The Ghost of Saddam Hussein

The Butcher of Baghdad's shadow continues to swing over America. Did we believe, in 2003, that he invented mass killing in Iraq-or even the Middle East? Writing for The New York Times on January 27 of that year, John F. Burns attempted to answer a critical question with the title of his article "How Many People Has Saddam Killed?"

Burns provided a tight focus for his article, as a professional Western journalist should. He kept our eyes on the corpses wrung of life by a sadistic villain. He admitted struggling with dubious numbers, and he offered only one comparison for heinous proportions: He wrote: "Stalin killed 20 million of his own people, historians have concluded. Even on a proportional basis, his crimes far surpass Mr. Hussein's, but figures of a million dead Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark, in a country of 22 million people."

This focus succeeded in being too tight for a subject that merits appropriate scope. The details that served as news four years ago have become nearly mundane in the interim. Burns continued: "The terror is self-compounding, with the state's power reinforced by stories that relatives of the victims pale to tell.... There are assassinations, in Iraq and abroad, and, ultimately, the gallows, the firing squads and the pistol shots to the head." Without making a direct statement on the subject, Burns managed to imply that Saddam was King of Death in Iraq.

We now realize that no such implication was correct. If Saddam was indeed King of Death, he had competitors who could barely wait to challenge him for that title. They did not just fear him: The envied him. They envied specifically his power to make people walk in dread of him. They longed to kill brazenly, as he did. They chased their pictures into the streets, shouting bedlam. If a Pope spoke one word they disliked, they threatened to kill him, too. They staged beheadings, blew up trains, and, pointedly, committed mass killings with shots to the back of victims' heads.

What a difference four years make. It is not a time to be gullible. Least of all is it a time to mistake a cliche for analysis. Once, Abu Ghraeb was a shrine to Saddam's horrors. Now, the US has contributed at least a pittance to that prison's reputation. Saddam was not King of Death. He was only a minor prince. .