This from the Chicago Tribune.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...obit-saddam,1,5392597.story?coll=chi-news-hed
Hussein legacy: Megalomaniac, nationalist leader
By Aamer Madhani
Tribune correspondent
Published December 29, 2006, 10:03 PM CST
Over his 24 years as president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein earned the moniker Butcher of Baghdad by ruling with brute force, torture and cunning.
His regime murdered at least 300,000 of his countrymen, according to estimates by human-rights groups. During his reign, neighbors spied on each other and children were taught at school to tattle on their parents if they spoke against the regime. More than 1 million Iraqis were killed in wars against Iran, Kuwait and the United States on his watch.
Iraqis, by and large, say they suffered terribly at the hands of the dictator. But Hussein will also leave a legacy in his country and the Arab world as a sort of Mesopotamian revolutionary—a nationalist leader who stood up to the American superpower that deposed and later captured him.
During his reign, speaking ill of Hussein or the regime was punishable by death. Baghdad cabdrivers feared him so much that they avoided even driving past the palaces because they didn't want to take any chances of angering Hussein or his associates.
Hussein was married, but he was rumored to have an insatiable desire for virgins, whom his henchmen would kidnap off the street. He was passionate about cigars, and Fidel Castro kept him stocked with Cuba's finest tobacco.
He earned credibility on the Arab street through his support of thousands of displaced Palestinians he invited to live in Iraq. He ordered the building of mosques to curry favor with Islamic clerics. In the weeks before the U.S. invaded Iraq, he issued amnesty to tens of thousands of Iraqis imprisoned for various crimes.
But Hussein's most horrific atrocities were the acts of brutality he meted out against fellow Iraqis. His henchmen amputated the tongues of those who criticized him. He ordered the systematic annihilation of tens of thousands of Kurds, including at least 5,000 in a notorious poison gas attack on the village of Halabja in 1988. Tens of thousands of Shiites were killed by forces loyal to Hussein during the uprisings in southern Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion in 1991.
The crime for which he was executed was the roundup and killings of dozens of Shiites in the village of Dujail in 1982 following a failed assassination attempt on Hussein there.
He and seven other members of the former regime stood trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.
In grim testimony, witnesses of the Dujail massacre recalled how Hussein's cronies, led by his half brother and former head of the secret police Barzan Ibrahim, tortured, imprisoned and humiliated hundreds of men, women and children. In all, 148 people died by execution or while under interrogation during the Dujail incident. Some 700 others were evicted from the village and cast off to live in the desert.
Hussein said in court that the executions were a lawful and necessary response to an assassination attempt on a head of state. Witnesses testified that the roundup was random and some of those taken in for questioning were children.
One of the tactics interrogators used on the Dujail victims was ripping their flesh by running them through a meat grinder, witnesses testified. One female witness described how she was stripped naked and sexually humiliated.
Hussein would later order the use of chemical weapons on Iraq's Kurdish people as part of the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, in which some 180,000 people were killed. He used poison gas against his own citizens more than a half-century after the civilized world had concluded that chemical weapons were too inhumane to use even against enemies. Hussein was still being tried on genocide and other charges related to Anfal when he was hanged.
UNICEF said the first eight years of sanctions may have been responsible for 500,000 deaths of children under 5.
While he hadn't left as long a trail of dead as Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Hussein and his cohorts represented one of the most diabolical regimes in modern history.
The fear he inspired was palpable through his reign. And his cruelty served as an example to his sons Udai and Qusai.
Udai once bludgeoned to death one of his father's valets in front of a crowd at a party. Qusai would order his guards to grab women off the street whom he would rape, and he oversaw the tortures and mass executions of hundreds of Shiites.
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