Capture may shatter great-man myth
WASHINGTON -- Image was everything to the dirt-poor boy who became a murderous dictator and obsessively projected infallibility, fortune, and an iron fist. But the most powerful and lasting image to Iraqis may be of a filthy, disheveled, and confused Saddam Hussein in captivity, probed with a tongue depressor.
Beyond the strategic and political significance of finding Hussein lies the humiliating, even cowardly fall of a man who ruled his country by terror, violence, and fear and, even as a fugitive, made Iraqis believe he was larger than life.
"Seeing a broken man with a long beard and looking like a vagabond will have a great impact on the Iraqi people and finally break the psychology of fear," said Adeed Dawisha, an Iraqi professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio. "The man who had 70 palaces was running from one hole to another. He was sleeping with rats and mice."
President Bush said yesterday that "a dark and painful era is over." It was one that officially began in 1979, when Hussein, a Ba'athist party strongman already in control of the country's security forces, declared himself president. It stretched over more than two decades of Hussein's aggression against his neighbors -- Iran, Kuwait, and Israel -- violence toward the Kurds, other ethnic groups, and any rivals in Iraq, and death threats against political enemies, including President George H. W. Bush.
Ironically, Hussein was captured in an underground hide-out not far from Auja, the primitive village of mud-and-reed huts where he was born and lived until age 10. Feeding his own great-man myth, Hussein claimed to be from nearby Tikrit, birthplace of the Kurdish conquerer Saladin and a descendant of Mohammed.
The image of the all-powerful and even immortal Hussein was ubiquitous in Iraq -- from billboards to wristwatches, from statues to classrooms to the country's currency. He made his birthday a national holiday. He dyed his hair to look younger. He was well-groomed and wore expensive suits, tailored in France, even when he was brandishing a semiautomatic weapon. He rewarded his family with the keys to the kingdom, but executed his sons-in-law because he thought they were disloyal.
Hussein's favorite film is "The Godfather," and he especially identified with the character of Don Corleone, a poor boy whose respect for family is exceeded only by his lust for power, his tastes for ruthlessness and violence, and his obsession with security, Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie wrote in "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf" in 1990.
"Here was a megalomaniac, a man who spent enormous amounts of money on the cult of personality, on putting his face everywhere and building palaces as monuments to himself," said Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. "He was also a germophobic, yet he was reduced to living in a small, underground space, in the filthiest condition."
Hussein had a fear of being contaminated by other people and was so worried about the food he ate that he typically had multiple meals prepared for him at various palaces. His unkempt appearance, head-lice check, and oral examination on the US military video broadcast around the world yesterday stood in sharp contrast to Hussein's admonitions to Iraqis that they bathe at least once a day (for women, twice).
Dr. Jerrold Post, who founded the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, said he had not expected Hussein to leave the country or, like Adolph Hitler, commit suicide, because the Iraqi leader needed to preserve his image as an Arab strongman. But Post said he was struck that Hussein appeared so weak and capitulating when he was captured, rather than "going down in a burst of gunfire." Post thinks a more defiant Hussein could emerge.
"I don't expect him to be cooperative on where the weapons of mass destruction are," said Post, a professor at George Washington University who recently wrote a psychological profile of Hussein. "That would give lie to his entire life. He is this Wizard of Oz -- this grand facade and, underneath, a very little man."
Iraqi officials who visited the 66-year-old Hussein yesterday described him as unapologetic and unrepentant, even though the only evidence that US soldiers found with him of his once-mighty regime were two low-level Iraqi officials, a taxi, two Kalashnikov rifles, a pistol, and $750,000 in $100 bills. Unlike his sons, who were killed in a US Army raid, Hussein gave himself up, a sign of both cowardice and his instincts for survival, said Dawisha, the Miami professor.
"Saddam is a survivor; he knew that he would be captured, not killed, and that he would not be tortured or abused by the Americans," Dawisha said. "He will have a trial, he will be able to stand and pontificate on his achievements, and he may feel that he can come out of this with something, if not everything."
Charles A. Radin of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Mary Leonard can be reached at mleonard@globe.com.
