Farewell, tyranny
He was just caught like a rat," Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno said of his famous captive. The commander of the 4th Infantry Division, whose soldiers apprehended Saddam Hussein, could barely suppress a smile at the mental image of the toppled dictator in his dismal crypt. There is about soldiers' utterances a clarity that often puts to shame the pronouncements of pundits and philosophers. Odierno, a child of Rockaway, N.J., who was educated at West Point, had been on the dictator's trail for several frustrating months, his soldiers chasing leads good and bad in and around Tikrit. The city had been Saddam's base and beginning, and, in the end, it doomed him. During the course of the military campaign, it had become routine to say that Iraq is the size of California. It is, but as far as the hunt for Saddam was concerned, the comparison was meaningless. Saddam Hussein was fundamentally a creature of his village, his clan, his district. He had governed from Tikrit and through Tikritis: The rest of the country was like an occupied land. In Kurdistan in the north, and in the Shiite southern part of the country, Saddam was a figure feared and reviled. He could never have hidden in Arbil or Basra. He started out as a peasant thug and terrorist in that fabled Sunni triangle; he was found there in that 8-foot hole, a stone's throw from some of the palaces he had built with the wealth of the state that he had treated as his private inheritance.
Pity the admirers of Saddam Hussein--in the Sunni triangle in Iraq, among the Palestinians and the Egyptians, among the Arabs to whom Saddam had peddled a bogus legend of heroism. He had told them he was the reincarnation of the 12th-century Muslim warrior Saladin, who had defended his world and his faith against the Crusades and whose chivalry had earned the respect of the Franks. (Saddam was unable to grasp the irony of his appropriation of the cult of Saladin, for Saladin hailed from a Kurdish ancestry, and Saddam Hussein had given the Kurds one of the darkest and saddest chapters of their history.) He had exalted "martyrdom" over and over again. Yet the Arab crowd that had stayed with him, through thick and thin, had to watch as the man with a pistol and two AK-47 rifles gave up without firing a shot. Nearly five months earlier, it should be recalled, in the town of Mosul, Saddam's two sons and a 14-year-old grandson were killed in a firefight with American soldiers. Trapped, they had fought back. But Saddam was of a different breed: He was homicidal rather than suicidal. Not for him was the cult of "martyrdom"; he peddled it but would not partake of it. No sooner had Saddam been caught than one of the leaders of Hamas, Abdulaziz Rantissi, a man who knows a thing or two about terror, expressed his deep disappointment that the Iraqi despot had not fought back.
It is understandable, but ultimately futile, that members of the Governing Council of Iraq paid the man who had wrecked their world a visit in his captivity. No illumination was to be offered these leaders; no second thoughts would be expressed by the tyrant. There was no depth in him that could even begin to speak to the depth of terror he had unleashed when he was the master and veritable owner of an entire country. "The world is crazy," one of the visitors, Mowafak al-Rubaie, observed after he had had his encounter with the former ruler. "I was in his torture chamber in 1979, and now he was sitting there, powerless in front of me without anybody stopping me from doing anything to him. Just imagine, we were arguing, and he was using very foul language." Dictatorship must be like one's old home and past: Apparently, you can't go back to it.
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