BILL TAMMEUS Saddam's atrocities defy explanation

Saddam Hussein, a frightening man whose monumental vanity allowed him to believe only in himself, relied on shocking fear and terror to maintain his hold on Iraq.
That much is clear. What is harder -- maybe impossible -- to explain is why Saddam, captured Saturday near his hometown of Tikrit, became one of the world's most repulsive leaders. Whatever its causes, the scope of his malevolence was breathtaking.
No one close to him would tell him hard truths for fear of reprisal. Their fear was not baseless. Saddam had killed opponents -- and even family members -- and had ordered countless other deaths of people he mistrusted. Near the end of his reign, it was said that he trusted only his son Qusai and his private secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, to know his location, though a sense that he was somehow protected from attack grew after each of four failed coup attempts since 1990.
International monitors and prisoners who witnessed his dreadocracy report that under Saddam's direction, some inmates were branded, given electric shocks to their genitals or beaten. The fingernails of some were pulled out. Others were hung from rotating ceiling fans, raped or burned with irons and blowtorches. Guards dripped acid on the skin of some and often denied prisoners food and water. Saddam would force people he considered traitors to watch videotapes of their children being tortured or their wives raped.
And all this is in addition to his using chemical and biological weapons on his own citizens.
Like father, like sons. Qusai and Odai Hussein, who died in a shootout with American troops in July, were malignant clones. Odai would order his guards to grab young women from the streets so he could rape them. Qusai sometimes watched as prisoners he wanted dead were dropped into shredding machines -- some head first, some feet first so they'd suffer longer.
Pervasive brutality
Even if intelligence sources got some of the details wrong, the brutality was so pervasive, so consistent, so unbelievable in scope and cruelty that words cannot convey the atmosphere of fear that permeated all of Iraqi society -- a fear that continued after his fall and before his capture. So far, no theory adequately explains how things got so bad. All we know for sure is that Saddam ran one of the bloodiest regimes in history. Even people who have criticized President Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq and remove him do not deny Saddam's maliciousness.
Saddam was born to a peasant family April 28, 1937, in a village near Tikrit, north of Baghdad. His father, however, died or disappeared before he was born. His maternal uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, reared him. Later, Saddam married Tulfah's daughter, Sajida, his first cousin.
When Saddam was 20 he joined the underground Baath Socialist Party, but already he was attracted to solving problems with violence. In his early Baath days he killed his communist brother-in-law and spent six months in prison. When he participated in a 1959 botched assassination attempt against Iraq's prime minister, he was shot in the leg and fled to Syria and then Egypt, where he finally finished high school.
In 1968, he helped plan a Baath Party coup that gave it control of Iraq. He became second in command. In 1979 he removed the coup leader and became president, imprisoning or executing many top party members in the ensuing purge.
War against Iran
He was almost always willing to fight. He waged an enormously costly war against Iran for eight years in the 1980s. A few years after that, he invaded Kuwait and precipitated the Gulf War. When that war ended and some of his citizens -- urged on by the United States and its allies -- rose up against him, he crushed them. He brutalized minority Kurds and often treated majority Shiite Muslims as if they were lepers. He also ordered the attempted assassination of the first President Bush.
It's fair to say Saddam had a messianic complex. He had convinced himself that he had a divine call to bring the depressed Arab world back to its pinnacle. He pretended to be an observant Sunni Muslim and claimed to be descended from the prophet Mohammed, but Saddam violated Islamic principles every hour.
He had so isolated himself from outside thinking that he lived in a fantasy world in which he pictured himself heroically striding across the world stage.
Those who studied his regime say he made his worst mistakes in miscalculating foreign policy.
In the end, the civilized world despised Saddam Hussein as it despised Hitler and Mussolini. No one mourns any of them. But somehow we must try to explain them.
XTammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.