Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein is presented less through a continuous personal biography than as a test of political responsibility. The book links the United States’ earlier support for him during the war against Iran to its later denunciation of his brutality, arguing that condemnation becomes evasive when it omits the condemning power’s own part in his rise and rule.

A history of support and belated condemnation

The text recalls that, during the war against Iran, the United States was fully behind Saddam Hussein. At that time, critics who drew attention to his use of weapons of mass destruction and other abuses were ignored by the U.S. state apparatus. The contrast is central to the book’s account: Saddam’s crimes are not denied, but the United States’ later presentation of them as a newly discovered reason for condemnation leaves its earlier support unaddressed.

The book sharpens this point by comparing the belated exposure of Saddam’s brutality with Stalin’s late-1930s disavowal of Yezhov, the head of the NKVD who organized terror. In both cases, the leadership’s apparent discovery of abuses risks shifting responsibility onto an agent or ruler while concealing the system that enabled him. The analogy does not equate the two regimes; it makes belated denunciation itself a problem of political accountability.

Abuse, exposure, and public image

In discussing the Abu Ghraib scandal, the text distinguishes the pattern of abuse associated with Saddam’s regime from that practiced by the United States Army. It characterizes Saddam-era torture as centered on the direct infliction of pain, while describing the U.S. soldiers’ abuse as organized around psychological humiliation. The contrast concerns not whether abuse occurred, but the different forms it took and the public meanings attached to it.

The circulation of photographs also matters to the argument. Saddam-era torture is described as secret, whereas the U.S. abuses were recorded by their perpetrators and became public through images. George W. Bush characterized the soldiers’ actions as isolated crimes that did not represent the values of the United States. The book notes that the scandal’s public exposure put the administration on the defensive, but argues that authorities had received warnings from the International Committee of the Red Cross before the disclosures. Their response, in this account, was not simply a failure to know: the decisive acknowledgment came when the abuse could no longer be kept from public view.

Intervention and its consequences

The book challenges the claim that the world is simply better off without Saddam Hussein by insisting that the consequences of the intervention must be included in the judgment. It distinguishes Saddam’s removal from the political aftermath of military intervention and occupation: the latter, it argues, was accompanied by a new rise in Islamic fundamentalism. The point is not to excuse Saddam’s rule, but to refuse a comparison that counts his departure as a benefit while leaving the costs of the intervention outside the account.

This reasoning is captured through the image of a worker whose apparently empty wheelbarrow is inspected each evening, until the guards realize that the wheelbarrows themselves are what he has been stealing. Applied to Iraq, the analogy warns that an apparently complete assessment can conceal the most consequential part of the transaction. A judgment about Saddam that omits the effects of the military intervention repeats that error: it registers the removal of the ruler but overlooks what the intervention produced.

Political significance

Saddam Hussein’s role in the book is therefore a case study in the difference between naming a crime and taking responsibility for the conditions that helped sustain it. The United States’ earlier support, its later public condemnation, and the consequences of the occupation form a connected sequence rather than separate moral episodes. By keeping both Saddam’s brutality and the intervening power’s responsibility in view, the discussion resists turning condemnation into a means of absolution.