Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Saddam once told a biographer he didn't care what anybody said of him today; he was more interested in what people would think of him in 500 years. Like so many tyrants, he was obsessed with his place in history. When he looked in the mirror he saw a reflection of great men of the ages: Nebuchadnezzar, Hammurabi, Saladin. Even the villains to whom his enemies compared him were historic--Hulegu, Hitler, Stalin...
...many who survived Saddam's monstrous regime, his ignoble end was no more than he deserved. But the unseemly scenes from the gallows, captured by a clandestine camera phone and broadcast to an aghast world, were also a reminder of what has come since he was removed from power: vicious sectarian hatreds that intrude, as his brutality once did, upon every aspect of Iraqi life, including the final seconds of Saddam's. His death did nothing to dampen those hatreds. The celebrations over his execution lasted barely a day before the Shi'ite-Sunni war resumed in earnest, with scores...
...closest he came to emulating one of his heroes was in an area over which he had no control: like Saladin, he was born just outside Tikrit, an ancient town in Iraq's dusty central plains. Saddam's rise was due in part to his effectiveness as an administrator. After becoming Vice President of Iraq in 1969, at 32, he nationalized the country's oil industry and used the revenues to launch a massive program to modernize the country's infrastructure: roads, bridges, factories, universities, hospitals. By the late 1970s, Iraq was the Middle East's most progressive state--rich...
...years as dictator, Saddam undid all the progress he had achieved, leading his country into three wars that devastated Iraq's economy and left more than 1 million dead. Hundreds of thousands more died at the hands of his henchmen and security forces. The true measure of his monstrosity, however, was not in any body count but in his subjugation of Iraqi minds. In February 2003, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, I visited a small village on the border with Kuwait. The local elder, known as Abu Mohammed, knew that when the fighting began, his tiny watermelon farm...
Less than two months later, Saddam was gone. By the end of 2003, when he was caught near his native Tikrit, his military and political networks had been dismantled, his ubiquitous statues and portraits had disappeared. His ruthless sons Uday and Qusay had been killed. The republic of fear had been destroyed. And Saddam's prospects of becoming one of history's greats--hero or villain--were dashed. Nebuchadnezzar, Hammurabi and Saladin had never cowered in a spider hole...