Saddam Hussein
The Iraqi dictator whose two wars of choice and brutal hold on a state built by outsiders made him the defining test case of strongman rule.
Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for twenty-four years, started two catastrophic wars of choice, used poison gas on his own citizens, and was hanged in a Baghdad basement in December 2006. He matters to geopolitics less as a monster than as a machine. He is the clearest modern case of a strongman holding together a country that outsiders had assembled and that could not obviously hold itself together without him. Every argument about whether it is better to remove a dictator or to live with one runs through Saddam.
The security man
He was born in 1937 in a mud village near Tikrit, fatherless, raised in poverty by a violent stepfather. He joined the Ba'ath Party as a young man and took part in a botched 1959 attempt to assassinate Iraq's ruler Abd al-Karim Qasim, escaping to Cairo with a bullet wound and a reputation. When the Ba'athists finally took power for good in 1968, Saddam did not take the top job. He took internal security.
That choice is the whole story. For eleven years he ran the apparatus that decided who was watched, who was promoted, and who disappeared, while his older cousin Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr held the presidency. By the time Saddam formally assumed power in July 1979, there was nobody left in the party who could stop him.
His first act as president was a piece of theater. He convened the senior Ba'athist leadership in a hall, had a confession to a supposed Syrian plot read aloud, then began calmly reading out the names of the traitors in the room. Guards led them out one by one while the men still seated chanted their loyalty. Dozens were executed, and surviving officials were made to serve on the firing squads, binding them to the killing. Saddam had it filmed. He smoked a cigar throughout.
Two wars he did not have to fight
In September 1980 he invaded Iran, gambling that the revolution had wrecked the Iranian officer corps and that Iraq could seize the oil-rich border province of Khuzestan in weeks. The war lasted eight years and killed something on the order of a million people on both sides. It settled nothing: the borders ended roughly where they started.
What the war did produce was a regime that had learned to use anything. Iraq fired ballistic missiles at Iranian cities, used mustard gas and nerve agents at the front, and received intelligence, credit, and diplomatic cover from Western states that preferred Saddam to Khomeini. In 1988 the same weapons were turned inward. The Anfal campaign against Iraq's Kurds destroyed thousands of villages and killed somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people by conservative counts, with Kurdish authorities citing far higher figures. On the morning of 16 March 1988, Iraqi aircraft gassed the town of Halabja and killed roughly 5,000 civilians in a few hours, most of them women and children.
Two years later he did it again. On 2 August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and a thirty-four-nation coalition threw him out in six weeks. What followed was the strange twelve-year twilight of the Saddam state: crushing Shia and Kurdish uprisings the United States had encouraged and then abandoned, living under the harshest sanctions regime ever imposed on a country, and cultivating deliberate ambiguity about weapons of mass destruction he no longer had. The ambiguity was not aimed at Washington. It was aimed at Tehran, because a disarmed Iraq next to a hostile Iran was a worse problem than sanctions.
The end, and the argument he left behind
The 2003 invasion took three weeks. Saddam was pulled out of a hole near his hometown in December 2003, tried for the 1982 execution of 148 men and boys from the village of Dujail, and hanged on 30 December 2006. The Anfal trial was still running when they killed him, so the largest crime he committed was never fully judged.
What happened next is why his name still comes up in almost every argument about intervention. The state he had built was inseparable from him. Dissolving the army and purging the Ba'ath Party removed not just his loyalists but the administrative class that made Iraq function, and the officers who lost their careers in 2003 supplied much of the military leadership of the Islamic State a decade later. The three provinces Britain had stapled together in 1921 came apart along exactly the seams they were stapled along.
The uncomfortable case for Saddam was never that he was tolerable. It was that the thing holding an artificial state together may be load-bearing, and that removing it without a plan for what replaces it is not liberation but demolition. Iraq is the experiment. It has run for more than twenty years.