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It's December 13th, 2003, a cool evening in Iraq. We're in the small town of Al Dawr, 10 miles from Tikrit. Operation Red Dawn is well underway. Acting on recent intelligence, dozens of US special forces operatives storm two key sites, codenamed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2. The soldiers turn them upside down, searching for their quarry.
By now everyone's seen the deck of specially printed playing cards, which lists the 48 most wanted individuals in Iraq. Many have even played a game or two with them. Since the US invasion began nine months ago, most of the targets have already been killed or captured. The Eight of Spades, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, the aces of clubs and hearts, Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay.
The Queen of Diamonds, Air Force General Muzahim Saab Hassan. But one card has so far eluded them: the Ace of Spades. To everyone's frustration, the two Wolverine sites yield nothing. That's more than a dozen fruitless missions now, in search of this particular target. Helicopters are on their way to extract the disappointed troops. But before they go, they decide to check out a third site.
It's a modest walled compound, comprising a mud hut and a small metal lean-to. Outside, washing has been hung on the line to dry. An old rug lies on the ground. The soldiers kick it aside. Underneath it is a polystyrene hatch. It looks to have been installed recently. They lift the lid and peer inside. They find a small chamber, about six feet below ground level.
It's dark, but by the light of their torches they can see a human figure clutching a pistol. With his long hair and grey straggly beard, the filthy old man looks like a vagrant. But as he stands up slowly and sets aside his weapon, his true identity is revealed. "My name is Saddam Hussein," the man announces. "I am the President of Iraq, and I want to negotiate." From Noiza, this is the final part of the Saddam Hussein story.
And this is Real Dictators. Let's go back a little. A year before being hauled out of his grotty spider hole, President Saddam Hussein is in his pump. The veteran dictator has just won his second election, following an upbeat campaign. Posters plastered all over Iraq feature images of the 65-year-old surrounded by love hearts. The campaign song, Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You, has been a constant fixture on TV and radio.
And the official election motto? "Everyone loves Saddam." It's a claim that seems to be borne out by the official results. According to the Revolutionary Command Council, 11.5 million votes were cast in Saddam's favor, with zero against. That's with a turnout of 100%. Outside Iraq, commentators are skeptical, to say the least. As a representative of the British Foreign Office puts it:
You can't have free elections when the electorate goes to the polls in the knowledge that they have only one candidate. That candidate routinely murders and tortures opponents of the regime, and the penalty for slandering that sole candidate is to have one's tongue cut out. Right now the eyes of the world are on Iraq. Just a few weeks ago the UK Parliament was recalled from their summer holiday to debate a new intelligence dossier published by Prime Minister Tony Blair's government.
Contained within it are a number of claims. Claims that will ultimately turn out to be false. Key among them: that Saddam possesses chemical and biological weapons and is working on a nuclear program. And that such weapons can be deployed within 45 minutes. The 45-minute claim in particular captures the public's imagination. The Sun newspaper runs with the headline: "Brit's 45 minutes from doom."
The star leads with, Mad Saddam ready to attack, 45 minutes from a chemical war. Dr Ali Ali. It wasn't completely mass. This idea wasn't completely implausible. Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction at some point. In the early 80s, there was a nuclear reactor being constructed in Iraq and the Israelis bombed it.
And I think that was the end of the nuclear program. Nuclear programs require a lot of expertise and resources. Chemical weapons, not so much. You need the mustard gas, the chlorine gas, the sarin. You just need to keep it well preserved. So I did wonder if he'd managed to preserve some of those.
And it appeared with hindsight that what was happening was that Saddam was keeping this idea alive that he had some of this capability left because he was always afraid of the Iranians. There was a function of this, maintaining that idea that they existed as a deterrent to the Iranian regime. For more than a decade now, Saddam has been leading UN weapons inspectors on AmeriDans around potential weapons sites. They haven't found anything.
But the amount of effort he's putting into frustrating their searches has led many intelligence experts to assume that there must be weapons somewhere. From this perspective, even Saddam's most frivolous indulgences can start to look like parts of a sinister plan. Author Alex von Tunselmann. Saddam was building so many palaces that actually the U.S. State Department really began to worry that these were being used to house these weapons of mass destruction that they suspected he had.
What transpired eventually is that no, he really did. He just built palaces for himself. There were no WMDs. They certainly weren't being stored there. He was just a very vain, very corrupt dictator. The 45-minute claim might be the most sensational, but for President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, it's by no means the only Cass's belly. Bush and his inner circle have been talking about invading Iraq ever since the 9-11 attacks a year earlier.
Less than a month after the terrorist atrocities, American troops were on the ground in Afghanistan, dismantling the Islamist Taliban regime that provided safe haven for Osama bin Laden. But linking Iraq to al-Qaeda is a trickier prospect, not least because Saddam himself has never had much time for fundamentalist Islam. Professor Joseph Sassoon
Saddam's two main enemies were Iran and Islamic fundamentalists. So the connection is nonexistent, in my opinion, with 9/11. Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, they're really anathema to his ideology. He becomes more religious in his old age, outwardly anyway. But he's exactly what they are opposed to. He's a secular Arab ruler.
there were pretty obviously no links between Saddam and 9/11. Those were kind of separate events. And that, you know, he wasn't responsible for that. There was much more a sense that it was a sort of unfinished business. This group of politicians, broad brush, they're known as the neocons, and they come to power. George Bush Jr. is the president. And you have these kind of Cold War players who were friends with George Bush Sr.
key political figures around Bush Jr. that see this unfinished business from the Cold War. 18 months after 9/11, the invasion of Iraq begins. But throughout that time, President Bush and his allies are fighting another kind of war for the hearts and minds not just of Iraqi civilians, but of their own constituents. In December 2002, Iraq submits a 12,000-page report to the United Nations.
detailing an extensive, but crucially now defunct, weapons program. A month later, UN inspector Hans Blix reports that he has found no smoking gun in Iraq. On February 16, 2003, coordinated anti-war protests are held around the world. Sixty countries play host to more than 300 separate events. Seven and a half million people turn out.
President Bush responds that to allow protesters to impact national security policy would be no better than governing by focus group. I mean, the war was certainly incredibly controversial in Britain, where there was a huge resistance to it. There was a lot of disbelief of the claim that Saddam had WMDs and could fire them in 45 minutes and, you know, kind of cause all this damage. There was a sense of the inevitable about it, whether the UK would join or not.
And it shifted from responsibility for 9/11 to general intent for terrorism, to weapons of mass destruction, to bringing democracy to the Middle East, liberating the Iraqi people. On March 17, Bush issues Saddam with an ultimatum: Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.
That time comes around pretty quickly. Two days later, at 10 o'clock in the evening, Bush addresses the world again, this time from his desk in the Oval Office. American and coalition forces have been deployed. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Blair makes an appeal to ordinary Iraqis: "Removing Saddam will be a blessing to the Iraqi people. We are with you. Our enemy is not you, but your barbarous rulers."
It was actually terrifying. The first couple of months from when the invasion started, the bombing knocked out telecommunications. So we didn't hear anything from our relatives for months. And everyone's afraid that their family would be victim to so-called collateral damage, a missile, a bomb straying off. Some of my relatives had gathered in my grandmother's house. They were together. The shock and awe campaign was terrifying.
We were very lucky that we didn't lose anyone in that. On my grandmother's street, a missile hit the house of one of their neighbors, destroyed the house and killed people living in it. So a change in wind direction could have had a very different history for us. On March the 22nd, after just two days of bombing sorties, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld states that Saddam is losing his grip on Iraq. But after 24 years at the top,
Saddam knows how to keep his subordinates in line. Even with the country collapsing around them, no one dares challenge him for the presidency.
I interviewed one member of the inner circle after 2003 and asked him, just enlighten me. You are 15 people sitting around the table. If half of you know that your turn is going to come sooner or later for whatever reason, why wouldn't you get together and do something about it?
Well, he says, you're being logical. That cannot take place. We never allowed ourselves to think that. And that's the power of fear. On March the 24th, Saddam appears on Iraqi TV, dressed in full military khaki, with his dyed black hair and his usual impressive mustache. He looks every inch the confident general. But it will be one of the dictator's final public appearances. Less than three weeks later,
As US troops flood into Baghdad, Saddam performs his great vanishing act. The most powerful man in Iraq has become the country's most wanted. With Saddam gone to ground, quite literally as it will turn out, others are left to speak on his behalf. Most notably, Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, who acquires a cult following in the West. His absurdly optimistic press briefings see him dubbed "Comical Ali".
Saddam had a weapons chief who was known as Chemical Ali, so Comical Ali was kind of a play on his name. And this guy's kind of PR efforts were quite extraordinary. So for instance, there he was
on TV giving this speech saying Baghdad is safe, the battle is still going on, the infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad, the Americans are nowhere near us, all of this kind of stuff. And you could see behind him as these international camera crews were filming, you could see American tanks on the other side of the river successfully invading Baghdad. So he became a kind of an international celebrity, Komakalali, because people found it so extraordinary that there he was trying to tell one story while you could visually see that it simply wasn't true.
Whatever their own opinion about the war, or Operation Iraqi Freedom as the invasion is officially called, no one can deny it's a compelling story. All around the world, people's eyes are glued to their TV screens. You could see it live. It was live entertainment for people. This was one of the kind of sick things about it. All of a sudden, people who watch TV know the names of four or five cities in the country they haven't paid any attention to before. And they're being entertained.
Professor Juman Kubba watches events unfold from Abu Dhabi, having fled her homeland two decades earlier.
All over the world, Iraqis were divided. I would say 99.9 or 100% of Iraqis wanted the removal of Saddam. Maybe with the exception of his clan, maybe. Very few people were pro-Saddam, but the majority of people were against the war. They didn't think that the war is going to remove Saddam, that it's going to be destructive to Iraq, which is what happened.
A few people supported the war, that it is the only way to remove Saddam. They say they thought that the outcome would be good for Iraq. And we all know that these world affairs are not some sort of niceties that happen because the world cares about us. It's not like that. But anyway, that's what happened. So people were split. Militarily, at least.
The war has been a huge success for the Anglo-American coalition and a humiliating defeat for Baathist Iraq after six days of fighting in the streets. Baghdad falls to the Western allies. Saddam's glitzy palaces along the banks of the Tigris River now play host to American soldiers. In a highly symbolic moment that soon beamed around the world, a giant statue of the tyrant comes crashing down.
Though whether this is spontaneous on the part of the locals, or a piece of street theatre orchestrated by the Americans, continues to be disputed. What is clear is that while locals chip away at the bronze bust with hammers and rocks, a 60-tonne M88 escape recovery vehicle, operated by a US Army corporal, is deployed to haul it to the ground.
So when Saddam's statue came down, it was this absolutely enormous international news event. It was on TV constantly. So for instance, the
The day it happened, 9th of April, Fox News replayed the footage of that coming down every 4.4 minutes and CNN did it every 7.5 minutes. So constantly you were seeing this image again and again and again. And the way that it was edited very much suggested that you had this crowd of cheering Iraqis shown afterwards and that they had done it.
that it was all being done organically by these Iraqis and that this statue was the ultimate symbol of Saddam, whereas in fact it was a pretty irrelevant, very minor statue and there were thousands more, many of which had already been pulled down. This moment, this kind of media moment when this statue came down was such a kind of climactic moment that it was presented as a kind of emotional resolution to the war, that we were basically job done, that this symbolic assassination of Saddam by pulling down his statue
was what actually mattered. And so, for instance, in the weeks after that statue came down, the coverage of the Iraq War on networks like Fox and CNN, the major kind of news networks, decreased by 70%. So from being the news story, as far as they were concerned, we kind of had the end to our story. So they hadn't found the real Saddam yet. That would take many more months. The war was not over. And furthermore, there was no plan, as we now know, to win the peace.
There was no plan for what was supposed to happen afterwards. With Saddam in hiding and a $25 million bounty on his head, leading figures in the Baathist regime begin falling like dominoes. By the summer, almost every face has been crossed off the most wanted deck of cards. Many give themselves up, but some decide to put up a fight, most notably Saddam's sons, who die in Koussei. Pulled up in a safe house in Mosul,
The boys are tracked down by US special forces on July 22. When they refuse to surrender, a three-hour firefight ensues. Several soldiers are injured in the frenzied exchange. With no sign that the Husseins are flagging, the Americans fire rockets from an attack helicopter. But still, Uday and Kusei continue shooting. Finally, the US commander calls for a barrage of anti-tank missiles fired from Humvees parked outside.
By the time the building has been stormed, Uday, Kuse and their bodyguards have been blown to smithereens. But there's one man left standing, if you can call him a man. Kuse's 14-year-old son Mustafa fires on the soldiers, until he too is felled. The Americans had hoped to capture Uday and Kuse alive. Now all they have are two barely identifiable bodies.
It's left to some highly skilled morticians to reconstruct their faces so that they can be photographed and filmed. This controversial practice is considered essential if the people of Iraq are to believe that Saddam's sons are really dead. When the images go out on TV that evening, Baghdad erupts with celebratory gunfire. Saddam receives the news in hiding. A week later, a taped message is broadcast on a satellite radio station.
In it, he declares that his boys died as martyrs. If Saddam Hussein had 100 sons, he says, he would have offered them on the same path, which is the path of jihad. And yet, five months later, when the Americans dig Saddam out of his spider hole, he surrenders without a fight. It's not a great look for the Iraqi strongman on any front.
You have this moment of seeing this person who'd represented himself with rocket-powered horses, you know, as this great figure. And there he was, this kind of like ordinary little man who was kind of scruffy and overgrown and hairy and thin and didn't look well.
I think that really was shattering to him, this idea that he was photographed and seen in this sort of bedraggled condition because it went against everything he thought about himself and wanted the world to think about him. This idea that he was captured just in rags, unshaven, with his hair a mess, literally out of a hole in the ground. I mean, that was the antithesis of the image that he wanted to project to the world.
It was that sort of extraordinary moment, makes me think of the Wizard of Oz where they pull the curtain back and you can see that the great and powerful wizard is just a little ordinary guy. And I think it had that sort of rather profound moment of realizing that you can build all the statues you like but at the end of the day you are just a fallible human being. Pictures of Saddam in such a miserable state have obvious propaganda value. After the deposed president is taken into custody, he's filmed undergoing a medical exam.
Doctors check his scruffy hair for bugs and look down his throat with a hand torch. But to some commentators, the use of these images is uncomfortable, perhaps even illegal. Amnesty International expressed concern that they may violate the Geneva Convention, which protects prisoners of war from public curiosity. There's this sense that the way that he was treated and the way that his capture was filmed, there was a real kind of lack of dignity involved.
There's this question, would the Americans have treated other leaders in that way? Was this tyrant being treated differently because he's an Arab tyrant? I'm not suggesting that he should have been allowed to have a haircut and a shave before going on the camera. What I'm saying is that there's a sense that there was something different about the way this head of state was being treated. Certainly once the prisoner is safely settled in captivity, the US military is keen to ensure that he's handled fairly.
And it doesn't take long for the old Saddam to bounce back. I think he was treated quite well whilst he was in American custody. The Americans obviously did an extensive interrogation. They wanted to know as much about how he had been on the run for this time. They kept him in a fairly secure facility at the Baghdad airport, which was their main base. I don't know, but I don't assume they tortured him. There was a book by one of his interrogators who was an actual American intelligence officer
who said he'd been quite happy to talk and had been quite compliant. You know, I think he still probably saw himself as the president of the country. And in fact, his interrogator said that he was, you know, talking to him as if he wasn't really particularly even a prisoner. Just he was talking as the president to somebody who just happened to be interrogating him. When he's eventually brought into court for his arraignment, Saddam is keen to make a good impression for the TV cameras.
He was very fastidious about his appearance. He wanted to wear very nice suits. He wanted to be very well-groomed. He was a narcissist. I think his appearance was important to him. Even away from the cameras, he's keen to make his mark. Will Bardenbepa's book, The Prisoner in His Palace, looks at the final chapter of Saddam's life through his interactions with a dozen of his American jailers.
The interviews that I listened to were conducted primarily with very junior-ranking soldiers who had been involved in the detention of Saddam. I would have assumed that they were kind of older, more seasoned veterans, maybe special operations troops.
But the people who basically were tasked with spending eight hour shifts, 24 hours a day in his company, in this case, were in some cases, 18 year old kids that had just graduated basic training. And so I think it was important to him, even if the only spectators were these 12 young men, to carry himself as the leader and to not acknowledge weakness to them. As the weeks and months go by,
On a personal level, Saddam actually appears to grow fond of his American captors, and they of him.
the intimacy of their interactions i found surprising maybe i shouldn't have in retrospect because i think it's only natural that if you're sitting across from someone for eight hours someone's going to have to talk otherwise it'd be a very long long day i mean saddam could speak english he would employ it strategically but if he wanted to converse with you in english he was capable of it it wasn't like they talked continuously for the entire shift but
but they would talk with some regularity as a way to pass the time. I don't think they were under any illusion that he was a good guy. I think they were well aware of all of the crimes that he was guilty of, but at the same time, they hadn't seen any of that. You know, they only saw this man that came across to them as kind of a kindly, grandfatherly sort of figure with a good sense of humor, whose company they had grown to enjoy. In some ways, prison offers Saddam a bit of downtime after decades of stress at the top.
He grew up without anything, and so it wasn't as hard for him to revert back to an existence that didn't require a lot. He didn't need luxury to find sort of the simple pleasures to get through the day. If he had his cigar and something to read and he had a little garden, well, he called it a garden. It was kind of just a bunch of weeds that grew out in the outdoor rec area that he had access to, and he would tend to that and water them and seemed to derive a lot of pleasure from watching this weed kind of slowly grow in the garden.
He had an exercise bike that they would encourage him to ride to stay fit. He would joke that it was his pony and he'd say, you know, I'm going to ride my pony. And then he'd make jokes. You better watch it. If I ride this pony, my legs are going to get strong and I'll be able to jump over this wall and escape. But while Saddam kicks his heels behind bars, Iraq is struggling in his absence. Anarchy is worse than anything else. And what we witnessed after 2003 is anarchy.
Things just got worse and worse. There was chaos and looting on the streets. As soon as the Ba'ath regime fell, all of these kind of criminal gangs came out of the woodwork, started looting government buildings, started looting private buildings. We had a pretty good plan as far as our ability to go and defeat an army militarily.
We had a much less robust plan for what comes next. It was just chaos. There were shootings. It was very criminal-based shootings. And then that started to coalesce into a sort of more organized resistance, I would say. And anybody was a target at that point. I remember there was a young British journalist who was just filming in the streets. Somebody just walked up and shot him in the head.
And this happened quite a few times with American soldiers because they'd be out, you know, there would be a barbed wire fence for the roadblock or in front of a guard post and people would just walk up and pull out a pistol, shoot somebody and then disappear into the crowd. So it was a very sort of tense and unruly time.
The soldiers were tired, they'd been away from home for many months. And also they'd been sent into an invader country and then from one day to the next they weren't invaders, they were like a peacekeeping force. And I think for a lot of them it was a very difficult transition. Pretty much overnight, the mission parameters have changed. From shooting enemy combatants to winning hearts and minds.
I spent quite a lot of time in bed with American soldiers and would ask them about hearts and minds and they would sort of, you know, jokingly, very sort of black humor that you find with soldiers. They were like, yeah, two in the heart, one in the mind, meaning, you know, shoot them and then the problem will be solved. I mean, the honeymoon period, if there was one, soured rapidly. Just over a year after the start of the war, a scandal erupts. Graphic images emerge from Abu Ghraib Jail, 20 miles west of Baghdad.
showing Iraqi prisoners stripped naked and forced to perform sex acts in front of their guards. A leaked US Army report details a series of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses at the facility. For Juman Khubar, the horrific images of abuse at Abu Ghraib are an eerie reminder of the ordeal her father suffered there as a political prisoner three decades earlier.
So my dad was kidnapped at the end of '73 in December, which is 50 years this year. So in '74, throughout '74, I went to Abu Ghraib many times. It's so ironic that in 2004, the scandal broke up and we saw what happened to the prisoners there. 2004, the Basri regime was removed, but Iraqis are still being tortured and harmed in the same place.
Six months after the Abu Ghraib scandal, there's another reminder of the horrors of the past. US investigators report that they found a mass grave in Hatra, northern Iraq, containing the bodies of babies and toddlers, some of them buried with the toys they were clutching when they died. They are victims of Saddam's genocidal campaign against the Kurds almost 20 years earlier.
Across Iraq, experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of bodies may lie in mass graves. Victims of 35 years of Ba'athist rule. The project to exhume and identify them will be a fraught one. The Americans did start exhumations in some of the sites, but there were so many of them. And it's a difficult thing to do properly because you need the proper staff, you need the proper hygienic conditions.
So they were trying to do this in a methodical way, but so many Iraqis had lost people and they were so tormented by where they might be that if somebody found a grave, then hundreds of Iraqis would show up and start digging it up with like shovels with their hands sometimes in completely uncontrolled, unsupervised and unsanitary conditions. And I just stood there one day just watching people doing it and...
Saddam's regime was brutal and terrifying.
But with the army disbanded, Iraq's borders become increasingly porous. Parts of the country begin to fall under the sway of the most horrific forms of extremism. Al-Qaeda hadn't been there before, but they had moved in pretty quickly afterwards. So it became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that Al-Qaeda was in Iraq, banning music, banning films. They would burn down the shops selling the DVDs and the CDs and, you know, sort of Talibanize the place.
Some of it was absurd that they were killing greengrocers because they were displaying cucumbers next to tomatoes. Yeah, because a cucumber is slightly phallic and two tomatoes together kind of look like breasts. Yeah, it was this absurdity mixed with extreme cruelty and just no limits. It was basically hell for a long time and it didn't get better anytime quickly.
And you had this guy, Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian terrorist who moved in. And he started organizing his cells and found quite a welcoming atmosphere in the Sunni triangle. A 7,000 square kilometer area stretching between Baghdad, Tikrit, and Ramadi, the Sunni triangle soon becomes a byword for the chaos and cruelty of post-Saddam Iraq. It includes the city of Fallujah,
where four American contractors for the private security firm Blackwater are killed by insurgents in 2004. Their bodies are dragged through the streets before being hanged from a bridge over the Euphrates. For Western journalists like James Hyder, working in Iraq means adjusting to a new normal, one where medieval cruelty and modern technology combine to horrific effect. I think you do have to keep an eye on what it's doing to you psychologically. And obviously,
When Zaqari was doing the beheadings, we would have to watch the beheading videos. They were the most horrific things I've ever seen. But at some point you have to decide, am I going to stay here and report it? And if so, I'm just going to have to deal with it. In 2004, Haider witnesses one of Iraq's bloodiest suicide bombings, when more than 100 Shia festival goers are killed during the Day of Ashura.
It was in the city of Kabul, which has a big shrine marking the site. It's a huge golden dome mosque, very beautiful. And the Shia hadn't been allowed to practice this festival for decades. Saddam had cracked down on religious practices. So there were, gosh, maybe a million people there, and it was huge. So we went down.
The first night we were there, it was this amazing festival. There were like men with black shirts on. They had flails, like flagellating themselves, whipping themselves across their backs as they marched through the town chanting. There was a giant fountain of dyed red water representing the blood. It was like a blood fountain representing the people who had been killed there.
And there was a big festival atmosphere. There were people handing out food, cakes, all sorts of stuff to the pilgrims. And just, you know, the place was packed. It was absolutely jam-packed. And then the next day, whilst we were out talking to people, I think nine suicide bombers blew themselves up in the crowd. The Kabbalah attack is part of a wave of sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq on a scale that hasn't been seen for centuries.
For many Iraqis, the new battle lines are as baffling as they are frightening. Sunnis were learning the prayers and the names of the Shia religious leaders because if you were caught by the wrong group, they would say, "Okay, say the prayers the way we say them." And they were training each other within families because obviously also these families, the wife might be Sunni and the husband might be Shia. So everyone was helping each other to like sort of memorize the correct prayers for the correct situation to avoid being killed.
It got to the point where if there was a killing of one sect by another sect, then they would go to the funeral of that person and kill the people who showed up because they knew they'd be from that same group. So even funerals became deadly affairs as well. So it was just horrific. By the time Saddam's trial finally gets going in 2005, he is ready to make the argument that he was the only thing holding the country together all these years. And by this point, many Iraqis would agree with him.
There's a common phrase, a common saying you'll hear Iraqis say that the Americans got rid of Saddam, but now we have 20 or 30 mini-Saddams all over the country having their own power bases with their own militias stealing. There's this feeling that, yes, Saddam was terrible.
and he was a tyrant, and he was a dictator, and he sent Iraq into disastrous wars. Hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared in jails, murdered. But at least there was electricity, at least there was infrastructure, at least there were jobs. That's not to say that everyone in Iraq loved Saddam. It's an indicator of how terrible things have become that some people are nostalgic about those days.
I remember an Iraqi man telling me a joke about a guy who's got a rooster next door and he's living next door. He tells the neighbor, "Your rooster wakes me up every morning and I can't sleep and it's hurting my health. Can you do something about this?"
So the neighbor says, okay, I'll sort it out. And then a couple of days later, the guy has woken up and there's this terrible noise. It's just this cacophony of crowing. And he goes and says to the neighbor, I thought I told you to kill the rooster. He said, yeah, I did. But when I killed that rooster, 50 other roosters came in and they're all like fighting for the territory. They're making even more noise. After almost two years in U.S. custody, Saddam gets his day or rather year in court.
The marathon trial begins in October 2005 and won't conclude until November 2006. That's despite a highly abridged chart sheet.
Encyclopedias could be written about the misery of the Baath regime, the crimes of Saddam and his gang. I wish in the trial they had listed all his crimes. They tried him just for two or three little things. Not little, but I mean just little in number. But I wish somebody had listed all the things that he had done.
Although Saddam remains in US custody, the trial itself is in the hands of the Iraqi judiciary. Five senior judges will determine their former leader's fate.
I think it was considered essential that the judicial process be viewed as an Iraqi-led one, to have sort of international legitimacy. In his mind, this was just a bunch of puppets who had been put there by the United States. They were doing what the US wanted them to do. I think it was clear they were always going to find him guilty. I mean, it was done pretty much by the book, the trial, I think, but obviously in a highly partisan situation.
you know, at least he was given a chance to defend himself. At least he was allowed to put a suit on and allowed to clean himself up and allowed to have a lawyer.
He knew he was on camera. At that point, I mean, I think everything he was doing was as geared towards burnishing this historic legacy as it was in actually any hope that he was going to win the trial, so to speak. I think by then he had probably resigned himself to the fact that he was nearing the end of the road and that this wasn't going to end well.
But he knew that if he carried that big Koran and waved it around and shouted and acted defiant, that could play well with his supporters in the Arab street. And so I think that that was mostly about optics as opposed to any kind of a legal strategy that he may have been trying to employ. The court proceedings do not go smoothly, as attested to by the extraordinary level of churn amongst the key players.
Saddam fires one attorney, another resigns, a third is kidnapped from his home and murdered. And then there's the game of musical chairs taking place on the judge's bench. Several senior justices come and go, some more willingly than others. When one of the five judges tells Saddam that he doesn't believe he is a dictator, he's swiftly removed from his position. But his replacement, Rauf Abd al-Rahman, doesn't meet with Saddam's approval.
Rauf has a Kurd from Halabja, the site of Saddam's genocidal chemical attack. Saddam is convinced it's a stitch-up. "You're not a judge, you're a criminal," he tells him. "A curse on your mustache." After months of chaos, the judges deliver their verdict. You know, it was a court, but it was also a little bit of a farcical court, to be honest.
And he knew, by the way, from the beginning that he was going to be hanged because he wouldn't treat anyone else differently. I guess he kinda accepted it. It was part of the game, you know. He did it to a lot of others, now it's his turn. What happens next makes the courtroom drama look positively orderly. Mobile phone footage of the execution soon begins circulating online.
A smartly dressed Saddam is led by a group of men wearing black balaclavas towards a rough and ready scaffold. Unfortunately, the execution itself, it all went off the rails. It's probably safe to assume that at least some of them had had family members killed by Saddam. I'm sure that their emotions were very raw. One of the tragic ironies of the execution is that Saddam comes across as the most statesmanlike, dignified person there.
They were clearly quite happy to see him dead, so there was rather rough justice, I think, at the end. The masked man offers Saddam a hood, but he refuses to put it on. As they place the noose around his neck, people in the room start chanting. Ignoring the jeering, Saddam begins praying out loud. But before he can finish, the trapdoor opens beneath him. The room erupts with cheers. On New Year's Eve 2006,
Saddam Hussein is buried in al-Aujjah, the small town outside Tikrit where he was born seven decades earlier. He's laid to rest in the same cemetery as his sons, Uday and Qusay. It took three decades and two Gulf Wars to loosen his vice-like grip on Iraq. But for Iraqis, moving on from the specter of Saddam may prove even harder.
Yes, dictatorship was toppled, but overall, you can't say 20 years after the invasion that Iraq is doing phenomenally well.
You have ISIS, you have mobilization of militias, you still have the Americans bombing different parts of the country. Mosul was kind of destroyed by the war against Daesh, against ISIS. Where's the reconstruction? Where's the assistance? Where's the support? Anything to indicate that the international community care about the welfare and the well-being of Iraq's population.
This thug, Saddam and his gang, came to power. They took Iraq into a path of destruction and a path of chaos and a path of death, of sectarianism, of wars upon wars upon wars. Western countries supported Saddam for a good four decades prior to the War of '91.
You know, our lives are valuable and we're not toys in somebody's hands, you know? If you look at the region as a whole, the legacy of these dictatorships, of just eroding any democratic growth and allowing the only opposition to be extremists,
I think it was just that literal stamping out of any spark of democracy, of political freedom, of initiative, of critical thinking, creating a cadre of people who are afraid to think for themselves because it really was dangerous to have ideas. And you leave behind you a population that is vulnerable to ideas of all stripes, often extremist ideas, you know, a country that
has been raised in violence, traumatized and struggles just at sort of normal behavior. So, I mean, the Iraqi people have just had decades of suffering. I don't know how you even begin to recover from that. That's regrettably, that's where we are. It doesn't mean we're going to stay there forever. Personally, as a person, I have faith in God and I have faith in justice.
And also, I don't underestimate Iraqis and there are good people. And I think the crimes that the Ba'ath did, as well as the crimes that were done by many entities from 2003 until today, they are being exposed and the world knows about them. And that's a good thing. In the next episode, we'll take a trip back in time to the first century BC to the kingdom of Judea.
The story of Herod the Great. That's next time.
