Tariq Aziz and History's Judgment of Saddam Hussein

The Guardian has an interview with Tariq Aziz, in which he talks about the world according to Hussein. In The Guardian's subsequent analysis of the interview, the ask some rather provocative questions about how Hussein will be viewed by history.

The recent, conventional view of Saddam Hussein, of course, is that he was a brutal dictator who ruled his people through fear and led Iraq into a series of devastating conflicts, first with Iran and later with the west, and that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the 2003 war, his being deposed was an unqualified good. Yet an alternative case can be made – that, at the head of the Ba'athist movement, Saddam Hussein was a secular moderniser who brought economic development to Iraq, who was a bulwark against Islamic revolution (and was backed by the west against Iran in the 1980s), who cemented Iraq as unitary nation state despite the centrifugal forces of different ethnic and religious groups, and who was a novelist of some note. In this light, Saddam Hussein might be seen as belonging to a long line of nationalist leaders in the Middle East – from Kemal Ataturk, via Gamal Abdel Nasser, to Muammar Gaddafi – whose methods of internal control may have been repressive and who sometimes defied the west in grand demagogic gestures, but who have nevertheless a claim to have "served their countries", modernised them and left them greater than they found them.

Is Aziz right that history may judge Saddam Hussein somewhat differently to his latter-day detractors? What will the long view of Saddam Hussein be? And is Iraq still better-off without him than it was with him?

By: Brant