Read Khidir Hamza's Saddam's Bombmaker. On a personal level, Saddam may be worse than Hitler.
Item: Hamza recounts an episode in which an Iraqi industrialist with whom Saddam did not wish to meet tracked the dictator down to one of his country palaces, with the help of a security guard from a Baghdad palace. Saddam was furious, got a description of the guard, and sent the industrialist to cool his heels for a couple of hours. Then the industrialist was taken outside, where Saddam confronted him with two security guards, and demanded that he ID the one who gave him the info. The shaken industrialist did so, whereupon the guard was immediately executed. The industrialist was informed that, the next time he showed up uninvited, it would be his turn to get the bullet.
Item: A doctor was called to one of Saddam's apartments, because the dictator was in a frenzy. The doctor gave Saddam a tranquilizer, then went into the bathroom to wash his hands, where he discovered the bloody body of a woman in the bathtub. The doctor prudently left the country the next day.
Item: Saddam met with his officers during the Iran-Iraq war to demand that a particular piece of territory be taken by a massed frontal assault. He then asked if there were any questions, whereupon a junior officer spoke up and suggested that a frontal assault was suicidal without softening up the enemy with artillery and bombing first. Saddam asked if anyone had anything to add. Nobody spoke up, so he pulled out his pistol and shot the junior officer on the spot, with the one-word comment, "Coward!" (The frontal assault went ahead as scheduled, and was a total disaster.)
There doesn't seem to be much that is particularly leftist about the Baath ideology. Seems much more fascistic. There is something very patronizing about the way the media ignores Baath ideology. Apparently Nazi ideas are bad when held by Germans, but not by Arabs.
Actually, they have a point. Germans had a quite decent chance of conquering the world. Arabs don't.