Saddam's Second Life

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An Iraqi man whitewashes a portrait of Saddam in April 2003.

Yuri Kozyrev for Time

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Perhaps it was inevitable that Saddam Hussein's end would be accompanied by low theatrics instead of high drama. After all, he had ruled for nearly three decades by a crude medieval code that vulgarized Iraqi public life. And yet the former dictator's final moments--the screams of "Go to hell" from spectators at the gallows, the taunts of "Muqtada, Muqtada" by guards evidently loyal to Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr--were undignified even by Saddam's standards. As if to block out the barbs, Saddam loudly intoned his final prayer, the traditional Islamic invocation to God and the Prophet Muhammad. But that too was cut short: without warning, the hangman opened the trapdoor beneath his feet, and the tyrant was silenced forever.

For many who survived Saddam's monstrous regime, his ignoble end was no more than he deserved. But the unseemly scenes from the gallows, captured by a clandestine camera phone and broadcast to an aghast world, were also a reminder of what has come since he was removed from power: vicious sectarian hatreds that intrude, as his brutality once did, upon every aspect of Iraqi life, including the final seconds of Saddam's. His death did nothing to dampen those hatreds. The celebrations over his execution lasted barely a day before the Shi'ite-Sunni war resumed in earnest, with scores of Iraqis killed in bomb blasts across the country. Among Sunnis, the images of Saddam's hanging sparked new anger at the Shi'ite-led government. In the face of growing outrage at home and abroad, the Iraqi government launched a probe into who shot the video of the execution and how it was leaked, allowing Saddam to dominate the headlines for days after his death.

Saddam once told a biographer he didn't care what anybody said of him today; he was more interested in what people would think of him in 500 years. Like so many tyrants, he was obsessed with his place in history. When he looked in the mirror he saw a reflection of great men of the ages: Nebuchadnezzar, Hammurabi, Saladin. Even the villains to whom his enemies compared him were historic--Hulegu, Hitler, Stalin.

But the closest he came to emulating one of his heroes was in an area over which he had no control: like Saladin, he was born just outside Tikrit, an ancient town in Iraq's dusty central plains. Saddam's rise was due in part to his effectiveness as an administrator. After becoming Vice President of Iraq in 1969, at 32, he nationalized the country's oil industry and used the revenues to launch a massive program to modernize the country's infrastructure: roads, bridges, factories, universities, hospitals. By the late 1970s, Iraq was the Middle East's most progressive state--rich, modern and thoroughly secular. A Baghdad political scientist described Saddam to me as "the world's best Vice President--until he became the world's worst President."