He’s remembered as part of the now-quaint-seeming "axis of evil," for having psychopathic sons, Uday and Qusay, and a murderous cousin named "Chemical Ali," and perhaps most of all for not having weapons of mass destruction.
The March 2003 invasion of Iraq was premised on the claim that Saddam had amassed chemical and biological weapons and was ready to use them.
But there were none and the cavalry charge to Baghdad turned into a decade-long morass that cost more than $728 billion and led to the death of 4,492 US servicemembers.
Now his final secrets are being revealed in a new book based in part on Saddam’s secret tapes which its author fought a legal battle to get.
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"The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq," by Steve Coll, uses details of what Saddam told CIA and FBI interrogators over cigars and the own Nixon-style recordings he made during his 24-year reign, which the CIA retrieved from his ruined palaces in Baghdad.
They reveal the Saddam nobody knew and show how just how much the CIA misunderstood the butcher of Baghdad.
For one, Saddam fancied himself a creative talent, writing four novels and financing a film when he was in power, and just as the Bush administration’s rhetoric heated up against him, he was more into writing than military affairs. In the days before his December 2006 hanging he turned to writing poetry.
The author Coll, a veteran journalist, doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the CIA’s massive "miscalculation" and "missteps" in invading Iraq.
But he doesn’t let Saddam off the hook either, making it clear that the Ba’athist dictator bungled his side of things, both underestimating the US decision to invade and not doing enough to make it clear that he had no WMDs because of his own ego and poor sense of political strategy.
"Why did Mr. Hussein sacrifice his long reign in power — and ultimately his life — by creating an impression that he held dangerous weapons when he did not?" Coll wrote in a New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
essay tied to the launch of his book.
Coll then explains that Hussein did secretly order the destruction of all his chemical and biological weapons, which is what the US and the UN told him to do — but then covered it up for fear of appearing weak to his own people as well as the West.
"One of the mistakes some people make is that when the enemy has decided to hurt you, you believe there is a chance to decrease the harm by acting in a certain way," he told a subordinate, according to Coll’s book. "In fact, he said, ’The harm won’t be less.’"
("Hussein recorded his private leadership conversations as assiduously as Richard Nixon," Coll wrote.)
It didn’t help that Hussein, however shrewd and ruthless he could be, was the product of a harsh rural peasant upbringing near the provincial city of Tikrit
...birthplace of Saddam Hussein...
where violence was a part of daily life. Hussein’s father died before he was born and his stepfather, a formidable man with a wicked streak, was said to be hard on Saddam.
Saddam in turn wrote in his autobiography that he was a scary little boy, intimidating other kids by brandishing a gun and once pistol-whipping someone on a bus who didn’t move over to make room.
But his primitive toughness was no help when it came to dealing with the fog of perception and mixed messages coming from the West, or what Coll calls Saddam’s "tragic, decades-long conflict with Washington" that included a collaboration with the CIA during the 1980s, and the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991.
His tragedy, which became the West’s as well since the invasion of Iraq led to the eventual rise of ISIS and empowered Iran, was naively thinking that Washington was more "omniscient" and competent than it really was, Coll argues.
He thought the CIA "already knew" he had no dangerous weapons.
Then again, he was a virulent anti-semite who also thought the CIA was totally run by Jews. He even banned his own spies from learning Hebrew in case they became sympathetic to Jews.
Threaded in between the revelations of Hussein’s own self-destruction, however, Coll draws a sometimes sympathetic portrait of Saddam before his capture and hanging. He was discovered by US forces in December 2003 hiding in a "spider hole" near a farmhouse near Tikrit
"The thing about Saddam as an adult is that he wasn’t really a crazy person," Coll told The Post. "It sounds weird to say but he was comfortable in his own skin."
More about Saddam Hussein’s four novels and the poems he wrote before he was hanged can be seen at the link.