Obituary:Saddam modelled his rule of Iraq on the despots who governed before him and saw himself as a great Babylonian king, writes Michael Jansen.
After former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003 he vanished from the Iraqi political scene for nearly nine months. He reappeared when he was betrayed to US forces and found hiding in a hole on a farm not far from the village where he was born. Although his statues had been pulled down and portraits erased, his brooding spirit hung over Iraq as he sat in a cage in a special court, on trial for crimes against humanity.
On November 5th, 2006, he was sentenced to death for the mass murder of 148 Shias at the market town of Dujail following a 1982 botched assassination attempt by Shia fundamentalists.
When this sentence was confirmed by the appeals court on December 26th, Saddam was also being tried for the slaughter of 180,000 Kurds during 1988. He rejected both trials as illegal. But, dressed in a dark suit and open-neck shirt, he relished his appearances before the bench, berating judges and prosecutors and diminishing witnesses.
In his farewell letter, dictated after the Dujail verdict, he called upon Iraqis to unite and coexist in peace, urging them "not to hate because hate does not leave space for a person to be just, it blinds you and closes the doors of thought".
Saddam was hanged before the dawn prayer on Saturday, as Sunnis began to celebrate the Feast of Sacrifice, although during his rule executions were prohibited on holy days. He maintained his composure on the gallows despite taunts from Shia hangmen, and left life with the dignity of a president. He was buried on Sunday in Auja, the village near Tikrit which he fled as a boy.
Saddam modelled his rule of the Land between the Two Rivers, Mesopotamia, on the careers of despots who governed before him. He liked to think of himself as a second Hammurabi, the great king and lawgiver of Babylon during the second millennium BC. When Saddam had some of the ancient buildings in Babylon reconstructed, he followed the example of the 6th century BC ruler, Nebuchadnezzr, and ordered bricks inscribed with his name. But many Iraqis, particularly Shias, saw in him a reincarnation of Hajjaj bin Yusif, a warrior of the 7th century AD.
When dispatched by the Caliph to put down a Shia revolt in Kufa, Hajjaj left his army in the countryside, entered the city alone on a camel and addressed a congregation gathered in the mosque. "I see straining eyes and starting necks, heads ripe unto the harvest! Well, I am a master at that trade," he sneered.
He banned free speech and association and warned that he would punish anyone who disobeyed him. He was not a man to make idle threats; he gave no quarter but imposed peace on restive Kufa and governed Iraq with an iron hand.
Saddam Hussein, an avid reader of history, ruled modern Iraq with an iron fist and became the scourge not only of the Shias but also the Kurds.
Born in April 1937, Saddam had a deprived childhood. His father, a peasant from a clan known for cunning and criminality, died before the boy's birth.
Slated to be a farmer by his mother and hated stepfather, Saddam rebelled and ran away from home to go to school in Tikrit. His maternal uncle Khairallah Talfah, an army officer and staunch nationalist sacked from the army and imprisoned following a 1941 revolt against the British, took the boy to Baghdad where he had a primary and secondary education.
In 1957 Saddam joined the Baath party, a pan-Arab movement espousing Arab renaissance, unity and socialism.
In 1958 he was implicated in the murder of the communist party chief in Tikrit and briefly jailed. In 1959 he took part in a botched attempt to assassinate the Iraqi leader who ousted the monarchy, Gen Abdel Karim Kassem, in retaliation for a massacre of Baathists in Mosul.
Lightly wounded, Saddam fled first to Syria and then to Egypt, where he prepared to enrol in the law school at Cairo University.
He made good use of his time in the Egyptian capital, the political hub of the Arab world, by meeting other exiled Baathists and reading voraciously.
He rose quickly through the party ranks, attaining membership in the Regional Command in charge of the Iraqi branch. After Kassem was ousted in 1963, Saddam returned to Baghdad, where he and his cousin, Gen Ahmad Hassan Bakr, refashioned the party and prepared to seize power from the Arab nationalists.
By the time the Baath took control in 1968, Saddam was its strongman. In July 1979, Bakr stood down, Saddam became president and promptly purged, with considerable cruelty, 66 opponents who plotted to use an election to deprive him of office.
On the domestic scene, Saddam followed the example of other Third World leaders. He carried out agrarian reform, industrialised, provided Iraqi children with schooling and established a public health system to meet the needs of the entire population.
On the regional scene he adopted the Nasserist Arab nationalist dream of reuniting the Arab world, carved up into client states by Britain and France after the first World War.
He championed the Palestinian cause, granted sanctuary to Palestinian refugees and other Arabs fleeing persecution, and gave money to various Palestinian militant factions fighting to end Israeli occupation of their homeland.
After his expulsion from Lebanon in 1982-83, Palestinian president Yasser Arafat lived in Baghdad for some time. On the world stage, Saddam joined the Non-Aligned Movement and successfully played off the West against the Soviet Union.
Following the toppling of the shah in 1979, the clerics who captured power in Iran attempted to export their Shia revolution to Shia-majority Iraq. Saddam responded by invading Iran in September 1980.
He expected to win in three months but it took eight long years to end the bloody conflict in which half a million fighting men died on both sides. At the end of the war, Saddam launched the Anfal campaign to remove the Kurds from the northern Iranian border since they had supported Tehran.
Baghdad emerged broke and deeply indebted to Arab rulers who had bankrolled the Iraqi side because they feared their subjects would be infected by Iran's revolutionary ideology. In 1990, Saddam accused Kuwait of stealing oil from Iraq's Rumaila field and of exceeding its quota of oil exports in order to keep the price low, thereby harming Iraq. On August 2nd, he invaded Kuwait.
The first Bush administration responded by imposing sanctions, waging a war to liberate the emirate and calling upon Iraqis to overthrow their leaders. Saddam brutally put down rebellions in the Kurdish north and Shia south.
Saddam repaired Iraq's devastated physical infrastructure within a year, but sanctions consumed the fabric of the country and reduced the people to penury.
When Baghdad fell on April 9th, 2003, at the climax of the second Bush administration's war on Iraq, US troops pulled down the imposing statue of Saddam at the heart of the capital, signifying the end of his era.
During his years in power Saddam displayed the traits exhibited by many other Third World dictators who came from humble origins. He trusted few comrades and appointed family and clan members to positions of authority. He created a police state dominated by fear.
He amassed a great fortune which fed his love of luxury. He built huge palaces for himself, his family and party members. He wore expensively tailored suits and smoked Havana cigars.
But he also imposed order on the country and transformed Baghdad into a handsome city of broad boulevards, fountains and parks. He told Iraqi architects that new buildings should last for 500 years. He subsidised the arts. Sculptors, painters, ceramicists and musicians flourished, including those who did not paint or sculpt "Saddams", his omnipresent images.
The two Bush wars destroyed much of his legacy - fine buildings, schools, academies, and the health system - and left Iraq a poorer, meaner and more violent place than it was during his cruel, repressive reign.