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A voice shouted, "Go to hell."

Hussein replied, "The hell that is Iraq?"

at 6:00 a.m. Baghdad time, Saddam Hussein was led up a flight of stairs in his old Istikhbarat military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad's Kadhimiyah district. The site was rumored to have housed torture chambers where supposed "enemies of the state" had suffered during his rule. Masked executioners led the former president toward a large noose. He followed obediently, with no visible fear, refusing to wear a hood. As pro-Shiite shouts of "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada" pierced the morbid stillness, cameras whirred and flashed, creating a spectral aura.Midway through his recitation of the shahada, the Islamic profession of faith, the floor dropped from under Hussein, an audible crack echoing inside the warehouselike structure as his neck was broken.In a statement shortly after the execution, President George W. Bush said thatwhile the execution wouldn't immediately end the sectarian violence already tearing apart Iraq,Hussein's death was supposed to give birth to a new era in Iraq and the region. But the new era didn't last five minutes. A cluster of Shiites wildly celebrated beside Hussein's body, creating a sense of an undisciplined lynching rather than a clinical state-sponsored operation. Within hours, at least 75 people were killed in bombing attacks across the country, in what were likely Sunni retaliatory strikes targeting Shiites. The U.S. military, meanwhile, announced the deaths of six more U.S. troops, making that December the most violent month for U.S. service members in two years.Billowing smoke now obscures the sunrise in towns across the Middle East 10 years after Hussein's execution, andThe neighborhood is a now a charnel house.At the time of the execution, the Arab Spring had yet to ignite — and be mercilessly extinguished. Though Syria and Libya remained repressive dictatorships,with the Bush administration moving to restore full diplomatic relations with Moammar Gaddafi's regime.too, appeared reliably stable, though critics of Hosni Mubarak remained unsatisfied by the scope or pace of the limited reforms he had agreed to. Always-volatileremained under the control of corrupt autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh, who famously referred to the challenge of holding the fractious country together as "dancing on the heads of snakes."in sectarian bloodletting that was growing worse by the day, had not yet flared into a conflagration that would spread across the borders.They soon would, though. The region's dictatorships wouldthat, once lighted, would consume the lives of more thanand eventually somewhere. Millions would flee their homes, causing a humanitarian crisis for which the world was utterly unprepared. Within a few years, refugees would pose a threat to Europe's social fabric, and a new terrorist organization named the, even more lethal and barbaric than al-Qaeda, would be born. With Iran's Sunni foe Hussein eliminated, thebecame ascendant, exercising aexpanding its reach intoas Houthi rebels took over the capital, and positioning itself toWho can forget Donald Rumsfeld's pronouncement — delivered with the unwavering confidence that characterized his leadership — that the IAs it turns out, the current struggle to liberate Mosul — for the, this time from a terrorist organization, the Islamic State, that didn't even exist when Hussein was killed — is now projected to last longer than Rumsfeld assured us the entire war would. Just this week, the first of 1,700 soldiers from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division hugged their loved ones goodbye before deploying to Iraq. The youngest were 5 years old when the United States launched the invasion to remove Saddam.One wonders how anyone, most notably the war's architects, can cling to the view that delivering Hussein to the gallows was worth thenot to mention theThat doesn't even count thewith little more than the clothes on their backs, or the terror threats that are now a routine feature of American and European landscapes.as their British counterparts were in the U.K.'s damning Chilcot Report All of this brings to mind something I learned while reporting my book on Iraq. Saddam had repeatedly expressed the same sentiment to some of the people responsible for him during his three years in captivity:It is disturbing even to entertain this notion, spoken as it was by a ruthless tyrant with so much blood on his hands. It is especially disturbing when I think about brave friends and fellow soldiers whose belief in their mission never flagged, some struck down in the prime of their lives. Yet when viewed in relation to the