Baghdad: Saddam's fate: The culture of political violence in Iraq is deeply ingrained. LaraMarlowe in Baghdad examines the probable fate of Saddam Hussein
With every hour that ticks by, the words "after the war" creep more freely into Iraqi conversation.
Everyone is thinking, and no one dares ask: where will he spend the bombardment? Will he move around the country, as he did in 1991, sleeping one night on a farm near Basra, surprising a middle-class Baghdad family by showing up at the front door and announcing he'll take a bed for the evening?
Could he again escape the US bombers, in a tent in the western desert? And, more important, what will happen to him?
The head of the Arab League yesterday cancelled a journey to Baghdad - presumably an attempt to persuade the raïs to consider exile, after the Iraqi government categorically rejected the Bush ultimatum. President Saddam Hussein was born in Iraq and he will die in Iraq, said the official statement.
But when, and how? It is hard to imagine President Saddam sitting out a trial for war crimes in the Hague, like Slobodan Milosevic. Nor would suicide be a dignified end for a man who wants to be remembered - like that much earlier son of Tikrit, the warrior Salaheddin - as a great defender of Muslims against crusaders.
Will a 5,000 lb laser-guided "bunker-buster" get him? Or perhaps he will, like Osama bin Laden, simply vanish.
There is another possibility, never evoked here, but certainly contemplated. A few days ago, Ms Irene Khan, the Secretary General of the human rights group Amnesty International, warned of the danger of "reprisals . . . internal killings . . . even a bloodbath" in post-invasion Iraq - for which the US, as occupying power, would be held responsible.
The past half-century provides many examples of how "regime change" is carried out in this most violent of Arab countries. King Feisal I, the monarch installed by Britain, was massacred with his family in their palace by military officers on July 14th, 1958. Two days later, Feisal's Prime Minister, Nouri Saïd, was literally cut to pieces by a street mob.
Saddam Hussein was 21 years old when Feisal and Saïd were deposed. He was accused of his first politically motivated murder that same year, and jailed for six months. By then, Saddam had carried a revolver everywhere for five years. As an admirer of the Egyptian nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and a sympathiser of the pan-Arab Baath party, he had hated the bourgeois, pro-British monarchy. His police file said he led a band of political agitators who were borderline petty criminals and hooligans.
The young ruffian became famous, in 1959, for participating in the attempted assassination of Gen Abdel Karim Kassem. Kassem was merely wounded, and Saddam fled to Tikrit and on to Syria and Egypt, an episode he later had glorified in a six-hour television series by the British director Terence Young. His own son-in-law, Saddam Kamel, played the young Saddam.
Under a death sentence for trying to kill Kassem, Saddam returned from Egypt two weeks after the general was overthrown and shot dead in 1963. A split between civilian and military branches of the Baath party descended into a campaign of tit-for-tat killings, and Saddam ended up in prison again. But he was freed in time to participate in a third coup in 1968, riding around Baghdad atop a tank, wearing a lieutenant's uniform. That coup was relatively peaceful, though the foreign minister was shot and his body thrown in the Tigris.
In January 1969, Saddam Hussein became the vice-president of Iraq. Ostensibly second in command to the older figurehead President Hassan el-Bakr, Saddam gradually assumed all presidential functions, forcing Bakr to retire and declaring himself president in July 1979.
One argument often heard in favour of "strong rulers" like Saddam Hussein and the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad is that dictatorship is the only way to stop endemic violence and hold together countries whose artificial borders were drawn up by Europeans.
But political violence never ceased under Saddam Hussein's rule.
During his decade as vice-president, he often used the Stalinist method of inventing or inciting conspiracies. A former mayor of Baghdad was tortured and threatened with the rape of his wife, daughters and nieces in 1968. He confessed on television to spying for the CIA and was hanged. A "Zionist plot" involving 14 Iraqi Jews from Basra culminated in their being hanged on Liberation Square in Baghdad, and left for several days for all to see. Twenty-seven Iraqi communists met the same fate in 1969; 29 military officers in 1970.
Saddam's hatred for the majority Shiites - whom he considers Persians rather than "real" Iraqis - eventually led him to the ruinous 1980-1988 Gulf War. Over the years he had 17 sons, grandsons and nephews of the Shia religious leader Sayyed Mohsin el-Hakim executed.
But the purges gained pace when Saddam obtained the president's title in 1979.
The same year, he discovered a "Syrian plot" and had one third of the members of the Revolutionary Command Council arrested on the spot, and taken downstairs in Baghdad's conference centre, where, according to Saddam's biographers, he and his closest comrades carried out the executions themselves in a "blood pact". The same companions - Izzat Ibrahim el-Douri, Taha Yassin Ramadan and Tariq Aziz - are still leading figures in the regime and could now share Saddam's fate.
It is impossible to chronicle in detail how violence has been used to terrorise Iraq for the past three decades, but one of the most dramatic episodes was the defection and return of the Kamel brothers, Hussein and Saddam, who had married Saddam Hussein's two oldest daughters, Raghid and Rana.
In August 1995, after Saddam's eldest son Uday shot his Uncle Watban in the legs, the Kamels fled with their wives and children to Jordan. Hussein Kamel had been deeply involved in Iraqi weapons programmes and made sensational revelations to the CIA and UNSCOM.
But after six months, Saddam Hussein's daughters grew homesick and convinced their husbands to return to Iraq. Though Saddam Hussein had said the brothers were guilty of high treason and were no longer related to him, they foolishly believed promises of pardon.
The Kamels were taken to Tikrit, where 20 soldiers from the Special Republican Guard surrounded their house and burst in firing machine guns.
The brothers, their father, two women and several children were killed. All copies of the film in which Saddam Kamel starred as the young Saddam Hussein were destroyed.
Now Saddam Hussein and his sons are threatened with a terrible end. Three decades of Saddam's rule have done nothing to ameliorate the culture of political violence. As they await the American onslaught, Iraqis wonder how many of their children will perish, if not in the bombardment, in a civil war that many fear may follow.