Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...next time I met Abu Mohammed, in the summer of 2004, he had come to Baghdad with a group of tribal sheikhs to seek patronage from the new Iraqi government. It was a few days after Saddam had been brought to court for the first time, and Iraqis were still absorbing the prospect that justice would be done upon their former tormentor. When I asked Abu Mohammed if Saddam was still in his head, he told me a story about one of his sons, who had a leg blown off by a landmine during Saddam's first folly, the eight...
...took Iraqis a remarkably short time to get the tyrant out of their psyche. One reason was that there were so many new terrors with which to contend - roadside bombs, suicide bombers, kidnappings and, eventually, sectarian slaughter. The other reason was the televised trial of Saddam, which served as a form of group therapy, on a national scale. As they watched him in court, day after day, Iraqis grew less fearful of him. His frequent outbursts began to seem like schoolboy petulance, and when he was scolded by the judge it was as if the class bully was being sent...
...outside the courtroom, as Iraq went from chaos to a bloody civil war, I would occasionally hear an Iraqi hark nostalgically back to the Saddam era, pointing out that for all the dictator's faults he was at least able to keep his country's sectarian demons in check. As the violence worsened, some argued that the only way to exorcize those demons would be to ditch the democratic process and hand the country back to a Saddam-style strongman. But nobody seriously suggested that Saddam himself be sprung from jail and restored to power. He had become too emasculated...
...Even the remnants of his old regime, which had morphed into the Sunni insurgency, seemed to lose their fervor for Saddam. Some Ba'athist groups kept up the charade that they were fighting to restore the dictator to his palace, but others quickly stopped referring to him at all and instead recast themselves as "the nationalist resistance" or as "mujahedin," or holy warriors. Many threw in their lot with the new ogre on the scene, Al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi...
...After Saddam's appeal failed, remnants of his Ba'ath Party threatened dire reprisals if the government carried out the death sentence. But such threats had been made throughout the trial, and they have amounted to nothing substantial. Most of the violence in Iraq is now perpetrated by people with no love for the dictator. Even if the Ba'athists were to step up their attacks, there's a good chance they would be lost in the general carnage wrought by Jihadi groups and Shi'ite militias...