He didn’t go down the way both those who admired, and those who reviled, him would have wished — fighting.
Those lost souls who had seen in Saddam Hussein a heroic figure, an Arab leader brave enough to stand up to American might in 1991 and again twelve years later, were shocked to see the man surrendering to American troops as he crouched in a hole in the ground outside a mud house in a village on the left Bank of the Tigris River.
And those others who had endured grievous suffering under his repressive regime would also have wanted him to die like a man, for that at least would have justified their sustained fear of him, the ritual terror and self-denial that he had socialized them to accept as a norm in their daily lives.
Instead, he went down ignominiously, captured on camera with a disheveled beard and matted hair, looking like a pathetic hobo from a homeless shelter.
The image was unendurable, not only for Iraqis but for all Arabs, for it was a sad statement about the region they inhabit — the only part of the world where there are two foreign occupations, with one confining an Arab leader to house arrest and the other relentlessly hunting down another leader till he was either captured or eliminated.
Put whatever spin you wish on the story: Saddam Hussein incarcerated in a prison cell, soon to stand trial, is a Saddam Hussein exposed as a blustering, little fraud.
His defiant posturing on the eve of war, the frantic blizzard of lies he told Iraqis and people elsewhere in the Arab world about his commitment to a last-ditch defense of Baghdad, where he and elite units of the Republican Guard were to gather invincibly in front-line trenches to defend the heart of their capital against the invading “sons of Satan,” all turned out to be a sham, a pose masking the man’s colossal insecurities.
And last Sunday we woke up to the news that he had not stood to fight to the death from his concrete lair, but that he was captured hiding in a hole in the ground, surrendering with facile ease, without firing a shot — or, at the least, swallowing a cyanide pill.
That is why his sycophantic supporters, who had benefited under his regime, and his opponents, who had been victimized by its calculated bestiality, are scandalized by that unspeakable image of the once mighty Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti in American custody, looking not nobly defiant, but dazed, helpless and cowering. And how much more scandalized will they be if he were to be tried by an international tribunal rather than by his own people!
Perhaps when the future transformation of Iraq enters the history books, historians may very well relegate the capture, incarceration and trial of Saddam Hussein to a mere footnote there, as closure for the new Iraq, whose greatest challenge will now be the reassembly of the Iraqi people’s sense of self.
Perhaps it may transpire that these people’s acceptance all these years of the Baathist regime’s desecration of their country’s cultural heritage and the ruin of its human resources had been, all along, a necessary though tragic prelude to the foundation of a new society.
And perhaps it may turn out, above all, that in the new Iraq, language - that Saddam had inflicted a mass of hysteria and cheapness on, using it as a conveyor of falsehood — will be revitalized, along with the public debate, and literate folk will then use words to match facts and facts to match the dignity of human thought and humane order.
True, the capture of Saddam Hussein is a story with legs and will play out on the front pages for months to come. But the real story will be the future of Iraq — the reconstruction not just of its social system but that of its national spirit.
That, in my view, is more significant than the fate of a man who had projected himself as a titan, only to be exposed as a spineless buffoon hiding in a hole in the ground outside a mud house in a village on the left bank of the Tigris.
