"Only stupid, sadistic dictators hang… and Saddam was both"

Harvard history prof Niall Ferguson pens an interesting postmortem of Saddam. Several passages are worth quoting:

"Only a minority of modern dictators have been executed for their crimes. The most bloodthirsty of all, Stalin and Mao, died in full possession of their powers, if not their faculties. Franco pulled off the same trick. Hitler cheated the hangman with a bullet in the bunker. Pol Pot lost power, but was never brought to justice and died in his bed, as did Idi Amin.

Slobodan Milosevic stood trial for his crimes, but died of a heart attack in March with 50 hours of testimony still to be heard. Augusto Pinochet, too, suffered the indignity of arrest; three weeks ago he also expired naturally before prosecution could even begin. Suharto is another fallen dictator who has avoided standing trial on the grounds of ill health. And let's not forget that dwindling band of dictators who are still alive and in power: Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi.

Dictators, by definition, have absolute power. For a dictator to end his life hanging from a rope, or facing a firing squad, therefore requires a rather rare combination of wickedness and stupidity: enough of the former to incur the hatred of his countrymen, enough of the latter to take on armies mightier than his own. Both these qualities Saddam Hussein possessed in abundance. That is why, in the wake of his execution at dawn yesterday morning, he deserves to be remembered as the Mussolini of Mesopotamia — if not the Ceausescu of Baghdad."

"Saddam shared more than a few traits with his hero Stalin. Like Stalin, his origins were humble (he was a shepherd's son from Tikrit). Like Stalin, he was attracted as much to nationalism as to socialism, which made the Ba'ath Party his natural political home. Like Stalin, he had no fear of revolutionary violence; indeed, he was wounded in the leg during an abortive Ba'athist rising in 1959. And, like Stalin, he rose through the party ranks until powerful enough to establish a ruthless dictatorship."

"The People's Army — the military wing of the Ba'ath Party — and the Mukhabarat (Department of Intelligence) were his chosen instruments for terrorising real and imagined opponents. The facade of legitimacy was provided by a classic personality cult. The gargantuan statues, the garish murals, the bombastic propaganda: all were taken from the 1930s Soviet playbook.

Yet Stalin would never have been as stupid as Saddam was — to pit his own army not once but twice against the most powerful military in the world."

"The decline and fall of Saddam Hussein has been too tawdry to pass muster as a Shakespearian tragedy. Its protagonist was too crass a character, more Don Corleone than Coriolanus. This play has been part Marlowe, part Brecht: a cross between The Massacre at Paris and The Threepenny Opera. Like the Duc de Guise in Marlowe's bloodthirsty drama, Saddam was responsible for more than enough mass murder to justify his own violent end. Unlike Macheath in Brecht's musical, Saddam was not pardoned in the last minute before his execution, but his death seems to pose a version of Brecht's old question: "Who is the bigger criminal: he who robs a bank, or he who founds one?"

"The dictator is dead, hoist by the petard of his own Stalinist cruelty and Mussolini-like miscalculation. But Iraq's road towards democratic stability has a very long way still to run. If every milestone is an execution, it will be a hellish highway indeed."