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Tyrant met his end with fortitude

SADDAM HUSSEIN met his death on the scaffold in Baghdad yesterday with fortitude and calm. It was an extraordinary, melodramatic end to a life of confrontation and defiance — a final performance to launch himself as a martyr.............
His last moments, face to face with death, were part of that same strategy. He knew Iraqis very well, and he knew what they liked in their leaders. The Saddam legend is only just beginning..............
Haddad had interrogated Saddam immediately after his capture, when he was still disoriented and deeply depressed. Now, he said, he expected Saddam to break down and perhaps plead for mercy when facing death. But nothing of the sort happened.
Instead, when one of the executioners shouted out “Long live Moqtada al-Sadr” — referring to the fiery young Shi’ite cleric who controls large parts of southern Iraq — Saddam replied with a contemptuous snort. As he was taken to the execution chamber he was chanting “God is great”..................
Now he is gone. The Iraqi government hopes to enter 2007 with the slate clean to draw more Sunni politicians into government and more Sunni leaders of the uprising into peace talks. But Saddam’s behaviour on the scaffold, as he hoped, will now become part of the legend of resistance. His people are unlikely to forget him............
As he stood on the trap door with the noose around his neck, waiting to plunge to his death, perhaps like all martyrs he was reflecting that immediate pain would be followed by an everlasting triumph. In political terms he may well turn out to be right

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