be almost trivial. Here was a bog-standard army officer, from a modest background, who entered politics and fought his way to the top in 1979 by ruthlessly eliminating rivals and then surrounding himself with a pack of toadies who feared him and kow-towed to his every whim. Power pleased him and he fought hard to hang on to it; in time he came to believe that he was invincible, emerging from the shadows as a kind of Saddam superman.
The reality was rather different. Saddam's Ba'ath Party quickly became a font of influence and patronage. Sunnis were given preference, and anyone from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit was certain of getting a well-paid job, provided that they did not stray from the party line. Like all dictators, he built up a system of checks and balances in public life to reward supporters and keep them on-side. In return he received nothing but raw obedience and flattery. It is irrelevant whether he believed any of it or merely accepted the sycophancy as his due: so potent are the insecurities of any leader who has seized power, it was enough that people treated him with respect.
And yet, a lot of Saddam's authority was a mirage. Even at the height of his supremacy his hold on the presidency was fragile. In the years between the first and second Gulf wars he could trust very few of his inner council and led a peripatetic existence, restlessly moving from one palace to the next to avoid creating a pattern of behaviour that his enemies could exploit. His bodyguards were routinely changed or eliminated; body doubles were used as a matter of routine; food tasters were employed to guard him from poisoning, and he rarely if ever confided his innermost thoughts to those around him. Curiously, perhaps his one trusted confidant was his deputy, Tariq Aziz, a Christian. Saddam knew better than to confide in his own kind.
Other dictatorial impulses influenced his life. For much of his career Iraq was at war. Eight years were spent fighting neighbouring Iran, and that was a happy time for Saddam even though the conflict ended in stalemate and huge numbers of casualties on both sides. Not only was he allowed to build up his armed forces - at one point in the 1980s Iraq's army was the fourth largest in the world - but he was encouraged in his ambitions by the West. In the battle to contain Islamic fundamentalism as represented by the ayatollahs in Iran, Saddam was Washington's point man, a trusted soldier who could be relied upon to do the right thing. Even former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was impressed, in times gone by being happy to be photographed with him.
NONE of that should be held against the US. Saddam might have been a son of a bitch, as the saying goes, but at least he was Washington's son of a bitch, and in any case successive administrations have always had a chequered history of supporting the wrong guy. Twenty years ago it was all so different. Saddam was seen as a capable leader who kept multi-faceted Iraq in control and who brought more sympathetic stability than the Shi'ite-controlled Islamic state of Iran. He might have had drawbacks, such as using poison gas against the Iraqi Kurds and having his political enemies disposed of in acid baths, but at least he kept the lid on things during a troublesome decade, the 1980s, when the rest of the region appeared to be in meltdown.
In Tehran, Washington had been given a bloody nose when revolutionary students had taken control of the US embassy and held the diplomats to ransom. A rescue attempt had then gone badly wrong, leaving the superpower looking mighty silly and impotent. In Lebanon a US intervention to curb the power of the Palestine Liberation Organisation had attracted retribution and left more marines dead in the sand. With only Israel offering succour, the US needed a force for stability in the region and found it in Saddam. When Iraqi Kurds sought help in Washington following the 1988 massacres, the State Department shrugged aside their evidence and continued to support Saddam.
Unfortunately, the Iraqi dictator swallowed the myth, and worse, he decided to improve it by adding to his prestige. In 1990, for reasons almost certainly tied up with his need to grab some much-needed oil wealth, he ordered his forces to invade neighbouring Kuwait. His claim was based on the possession of oil reserves, but he also knew his history and realised that Kuwait was as artificial a creation as Iraq, whose boundaries had been fixed in 1921 during the British-French carve-up of the Middle East. If the West really valued him, reasoned Saddam, they would surely condone an occupation of Kuwait. On August 2, his forces swept over the border, and in short order Kuwait was declared the 19th province of Iraq. It helped Saddam's cause that there was no opposition worthy of the name inside Iraq, and, as dictators have done down the years, he had come to believe any action he took had to be right simply because he had sanctioned it.
As history knows only too well, he was wrong on that score and suffered the humiliation of defeat at the beginning of 1991. Even then he did not learn his lesson, but set out on a bewildering confrontation with the rest of the world. It's almost certain that he had destroyed all his weapons of mass destruction by the mid-1990s, but he was fixated on playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with the UN weapons inspectors. Eventually his brinkmanship was met with overwhelming force, his once-mighty armies were crushed and he was forced into hiding. The irony is that Saddam rose from obscurity, was rescued from it by his rise to power and returned to it in an anonymous execution shed in a Baghdad suburb. There was no heroism there, simply the banality of failure.
