Saddam Hussein is dead, executed by the Iraqi government for his part in the murder of 148 Shi’ites.
Saddam was one of the last of a dying breed. Like Arafat, Nasser, and Assad, he was a secular Arab nationalist who lived and wielded power according to rules that were hardly uniformly Islamic. Like Arafat and others also, he made use of jihadist rhetoric whenever it suited him to do so, and increasingly so in his latter years, as Sharia supremacists grew more powerful than they had been for some time. While the jihad was not his cause, he didn’t hesitate to try to co-opt it for his own ends, even to the extent of sponsoring jihad terror activity. If he had remained in power, it would have been interesting to see who ultimately co-opted whom.
With Saddam out of power, there is no one with the will or the strength to keep Iraq united, except possibly Iran — the chief beneficiary of the American democracy project. Here is yet another fruit of the wholesale ignorance of and wishful thinking about Islam that prevails in Washington.