THUS EVER:

Saddam fooled me, too (Con Coughlin, 21/12/2003, Sunday Telegraph))

I never expected it to end like this. Saddam Hussein, the Anointed One, the Glorious Leader, direct descendant of the Prophet, president of Iraq, chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, field marshall of its armies, doctor of its laws, and great uncle to all its peoples, surrendering himself to American soldiers from the confines of the fetid hole that had become his final refuge.

After Saddam praised the "martyrdom" of his two sons Uday and Qusay, who died in a hail of bullets following a six-hour gun battle with US troops last summer, I assumed that, were he to find himself in a similar predicament, Saddam would fulfil his promise to use the "last bullet" on himself.

On reflection, I should have known better. Saddam has always been better at portraying himself as the great heroic leader than playing out the role in real life. During his rule Iraq's propaganda machine made much of the fact that Saddam had been seriously injured during a failed assassination attempt on the then president in the late 1950s, when in fact he had suffered nothing more than a light graze.

In the same way, we're always disappointed when serial killers or asssassins are caught and turn out to be such schlubs. We desperately want the personalities of such men to measure up to the evil that they commit, because the idea that complete losers can wreak such havoc is somehow even more terrifying. This reaction is natural and human enough and relatively harmless, but it has a terrible corollary: in our imaginations we also conflate the regimes of men like Saddam, Hitler, Stalin, etc. into towering threats, when in fact they truly aren't. The source of much of their power lies just in our fear of confronting them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 20, 2003 7:58 PM