Mark Holtz
04-20-03, 08:07 PM
From Yahoo/New York Times (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=68&e=2&cid=68&u=/nyt/20030420/ts_nyt/last_days_of_a_brutal_reign):
Last Days of a Brutal Reign
On the gilded marble tablets posted at the gateways of a score of presidential palaces, it was known as "The Era of Saddam Hussein."
Yet in the 26 days of American warfare it took to bring that era down, the hallmark of Mr. Hussein's rule was revealed not as one of grandeur, but of gangsterism and thuggery. On the pediments of his palaces, Mr. Hussein mounted 30-foot bronze busts of himself as Saladin, the Mesopotamian warrior who conquered Jerusalem with his Islamic army in the 12th century. But Mr. Hussein's legacy, revealed with merciless clarity in his last, desperate weeks in power and in the looting of those palaces that followed, was not one of historical accomplishment, as he claimed, but a chronicle of terror, greed and delusion writ large.
In effect, Mr. Hussein and his entourage inverted what was said of the dying dignity of a 17th-century English king, that nothing so became him in life as the leaving of it. Of Mr. Hussein, who may yet be alive, perhaps hiding somewhere in Baghdad with the last of his loyalists, a truer epitaph would record that nothing characterized the way he ruled Iraq, for nearly 24 years, so much as the bullying, mendacious and cowardly way in which he and his associates behaved as their power collapsed.
Full Story Here (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=68&e=2&cid=68&u=/nyt/20030420/ts_nyt/last_days_of_a_brutal_reign)
Last Days of a Brutal Reign
On the gilded marble tablets posted at the gateways of a score of presidential palaces, it was known as "The Era of Saddam Hussein."
Yet in the 26 days of American warfare it took to bring that era down, the hallmark of Mr. Hussein's rule was revealed not as one of grandeur, but of gangsterism and thuggery. On the pediments of his palaces, Mr. Hussein mounted 30-foot bronze busts of himself as Saladin, the Mesopotamian warrior who conquered Jerusalem with his Islamic army in the 12th century. But Mr. Hussein's legacy, revealed with merciless clarity in his last, desperate weeks in power and in the looting of those palaces that followed, was not one of historical accomplishment, as he claimed, but a chronicle of terror, greed and delusion writ large.
In effect, Mr. Hussein and his entourage inverted what was said of the dying dignity of a 17th-century English king, that nothing so became him in life as the leaving of it. Of Mr. Hussein, who may yet be alive, perhaps hiding somewhere in Baghdad with the last of his loyalists, a truer epitaph would record that nothing characterized the way he ruled Iraq, for nearly 24 years, so much as the bullying, mendacious and cowardly way in which he and his associates behaved as their power collapsed.
Full Story Here (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=68&e=2&cid=68&u=/nyt/20030420/ts_nyt/last_days_of_a_brutal_reign)