WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein’s ignominious surrender captured the essence of his quarter-century of misrule over Iraq: He was exposed as a blustering fraud who robbed his people to line his own pockets and to satisfy his monumental vanity. In the end he could not escape his own personality or the pursuing U.S. Army.
For the Iraqi dictator and for those who challenged his word and murderous ambition, the battle has always been intensely personal.
Four members of Iraq’s Governing Council questioned Saddam at the Baghdad International Airport on Sunday. After a brief shouting match, they asked why he had killed a renowned Shiite cleric and other individuals they named. This was not an abstract moment about justice and freedom or distant U.S. politics for them. This was about the millions upon millions of lives the monster before them had taken, ruined or forced to be spent in exile.
Saddam responded with heavy sarcasm and personal disdain, according to one person present. "He showed that he learned nothing and forgot nothing" while on the run, this person said.
The dictator made a play on words with the name of one victim. He did for the interrogators the number he always trotted out for journalists in Baghdad interviews: You don’t know what you are talking about. That was no cleric. That was a terrorist. The hundreds of thousands found in mass graves were thieves. I am a firm but just ruler. You are scum.
Right. My own question is directed to the troops who found this great Arab warrior cowering in a 6-by-8-foot dirt hole with a pistol he didn’t use and $750,000 in pocket money. Guys, did he still have the diamond cuff links? Or had the Mighty and Munificent One pawned them to finance his flight?
The dictator flashed his tailored cuffs and diamond-encrusted jewelry at me in an encounter in 1975 as he described in minute detail his commitment to Arab socialism. He went on to deny that the atrocities I had seen in Kurdistan a few weeks earlier could have happened. When I reported both atrocities and atmospherics, Saddam sent word that he was outraged — that I had mentioned the cufflinks.
After that it was hard to take him seriously as a political leader, if not as a gangster and homicidal tyrant. While other Arab leaders had their opponents killed when they felt threatened, Saddam killed just to keep in practice. The scene that unfolded near Tikrit on Sunday underlined that he ordered the killings and the looting of an entire nation from the safety and obscene luxury of his palaces, not from any battle front.
This was no reincarnated Saladin, as his publicists claimed, or some brave, modernizing Arab nationalist holding off the Iranian hordes, as gullible Arab journalists and rulers — and a pair of American presidents named Reagan and Bush — believed in the 1980s. Saddam was always the ultimate sadistic gangster who cloaked his clan’s brutality and greed in a fascistic pseudo-ideology called Baathism.
His being caught "like a rat," in the words of Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, will help puncture the myth that the terroristic insurgency being led by Saddam’s Baathist remnants represents a heroic form of Iraqi or Arab nationalism. The campaign they wage is a rear-guard attempt to regain privilege and domination for a small group of Sunni Arabs, who have used death and destruction as their only tools of governance and now of rebellion.
Necessary but probably not sufficient is the best way to think of the role that Saddam’s capture will have in ending the insurgency. His failure to resist, though his sons went down fighting, will help dismantle the myth factor in the rebellion. "People are already saying the sons died like men and he gave up like a coward," a Baghdad resident told me in a telephone conversation.
"Why didn’t you fight?" one Governing Council member asked Saddam as their meeting ended. Saddam gestured toward the U.S. soldiers guarding him and asked his own question: "Would you fight them?"
The Sunnis must now reconcile themselves to sharing power rather than fearfully hedging their political bets, which they did while Saddam was free. That kind of reconciliation is the only path toward a genuine Iraqi nationalism that does not treat the Kurds and Shiites as exotic afterthoughts in Iraqi politics.
The trials of Saddam and his closest associates should be conducted in Iraq by Iraqis, with international support and guidance inspired by the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. A transparent and fair legal process for these brutes should become the cornerstone of the new Iraq that will emerge from the dismantling of the intellectual and emotional fraud that was Baathism.
Jim Hoagland is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him by writing to
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