Saddam: A leader once tolerated, then vilified, by U.S.

WASHINGTON -- When U.S. leaders decided it was time to despise Saddam Hussein, he made the perfect villain.

He was cocky and cunning. He looked dangerous and deranged standing at rallies firing a gun into the air, conduct unbecoming a head of government.

He was Hitler Lite, or as the first President Bush put it, "Hitler revisited," lacking the endless armies, but close enough for U.S. purposes. He had a history of atrocities. His black mustache heightened the aura of menace.

America's quarter-century entanglement with the Iraqi leader ended Friday at the gallows.

His hanging closed the books on a man who dealt with and benefited from the United States, then defied it, then ran like a rabbit into a hole in the ground, reduced to his own army of one.

Saddam's capture Dec. 13, 2003, was a rare day of triumph for the United States after the Iraq invasion. In contrast, his execution brought worries that violence would spike beyond its usual chaotic level.

Minibus and car bombings in Baghdad killed at least 68 people in the hours after his death. The toll was not unusually high and the attacks were not immediately tied to his execution.

Saddam was vilified by the U.S. government probably more than any dictator since Adolf Hitler.

And this is a country with a long and still-active tradition of personalizing its enemy, making conflicts less about competing interests than about specific madmen and loose cannons -- Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Moammar Gadhafi, Fidel Castro, the wanted-dead-or-alive Osama bin Laden.

While others cry "death to America," America assembles a rogues gallery.

U.S. officials were never comfortable with Saddam but treated him as a useful counterweight to the hostile theocracy in Iran after the U.S.-supported shah fled the country in 1979.

By 1991, the United States was at war with Iraq, assembling a coalition to force Saddam to reverse his annexation of Kuwait. Saddam was the target of U.S. denunciation from then on, as a sponsor of terrorism, a seeker of weapons of mass destruction, and a ruthless murderer of Kurds, opponents of his rule and inconvenient family members.

Left in power after his forces retreated from Kuwait, Saddam was a volcanic presence in U.S. affairs for another decade, capped but toxic. It was a time of convoluted sanctions, fitful weapons inspections and no-fly-zone confrontations.

A fuzzy Iraqi TV picture captured the 1983 handshake between Saddam and Rumsfeld the envoy on a day when the two men agreed it was too bad a generation of Americans and Iraqis had grown up without knowing each other.

The future would bring the next generations together on bloody streets in a conflict neither side imagined then. And the man who shook Saddam's hand would direct the costly war that drove him from power, into the hole and to the executioner.