How Saddam ran Iraq

I'm back... kinda... even though close to nobody reads this... more explanation later.

- This is how Saddam ran Iraq; like a paranoid tribal sheik from the twelfth century. Western Iraq, a place with a strong nomadic tradition, was always a violent place. It's the kind of place that sharia brought brutal but fair order to long ago. Saddam expanded on that tradition - expanded in its methods and results (more violence in terms of amount and intensity) and its geographical reach (to the rest of the country). Here's a small insight into the way he thought. Whether the world likes it or not - we are seeing the fruits of Saddam's Iraq today. His legacy is going to a dominant and bloody factor for a long time.

From the BBC:

By Jeremy Bowen
Middle East editor, BBC News
The American journalist Bob Woodward, in his third book about the Bush administration at war, State of Denial, relates a story told by Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, who was the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States.

Prince Bandar recalls a conversation that Saddam Hussein had with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia after a group of extremists took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979.

The rebels had been caught and thrown into jail, and this was the Iraqi leader's advice: "In my mind, there is no question that you are going to kill all 500, that's a given.

"Listen to me carefully, Fahd. Every man who in this group who has a brother or father - kill them. If they have a cousin who you think is man enough to go for revenge, kill them.

"Those 500 people are a given. But you must spread the fear of God in everything that belongs to them, and that's the only way you can sleep at night."

That seems to have been the tactic that Saddam Hussein used at Dujail in 1982, when - after an attempt to assassinate him - 148 people were killed. It is the crime for which he has been sentenced to hang.

Perhaps Saddam Hussein will accept his fate on the gallows as an occupational hazard of being a despot. Or maybe he never intended his own rules to apply to himself.