Andrew links Hitchens as saying so in '76 -- the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser. Well. We all knew Saddam was particularly good at being a tyrant. Since ancient Greece we have known that tyrants have been bad leaders but 'strangely' effective rulers, and that the story of a tyrant's decline is the story of how ineffective his leadership becomes. Thus the slip into a bureaucracy of lies as official policy, political and military miscalculation, etc., etc. But in '76 Iraq had been less than twenty years free of the Hashemite monarchy that that come back in with Britain's World War II occupation. Saddam did the tyrant's work of crushing and compacting Iraq into something that functioned in the outside world as a unitary state.
It's cheap and unnecessary and misleading to call this visionary. But 'most visionary since Nasser' isn't the hardest beauty pageant to win. That the bar for Arab leadership since Nasser has sat so low in the vision department makes Saddam's eminence there seem like that of a spork in a box of rocks. Not really a great lesson to this story, except that nation building as a rule requires something considerably more than the vision thing. And this is the strangely secret truth about people who get called visionaries, probably because of the effect of luck, of things beyond control, of the sorts of things that kept Nasser from dropping like a stone into the deep end of history.
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