Tyrant plays to the gallery in last bid to be an Arab hero

AS AN Iraqi prisoner, Saddam Hussein occupies a position of unique significance: more than just a fallen dictator, more than a war criminal, he is once again the personification of sovereign Iraq. In a twisted, negative way, of course. For the possession of this prisoner is one of the few palpable manifestations of power for prime minister Iyad Allawi’s new government. As was evident at an Iraqi judicial hearing in Baghdad this week, Saddam will continue to exploit the drama of his special prestige to say, effectively, American puppets may come and go, but, as Louis XIV put it, "L'état, c'est moi."

Tired, thin, grey-bearded, initially bemused, he soon made clear that he was far from broken. As in an imperial ritual, he reminded his audience: "I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq," while disdainfully scorning the Kuwaitis as "dogs" and calling the US president the "real criminal". The old smirk, the old self-belief and the old menace were back. If executed, will he die a believer in himself - and will he convince the Iraqis to revere him as a hero?

Aristotle said men do not become tyrants to "keep out the cold". They are motivated by forces that are as unfathomable as they are impractical. While we cannot say for sure what forces drove Saddam to achieve the rank of tyrant, we can say something about the man on whom he modelled himself: Stalin. By looking at how Stalin fared in Russian popular opinion after his death, we might also hazard a guess as to how Saddam and his image will fare during and after his trial.

Saddam admired, studied and copied Stalin, the paragon of modern dictators. Here’s one story. Stalin had 15 scenic seaside villas, some of them tsarist palaces, on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. In 2002, I visited and photographed these extraordinarily well-preserved Stalinist time capsules. At one point, I asked an old caretaker if any other Westerners had visited them. "No," she replied, "but there was an Arab gentleman in the 1970s who insisted on visiting every one!" His name? "Saddam Hussein."

According to Saddam’s courtiers, he was obsessed with Stalin. Kurdish politicians who visited his apartments recall seeing shelves of Stalin biographies, translated into Arabic just for him.

Small wonder. The parallels are powerful: Gori, Stalin’s Georgian birthplace, and Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, are barely 500 miles apart. Both men were raised by strong ambitious mothers, abused by useless fathers, inspired to greatness by stepfatherish patrons. Both found absolutist belief and personal respect in radicalism: Bolshevism and Baathism respectively. Neither seized power overnight; instead, both eased into supremacy through a mixture of patronage and personality within a tiny one-party oligarchy. Both were promoted by revered potentates whom they ultimately crossed.

And both were avid avengers. In 1937, Stalin orchestrated a terror against erstwhile comrades, making them accuse one another at a Central Committee Plenum, then supervise one another's torture and execution; in 1979, Saddam parodied this at a filmed Baathist conference in which his "enemies" were named, then shot downstairs by their colleagues.

When such characters find and embrace their creed, self-belief fuses with fanatical ideological devotion. Once, Vasily Stalin dropped his father’s name: "I’m called Stalin too," insisted Vasily. "No," shouted Stalin. "You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power." The question today is whether the same will be said of Saddam and Iraq.

Stalin, of course, never went on trial, but his legacy did. In 1956, three years after his death, he was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev. And his crimes were even more explicitly exposed by Mikhail Gorbachev during the late 1980s. Yet to many, Stalin remains more legitimate as a Russian leader than anyone since.

Such tyrants are accomplished actors. Stalin, the Georgian cobbler’s son, recreated himself as tsarist "Little Father": remote and tough, but good. He resuscitated Russian literature (Pushkin) and Russian heroes (Ivan the Terrible). He also won a war and conquered an empire. And his image has been helped by Russia’s downward slide. The reputations of dictators thrive amid poverty and instability. According to a poll released last year, 26 per cent of Russians would vote for Stalin for president if he were alive today.

Could Iraqis find themselves voting again for Saddam? He’s laid the groundwork. As a ruler, he identified himself with heroic Arab stereotypes. He dressed as a Bedouin chief, father figure, Arab warrior-king, like Saladin; his propaganda explicitly compared him to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.

Yes, most Iraqis hated him and now revel in his humiliation. But if as years pass, poverty and instability continue, some Iraqis will return to revering Saddam as a mythical strongman who heroically defied invincible American Crusaders. It is a terrifying lesson in the naked power of savage terror and brazen propaganda that sometimes the wanton destructiveness of tyranny - the slaughter, torture and buffoonery - are forgotten while the myth of glory enters the popular memory: Shelley’s Ozymandias in reverse.

At the arraignment, however diminished physically, however grizzled the beard, scrawny the neck, ponderous the bags beneath his eyes, Saddam was like a lame old tiger in a zoo, captive - but still capable of destruction. Saddam denounced the court as a "theatre" but his whole life has been an act of supreme will. However afraid of execution he may be (Stalin too was a physical coward, terrified of death and gunfire, even of flying in airplanes), he will relish his theatre because he believes in his world-historical mission.

Saddam’s courtiers say he marvelled at how Stalin kept power - and managed to die in his bed. He wished to do the same. Probably, he will not. At his trial, Saddam will play the role he believes he was born to play: the Man of Arab History. From what we saw yesterday, he may play it better in the dock than he ever played it on the throne.

For those who haven't read Ozymandias, it goes as follows:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Regards, Ivan

He also had the arrogance and self-delusion that comes with being a sociopath. His cult of personality is closer to Hitler's than to Stalin. As a man-god he was worshipped and his word was law.

I haven't read that poem in a very long time.

Is the world Saddam's stage? He'd like to think so. Delusional doesn't begin to explain it. That man is and always has been sick.

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