The hanging of Saddam Hussein ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history and negated the fiction that he himself maintained even as the gallows loomed -- that he remained president of Iraq despite being toppled by the US military and that his power and his palaces would be restored to him in time.
He was 69.
The despot, known as Saddam, had oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years, unleashing devastating regional wars and reducing his once promising, oil-rich nation to a claustrophobic police state.
For decades it seemed that his unflinching hold on Iraq would endure, particularly after he lasted through disastrous military adventures against first Iran and then Kuwait, where a US-led coalition routed his unexpectedly timid military in 1991.
His own conviction that he was destined by God to rule Iraq forever was such that he refused to accept that he would be overthrown in April 2003, even as US tanks penetrated the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in what became a bitterly contentious, bloody occupation.
Manhunt
Saddam eluded capture for eight months during an intensive manhunt, maintained until the end that he was Iraq's rightful president. "High Value Detainee No. 1," his US military code name, heaped scorn on the Iraqi judge who referred to him as the "former" president after asking him to identify himself on the first day of his trial for crimes against humanity, which ultimately lead to his execution.
"I didn't say `former president,' I said `president,' and I have rights according to the Constitution, among them immunity from prosecution," Saddam growled from the docket.
The outburst underscored the boundless egotism and self-delusion of a man who fostered such a fierce personality cult during the decades that he ran the Middle Eastern nation that joking or criticizing him in public could bring a death sentence.
If a man's life can be boiled down to one physical mark, in Saddam's case it was the wrist of his right hand, which was tattooed with a line of three dark blue dots, a mark commonly given to children in rural, tribal areas. Some urbanized Iraqis removed or at least bleached theirs, but Saddam's former confidantes told the Atlantic Monthly that he never disguised his.
Peasant
Ultimately, underneath all the socialist rhetoric, underneath the Koranic references, the tailored suits and the invocations of Iraq's glorious history, Saddam was basically a village peasant attempting to be a tribal leader on a grand scale. His rule was paramount, and sustaining it was his main goal behind all the talk of developing Iraq by harnessing its considerable wealth and manpower.
Mosques, airports, neighborhoods and entire cities were named after him.
While Saddam was in power, his statue guarded the entrance to every village, his portrait watched over each government office and he peered down from at least one wall in every home. His picture was so widespread that a joke quietly circulating among his detractors in 1988 put the country's population at 34 million -- 17 million people and 17 million portraits of Saddam.
Throughout his rule Saddam unsettled the ranks of the Baath Party with bloody purges and packed his jails with political prisoners to defuse real or imagined plots. In one of his most brutal acts, he rained poison gas on the northern Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 of his own citizens suspected of being disloyal and wounding some 10,000 more.
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