IN THE spring of 1990, Iraqi state television commemorated Saddam Hussein's 53rd birthday by playing, over and over, extended footage of the leader touring an art gallery. Room after room, the display consisted entirely of works sent as birthday tributes. To the jolly strains of Mozart's “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, Iraq's president and his train of uniformed henchmen nodded, smirked and gestured appreciatively before paintings featuring Saddam, Napoleon-like, atop a rearing white stallion, or Saddam, commanding a tank, gesturing towards a blazing battlefront, or Saddam, in profile, facing the Dome of the Rock, clad in the chain-mail tunic and spiked helmet that Saladin, the Muslim liberator of Jerusalem, was made to wear in Egyptian costume dramas.

This was springtime indeed for Saddam Hussein. He had recently emerged undefeated from the winter of a bloody eight-year war with Iran, and had just successfully crushed another Kurdish uprising. This fatherless son of dirt-poor peasants, raised by better-off relatives, who had been given the ungainly name of Saddam (a conjugate of the Arabic words for “shock” and “collision”), had already ruled Iraq for two decades. He had eliminated all rivals, cowed the potentially restless Shia majority and packed the state with his own trusted relations. Museums, hospitals, parks and whole cities bore his name.

And then he blew it all by invading Kuwait, the small, rich neighbouring emirate, on August 2nd 1990. Asked in later years, following his capture in a “spider hole” by American invaders, why he had done this, Saddam first blustered that it was because Kuwait was rightfully Iraq's 19th province. Then, in his slightly nasal whine, he growled, “When I get something into my head I act. That's just the way I am.”

Saddam Hussein was one of the last of the 20th century's great dictators, but not the least in terms of egotism, or cruelty, or morbid will to power. He rose fast, like Stalin and Mao, from within an ostensibly secular, progressive political party. In Iraq's case this was the Baath, or Renaissance, Party, a vehicle which he ultimately transformed, through terrifyingly capricious ruthlessness, into a fascistic tool for his own absolute control. Like Enver Hoxha of Albania or North Korea's Kim Il Sung and son, Saddam succeeded in turning the entire apparatus of the state into an expression of his own paranoia. His rule cost the lives of perhaps half a million Iraqis. Two-thirds fell in unnecessary wars; the rest were civilian “enemies”, rounded up and shot, usually by firing squad.

Yet, like those other thuggish rulers, Saddam won not just fawningly insincere adulation but a surprising degree of support from his people. Much took the form of a Stockholm Syndrome-like response to captivity, whereby hostages end up sympathising with their captors. Yet Saddam attracted real constituents, and not only from the favoured among his own clan, tribe and fellow Sunni Muslims. If police repression was politically deadening, it did also mean security from such historical Iraqi plagues as coups, tribal vendettas and religious strife. Baathist secularism promoted such modernising trends as inter-faith marriage and scientific education. The state ideology was rigid but it did, in a way, succeed in strengthening Iraq's fragile sense of nationhood. For many Iraqis, Saddam inspired pride.

A hero to many Arabs—and the West

Saddam was luckier than rival dictators in one major respect. His rule coincided with a huge surge in oil revenues. During the 1970s, a relatively peaceful interlude when he exercised real control as second-in-command to a weak president, dozens of ambitious projects swiftly created a first-class infrastructure of expressways, power lines and social services. In neighbouring countries, the oil boom generated garish consumption and commission billionaires. Iraqis could fairly claim that their national wealth had been used instead to create a broad, home-owning middle class, the symbol of which was the “Brazili”, a stripped-down Volkswagen bought by the million from Brazil. Generous state subsidies lifted even the very poor out of need. Corruption was unknown.

Much as Adolf Hitler won early praise for galvanising German industry, ending mass unemployment and building autobahns, Saddam earned admiration abroad for his deeds. He had a good instinct for what the “Arab street” demanded, following the decline in Egyptian leadership brought about by the trauma of Israel's six-day victory in the 1967 war, the death of the pan-Arabist hero, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1970, and the “traitorous” drive by his successor, Anwar Sadat, to sue for peace with the Jewish state. Saddam's self-aggrandising propaganda, with himself posing as the defender of Arabism against Jewish or Persian intruders, was heavy-handed but consistent as a drumbeat. It helped, of course, that his mukhabarat (secret police) put dozens of Arab news editors, writers and artists on the payroll. As a result, to many poorer Arabs, his lunge for Kuwait, and the subsequent, strategically inconsequential lobbing of 39 Iraqi Scud missiles at Israel, appeared as Robin Hood-like acts of retributive justice.

Refuge in Islam

Following the debacle of Operation Desert Storm, America's crushingly efficient counter-thrust, Saddam hastened to burnish his tarnished lustre by switching to a new posture as a champion of Islam. The cry of Allahu Akbar, Mighty is God, was added to the Iraqi flag in a script modelled on the president's own. With his country now besieged under UN sanctions that systematically impoverished its middle class, Saddam posed as the victim of a relentless American-led campaign to weaken and hold back the world's Muslims. While few took his religious pretensions seriously, this message meshed with a growing sense among Muslims, fanned assiduously by a resurgent fundamentalist movement, of thwarted ambitions and generalised victimhood.

Saddam's showy return to the faith was perhaps not entirely cynical. It was in some ways an expression of his feeling of having been used, then betrayed, by the West. Back in the late 1950s, when Saddam consecrated his party membership by wielding a pistol in a botched assassination attempt against Iraq's then president, Abdul Karim Qasim, the Baath was favoured by Western powers as a foil to both the powerful Iraqi Communist Party and to the pro-Russian Nasserists. The West welcomed the 1968 coup that brought Saddam into power. When he invaded revolutionary Iran in 1980, America and its allies helped quietly but generously with credits, arms and satellite intelligence. Later, they turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons, first against Iranian soldiers and then against his own unruly Kurds. Donald Rumsfeld paid the Iraqi leader a courtesy visit in 1983. For a time, the CIA helpfully contended that it was Iran, not Iraq, that had dumped poison gas on the Kurdish city of Halabja.

Many Arabs still contend that America goaded Saddam to invade Kuwait, by pushing the emirate to provoke him by demanding repayment of wartime loans and then telling the dictator that America would not intervene in inter-Arab disputes. More likely, Saddam simply overplayed his hand. As April Glaspie, America's ambassador to Baghdad at the time, said, “Obviously, I didn't think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”

Saddam's brashness, and the criminal abandon with which his officers looted Kuwait, stripping even the marble from its palaces to add to Saddam's own, revealed for all to see his nature as an unworldly and power-mad brute. His isolation from reality, the now rapidly increasing venality of his family and regime and his lack of judgement in dealing with the world led to his final undoing.

AP

A martyr to some

Chastened by defeat, Saddam actually did move in 1991, as demanded by the UN, to dismantle his programmes to build weapons of mass destruction. Yet having built his power on fear, he was loth to admit that he had been de-clawed, and so allowed the interminable and ruinous saga of sanctions to continue. To a dwindling constituency of Arabs, his posturing continued to inspire a certain awe, mixed with sympathy for the apparent underdog. But to the rest of the world he had become the perfect villain. As news leaked from Baghdad of the murderous excesses of his sons and of the vicious retribution meted out to Shias in the south, who had the temerity to revolt, it became easy to label him as a kind of devil incarnate.

Following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington of September 11th 2001, Saddam's mix of obduracy, ambivalence and belligerent rhetoric attracted the interest of an American administration that was keen to persuade its public that the superpower was doing its utmost to prevent future attacks. To powerful neo-conservatives, a strike against Iraq was appealing for several reasons. It would send a blunt message to malingering governments everywhere. It would place American troops in a position to threaten other alleged sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran and Syria. And, it was presumed, the overthrow of a dictator such as Saddam would be greeted with cheers, and stimulate a domino effect of democratic change in a region whose repressive rulers had primed their youth for Islamist extremism.

As the world now knows, such dreams built Saddam into a far greater catch than he proved in fact to be. The famous weapons of mass destruction did not exist. His capture, eight months after the fall of Baghdad, was little more than a brief flash of triumph in a remorselessly darkening sea of gloom. Rather than melting away at the sight of its presumed leader's humiliation, Iraq's burgeoning Sunni insurgency gained strength, since it could now claim to act out of pure nationalist motives, dissociated from the criminal past of the tyrant. America's adventure, immensely costly in terms of blood and treasure, turned into a debacle.

Towards the gallows

The Iraqi state that Saddam had created was dismantled, but with such crudeness that the wider polity he had built also began to fall apart. As it did so, cracking with ever greater force into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish components, a slogan appeared on Baghdad's walls: “Better the tyranny of Saddam than the chaos of the Amerkan.” In captivity and then during a messy, ill-conducted trial, the reviled dictator began to regain stature among his core Sunni constituents. The sordidness of his hanging, and its ugly timing on the day of the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice—contrasting with his composure before death—reinforced the Sunni sense of injury at the hands of what many see as a puppet sectarian regime. In Saddam's final communication to the world, a letter released following his conviction for crimes against humanity, he adopted the role of a martyr to the nation, calling nobly for Iraqis to unite and to forgive invaders for their leaders' folly.

It is difficult to judge what Saddam's legacy will be. Many Iraqis, especially among the Kurds and Shias, rejoiced at his death. Others simply shrugged at the inevitable passing of a delusional has-been. But quite a few regret his departure, less out of admiration for the man than out of sadness for the deeply flawed but at least secure and predictable Iraq they have lost. And in Iraq and beyond the rage against the world felt by many other Arabs and Muslims, which the dictator once harnessed, has yet to be assuaged.