Earlier last week Saddam Hussein decided to end his hunger strike undertaken as a protest at the judge overseeing his trial; it had put his health at risk he said. Later, he declared that he alone was to blame for his actions and that those on trial with him for the massacre of 148 Shiite Muslims from the village of Dujail north of Baghdad should go free.
Both statements testify to the incredible arrogance and vanity of the man.
Saddam’s claim of sole responsibility is not some noble gesture to protect his former minions. It is an unrepentant boast. Even from the dock, accused of mass murder, he cannot abide the thought that others share with him responsibility for what happened. Megalomaniac that he is, he remains fixed with himself and power. He clearly still thinks that he is at the epicenter of everything in Iraq. There has been no change in attitude from the day he was found hiding in his now notorious “rat” hole near Tikrit. “I am the president of Iraq,” he had said to his captors and then demanded negotiations with the Americans.
The hunger strike issue is no less revealing. Hunger strikes, whether one approves of them or not, are in most people’s minds about putting a cause above their own personal well-being. The idea is that the hunger striker is prepared to die if necessary, to become a martyr, for the cause. No one goes on hunger strike if he is concerned about his health. Saddam’s threat a fortnight ago was simply bluster and blackmail to intimidate the new judge brought in to reimpose order and prevent him and his team from hijacking the trial.
In refusing to be intimidated, the judge has exposed Saddam’s bluff and forced him into ignominious recantation to save his skin. Saddam clearly has no desire or intention to be a martyr. That is something that most people already suspected. This after all is the man who when president was prepared to kill members of his family, his party and government and anyone who got in the way, who was to sacrifice as many as it took for his own survival and who when finally caught with a pistol in hand could not turn it on himself.
That concern for his own skin suggests, moreover, that he imagines that he is going to survive his present situation, even though his claim of sole responsibility does more than anything to ensure that the noose is placed around his neck. It is all part of his blind, willful megalomania — for what else can be said about a man who notoriously dismissed his victims as “thieves”, who now tries to justify the massacre of 148 men from Dujail, the dispatch of their wives and children into the desert and the village’s destruction because there had been an assassination attempt against him?
Those who said of Saddam Hussein after he was caught that in the end he was not particularly brave were making an understatement. His court outburst and his hunger strike antics reveal him to be what all bullies are, a swaggering coward.
