Robert Evans and Jamie Loftus dissect Saddam Hussein's duality as a genocide perpetrator and romance novelist, detailing his rise from a school expulsion to the 1979 presidency via CIA-backed coups. They analyze his brutal purges, including forcing informants to watch family murders, alongside his progressive yet contradictory 1970s policies on women's rights. The hosts scrutinize his post-fall novels like "Zabiba and the King," noting its anti-Semitic rants mixed with democratic themes, before concluding with the complex emotional burden faced by American soldiers escorting him to his December 30, 2006 execution. Ultimately, the episode reveals how Hussein's literary output served as a bizarre final chapter to a regime defined by paranoia and violence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hey, everybody.
I am Robert Evans, and this is again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history.
Today we are talking about Saddam Hussein, dictator, genocideer, and romance novelist.
With me today is Jamie Loftus.
Hello.
Writer.
Yes.
Podcaster.
Yes.
Other art maker of things.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Akmi.
And a comedian.
Yeah.
Are you ready to get your Saddam on?
I am fully ready.
All right.
Well, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majd al-Tukridi was born on April 28th, 1937.
And we know that much for sure.
Everything else about Saddam's early life is kind of up in the air.
Reading about his backstory is a little like asking the Joker to explain like where his scars came from.
You get different stories depending on who you talk to.
Right.
There's the Jared Leto version of Saddam Hussein and then there's the Heath Ledger interpretation.
Everyone brings something different to the table.
Yeah, and I went full ledger on this once.
You went, oh, wow.
Okay.
Inspiring.
Okay.
Well, yeah, it is a little bit.
So, you know, early on, Saddam is kind of an underdog from the start.
His dad disappears like six months before he's born.
He was probably murdered by bandits, but we don't really know.
Okay.
Saddam's older brother died while he was still in the womb.
One common myth states that his mom tried to kill herself and abort her baby after these deaths.
She leapt in front of a bus and was reportedly saved by a local Jewish family.
And after they stopped her from committing abortion slash suicide, she is alleged to have screamed, I'm carrying Satan in my belly.
This fetus has already killed his father and his brother and wants to be the only man in the family.
Okay.
Yeah.
Really quick.
This, I feel like, where people bring up the baby Hitler paradox all the time of like, if you could go back in time and kill a baby, if you could save six million people, would you?
I feel like this anecdote effectively answers that question.
Because she tried.
Yeah, his own mom was like, you know what?
Something is awry.
There's, wow.
This isn't going to end well.
I can tell at like the second trimester.
So the real villains were the people who saved the babies, effectively answering the baby Hitler paradox.
Kill the baby.
100% kill the baby.
Yeah, the villain in this story definitely isn't Saddam's mom.
She tried to do the right thing.
No.
God, she was sacrificing herself.
To kill this evil baby.
To kill the evil baby.
That's upset.
I mean, yeah, kill the baby.
Yeah, kill the baby.
I'm learning.
Kill the baby.
Yeah, I feel like we answered that question.
Well, please bring this argument to court in a few years when I kill the baby.
Oh, when time travel exists?
Or are you just going to find another baby?
I mean, there's going to, there'll be other.
There's evil babies born all the time.
That's the really horrifying thing is there are.
There's an evil baby born every day.
Right now, someone is being born who will later really hurt people.
And yeah, I have that feeling because every time I see a baby, they almost all look like Dick Cheney.
And it's like a percentage of them will turn out to be like Dick Cheney.
Like, we just know that.
It's crazy.
My best friend just had a baby, and I look at her son.
I'm like, you're going to gaslight someone so hard one day.
They're going to be so upset, but now you're so damn cute.
Right now, you haven't done anything terrible, but I can just see you kicking a dog in 24 years.
And feeling nothing.
Nothing and all that.
Just bone quiet on the inside.
So Saddam's mom did eventually give birth to a healthy baby boy.
She named him Saddam, which means one who confronts.
So solid name game.
Okay.
I mean, in terms of naming a baby you already view to be Satanic.
To be the devil.
It seems a little on the nose, but sure.
I mean, that's what he spent his whole life doing.
That's true.
That's true.
His family was very, very poor.
His hometown of Al-Aja was a very violent place, so he grew up tough.
One version of the Saddam myth says that he was enchanted by math, learning, reading, and writing, but that his mother told him his destiny was as a farmer, and she wouldn't let him go to school.
Okay, so she's trying to suppress the devil.
Like, let's not educate the devil.
Let's just give him a rake and hope for the best.
Yeah, the last thing this boy needs is math.
Let's not.
Wow.
You know, I've got a lot of respect for Saddam's mom right now.
She tried.
She's doubling down on thinking her son is pure evil.
Yeah, she really put in the work to try to stop this.
Wow, okay.
But yeah.
So Saddam's home was a one-room mudbrick hovel, no electricity, no running water.
Just him and mom?
Just him and mom.
His brothers are dead, or his brother is dead.
He's said to have had a rough upbringing.
The other kids in town mocked him for not having a dad.
And because he had no older brother, there was nobody to defend him.
So Saddam started carrying an iron bar as a weapon.
This is like six-year-old Saddam walking around with an iron bar, just beating other kids.
Wow.
Just like Tanya Harding.
There's a little girl.
She's cooling everyone in the village.
All right.
Yeah.
Well, and he wound up with a stepfather at one point, but his stepfather was apparently quite vicious.
His name was Hassan the Liar.
So maybe not great choice on mom's part there.
Maybe don't marry.
Okay, and mom just lost me for the first time in this story.
Yeah, maybe don't marry Hassan the Liar.
I mean, especially if he comes with that title.
Yeah, I'm imagining the house party they meet.
And it's like, oh, yeah, I'm, you know, Sejita.
Oh, I'm Hassan the liar.
Hello.
Maybe he likes cow shit.
Maybe he's like, I'm Hassan.
Date five, you're like, oh, it's the liar.
That's what he was saying the whole time.
Hassan's weapon of choice was a large pipe soaked in boiling tar, which he would use to beat Saddam with.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Oh, that's horrible.
I know.
There's a little bit of this story where you're kind of on Saddam's side.
Okay, okay.
I'm on this journey.
So one of the peculiarities about writing about Saddam is that you either get really sympathetic towards him or wildly negative towards him, depending on who writes his backstory.
But it's pretty safe to say either way, his childhood was shit.
Like if you look at the CIA analysis of Saddam, like you can see the CIA analysts feeling sorry for little kid Saddam.
Really?
Yeah.
That's like a normal part of learning about Saddam.
Right.
So one night when he was around 10, he was said to have snuck out of bed and gathered up his few possessions into a hobo bundle and made it to the town across the desert or whatever to find some other members of his family.
Across the desert?
Well, a little bit of a desert, not a lot of desert.
Like he wanted to go to school and his mom wouldn't let him.
So he sneaks out and he finds some relatives and he says, I want to go to the city where my uncle lives.
Can you guys help me get there?
And they say yes.
And they give him cab fare and a gun.
He's 10.
He's 10.
And he just...
Now I'm like, this kid just wants to learn math and he needs, and he's given all these weapons.
You want to go to the city, huh?
Yeah.
Can you imagine being 10 years old and being like, I really, I want to learn math so much, I'm going to run away from my family.
God, I would have just been a farmer.
Well, and their answer being, oh, okay, you want to learn math?
Well, here's a gun and some money.
Like, deal with it.
The price of math?
Maybe your life.
Yeah, you may have to kill somebody to get to math.
So no one goes with him.
He goes by himself.
Yeah, he goes by himself.
He finds someone to drive him and has a gun in case someone attacks him on the road.
Okay.
But he gets to Crete, which is the big city, comparatively.
And his uncle takes him in, and Saddam starts to attend school.
That does not go very well, though, because he was Saddam Hussein.
And he gets expelled.
And when he's expelled, he goes to his uncle, and his uncle gives him a gun and says...
But he already has a gun.
Yeah, well, he gives him another gun.
So far, he has an iron bar and two guns, and he's not even 11 years old.
Yeah, he's not even 11 years old.
And when he gets expelled, his uncle gives him a gun and says, go make the principal take you back into school.
Whoa.
And Saddam does.
He pulls a gun on the at like age 11.
Hold the phone.
So he's like a fifth or sixth grader.
Yeah.
And he has to go.
He's like, I want to learn math.
God damn it.
I want to read.
And you, Jesus.
Okay.
Jeez.
You got to give him credit.
He is dedicated to that education.
He has had more of a life than both of us at Age 11.
Okay.
So he's put back into school after threatening violence on the principal.
Because he threatened the principal.
Because he threatens the principal.
Okay.
Yeah.
So he gets to go back into school.
His uncle became his childhood role model.
His uncle's name was Kairala.
And Kairala had, before this point, spent six years in prison for fighting against the British occupation of Iraq.
He was kind of a Nazi sympathizer.
And by kind of, I mean he was 100% a Nazi sympathizer.
So he's, yeah, he's a.
Can we, like, okay, this is actually a question.
When we say Nazi sympathizer, are we just saying Nazi?
Well, it's a little more complicated because like he was, a lot of why he liked the Nazis is because the Nazis were fighting the British and the British were in control of his country.
So it's not, but he was also super anti-Semitic.
So he's a Nazi.
He's a Nazi.
He's like a Nazi sympathizer and also his anti-Semitic.
Okay.
Well, yeah.
And the reason that Saddam idolized his uncle is because his uncle was an author.
And his uncle's written work that was most famous was a pamphlet called Those Whom God Should Not Have Created, Persians, Jews, and Flies.
Okay.
Yeah.
I was about to compliment his use of whom, but I take it back.
I mean, he got the whom right.
He did a good use of whom and a bad use of everyone else's time.
Everything else is terrible.
Oh, geez.
That pamphlet would go on to have a big impact on young Saddam because his foreign policy as dictator of Iraq was based around opposing the Persians, Iran, and Israel.
I'm not aware of any anti-fly policies, but I assume they made it in there somehow, too.
So now I'm like not on Saddam's side again because it's like, imagine using one, like if I use my uncle's like weird, creepy fanfiction account as a way to like direct a country, we would all be, you know, like X-Files, B characters, frantically having sex with each other.
So you can't just take your uncle's literature and take it to heart too much.
Oh, the big ups on your uncle.
I mean, mine is, it's more like Fraser fanfic, which is uncomfortable.
Oh, that's a fancy uncle.
You know, I would prefer that to X-Files.
I'm like, we're getting into genre stuff, you know.
I mean, but Mulder and that like swamp monster thing, that's a hot mix.
I'll give you his email.
Yeah, I'm really into that.
So Saddam moves to Baghdad with his uncle to attend secondary school, which is what non-Americans call high school.
So now he's a teen.
Now he's a teen.
Teen Saddam.
Teen Heartthrob Saddam.
I'm going to show you this picture of young Saddam.
I saw that picture when I came in.
I was like, God, I hate that he's hot.
Yeah, he's not a bad looking guy.
It says Saddam Yo at the top.
That was the working title of this podcast.
Love it.
So Saddam moves to Baghdad with his uncle.
He graduates high school.
He spends three years in law school before he drops out to join the radical Baath political party.
The Baathists, in short, are a pan-Arab party.
They think that all the different Arab states should be one big country.
This is after the Ottomans have fallen.
So that's kind of what they want.
They're sort of socialist, but they're also anti-communist.
So the CIA really likes them at this point.
So in 1958, there's a big military coup that overthrows the king of Iraq, and a new asshole named Qasim winds up in charge of the country.
The CIA didn't like Qasim because he was kind of pro-Soviet Union.
And since the Baath party also hated Qasim, the CIA was like, these guys are clearly our friends.
They become sympathizers.
Yeah.
Okay, got it.
So Saddam was working as a teacher during this period of time.
Yeah, teaching.
I'm not sure what.
I haven't found any details about it.
He's not in a rate my professor.
Where are his students at?
Yeah.
Like, what kind of teacher was Saddam?
Do we know what age he was teaching?
I mean, I'm going to guess, like, teenagers, but I really have no idea.
Ooh, we should not let teens around Saddam.
Is it better if he's teaching like kindergarten?
Definitely funnier if he's teaching kindergarten.
Saddam helping little kids put blocks in their right hole.
You know, I think that that is a good way to neutralize a threat is to just put them around little cutie pies and tell them what the color blue is.
Yeah, well, a lot of these monsters are really good with kids.
Hitler probably would have been an all right kindergarten teacher.
Oh, geez.
Yeah.
So he's teaching probably teenagers.
Yeah, he's teaching probably teenagers, but I don't know exactly.
Because I'm a hack.
Hot teacher Saddam.
Yeah, hot teacher Saddam.
And hot teacher Saddam and his friends wind up getting the attention of the CIA.
And the CIA is like, you guys want to assassinate the president?
And Saddam and his friends are like, yeah, we want to assassinate the president.
And so the CIA gives them all weapons and helps them plan a daring murder.
It is crazy how many people are just down to give Saddam Hussein guns.
That's his whole childhood age, just people giving him guns.
What is it about him?
And then everyone's just like, we've got to arm this man.
He's a trustworthy man.
You know what this guy's problem is?
Not enough guns.
You know, I like everything, but what I really could use is more violence.
Yeah.
What if we just strap a gun to him?
Oh, boy.
Okay, so now the CIA is giving Saddam a gun.
Saddam and his friends.
Yeah.
And so they get set up to go assassinate President Qasim.
And Saddam's job in this assassination is to provide cover for everybody while they run up to the president's car with machine guns and gun him down.
Things instantly got fucked up.
Depending on who you believe, Saddam either got so excited when the gunfire started that he rushed up to shoot the president too, or he panicked before the attempt even started and fired his gun into the air.
We don't really know what happened, but the whole attempt has been described as a farce.
One assassin was given the wrong bullets for his gun by the CIA.
Another assassin got a hand grenade caught in the lining of his coat.
So it was just a disaster.
The president survived.
Saddam got shot in the leg as he was fleeing.
Very noel coward vibe to that assassination.
Very silly sounding.
Yeah, you could imagine like Yakati Sachs being a solid assassin soundtrack for that.
Are we in the 60s yet, or is he still in college age?
I think this is the early 60s because Qasim took power in 58.
So this is Saddam's 60s, hilariously failed assassination attempts.
Okay.
So Saddam gets shot in the leg.
The official version of the story, and by that I mean like the Iraqi government's official version of the story, was that he and a friend had to remove the bullet with a razor blade and scissors so they get a little like boondock saints thing there.
Okay.
And they claimed he was still in high school at the time, but that doesn't track with the actual time frame.
But like the version of the story Saddam wanted people to believe is that he like removed the bullet from his own leg and then went back to school.
Went to math class.
I mean, that is a narrative that is exciting.
That is a cool narrative.
I got boondoxed and then I went to algebra too.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wasn't going to miss my fucking quiz or whatever.
I don't know enough algebra to make an algebra.
Can't fault him for that.
My quiz.
That's 6% of the grade.
Long division.
But we actually know that he fled the country immediately so he wouldn't get murdered, as several of his friends were.
High School Math Class Lie00:04:41
The CIA and the Egyptian intelligence forces helped him escape to Cairo where he was put up in a nice apartment and apparently spent all of his time playing dominoes for several years.
Wait, for several years?
Yeah, yeah.
He's there for a few years.
Just playing dominoes.
Playing dominoes.
That is a sinister game to be playing for many years.
You know that scene in V for Vendetta?
It's like my least favorite scene of all time where like V has set up a room full of dominoes for this one and it's like, who?
It took you, you only live here.
This must have taken 16 hours and you're just like, hey, Natalie Portman, check this shit out.
And then he knocks down the whole thing.
You're just like, what are you doing?
Anyways, such a crazy person move.
It's so, like, could there be a big, bigger red flag other than refusing to show your face?
That movie is infuriating.
Anyways.
I'm sure the reality is he was like playing dominoes with other people at cafes, but I like to imagine him for just three straight years alone in his apartment, just building dominoes.
Right.
We don't, I guess, yeah, dominoes.
I forget dominoes is also a game.
I imagine him in like a ballroom just assembling dominoes in different patterns and trying to get people to be like, hey, you know, it would be really cool.
So 1963 rolls around.
Qasim gets assassinated and Saddam is able to return to Iraq.
He's assassinated by like a different crew.
Yeah, somebody else, not Saddam.
I'm sure the CIA was still involved.
Saddam goes back to Iraq, but it turned out the new government wasn't a big fan of him and his fellow Baathists either.
So he gets arrested in 64 and sent to prison.
Thankfully, Iraqi prisons in the 60s kind of acted on the honor system.
So after two years of imprisonment, Saddam convinced his guards to let he and some friends go to a restaurant on their way to court.
While he was in the bathroom, he walked out of the back door.
I mean, that's fully on the jail.
That's funny.
That's all that.
Fully on them.
That is a wild policy.
I also thought you were going to say, fortunately, prisons in Iraq had dominoes.
I assume he's dominoing all throughout this period.
Basically unchanged.
Yeah.
So he gets out.
Yeah, he gets out.
He rises through the ranks of the Bath Party.
And in July 17th, 1968, he helps to launch a coup that finally puts his party in power.
Here's a quote from a book I found about how that morning went down.
He began by bringing out all of the weapons and uniforms he had hidden in the house.
His wife Sajida helped in the preparations, as did their son Uday, who ran around the room picking up hand grenades from the floor, bringing them one by one to his father as if they were toys.
Oh, scary.
When did he get a son?
Oh, yeah, I mean, he's got a wife and kids by this time.
Yeah, that kind of happens after he's out of prison and such.
Oh, okay.
So, okay, so he's like, you know, I'm really going to pull it together now.
I'm going to join an extremist party.
I'm going to have a wife and a kid.
He's getting shit done.
God.
And then, and so his kids touching grenades.
Good, I mean, there's grenades all over Iraq.
They love those things.
Right.
Yeah, that quote is from a Saddam sympathetic biography by Nita Rinfrew.
You can find it online if you want.
It's very much questioned, but I am choosing to believe that particular depiction because it warms my heart.
Right.
I mean, a moment for fatherhood.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's some quality dadding.
So the coup goes off without a hitch.
Saddam becomes the vice president.
He's number two to a guy named Hassan al-Bakr.
While vice president, Saddam finishes his law degree and enrolls in the University of Baghdad, but he attends classes in disguise.
Whoa, that is a bad movie.
That's a bad movie.
Secret vice president?
Yeah, student Mike Pence.
He's just sitting in a biology class getting angrier and angrier.
He can't say anything.
Mike Pence putting on a wig and going to someone's chem class.
They're just explaining how like the age of the universe and he's just like red-faced, sweating and furious, veins bulging on his neck.
Did they say anything about what the disguise was?
Because if not, I'm going very silly.
I'm with a bigger mustache.
Gigantic glasses.
No, I found no details on how he was disguised, but he apparently had a lifelong habit of going around in disguise.
In disguise.
Okay, I'm imagining the disguise kit from The Master of Disguise, one of my favorite movies.
He's just dressed up like a gigantic cherry pie in a college class, learning chemistry.
That is so bizarre.
Gigantic Cherry Pie Disguise00:03:04
Someone could come to his house.
Yeah.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we have some ads to break to.
So we're going to sing a little song for Sweet Lady Capitalism.
And then when we are back, we're going to talk about Saddam Hussein's love of reading, his rise to absolute power, and of course, his career as a romance novelist.
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I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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Chemical Weapons and Luck00:15:46
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
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And we're back and we are talking about Saddam Hussein, who at this point in our story has gone from an adorable lead pipe wielding child to the vice president of Iraq.
Saddam was vice president for 11 years, although for most of that time he was the power behind the scenes and he was actually in charge of the country.
And one of the first things he decided to do as vice president was to spread his love of reading to everyone in Iraq with what was essentially the most brutal scholastic book fair in history.
He required every city and village in Iraq to host reading programs.
Attendance was mandatory.
Skipping was punished by three years in prison.
Every man, woman, and child in the country was forced to learn how to read.
And it worked.
Iraq went from majority illiterate to the vast majority of people there being literate.
UNESCO gave Saddam an award.
See, that is an unusual move, right?
For like an evil ruler to want people to be literate.
Like, usually you're like, everyone needs to be as dumb and obedient as possible.
That's Saddam is like, you're going to read, and if you don't learn how to read, you're going to go to fucking prison for three years.
You're going to go to jail.
Yeah.
So, was it?
I imagine it was like specific things you had to read.
I mean, I think there's a lot of reading of religious texts and whatnot.
Like, during the height of his regime, a lot of fiction was banned, but at this point, they weren't banning a lot of books.
Like, you know what?
Just pick up a Juni B. Jones, pick up an Animorphs, and just go to town.
That's a lot of Animorphs in 1960s Iraq.
If you don't read a new Animorphs chapter book this week, you're going to jail, my friend.
You're not.
Yeah, they're big fans of the Animorphs.
I mean, Saddam was a big reader.
He's a huge Hemingway fan, which, of course.
Oh, geez.
What a cock.
Yeah.
Yeah, well.
Really loved Old Man in the Sea.
Man, I wonder if he ever picked up any David Foster wallets.
Jesus Christ.
Oh, don't get Saddam started at David Foster Wallace.
He won't shut up.
He will not shut up about it.
He stands for Franzen, and it's insufferable.
Okay.
So we're almost at the end of our positive Saddam stuff, but I do need to mention that he was a surprisingly progressive leader when it came to women's rights.
We're talking about the Middle East in the 70s here, so don't expect a lot.
But they were allowed to live.
Well, they were allowed to work and be in the military.
And it's said that he preferred women's advice and insight because he thought they were more honest than men.
So that tracks.
This concludes the good part of Saddam Hussein being in charge of Iraq.
He becomes the full president in 1979.
He went from, you know, during the time when he was VP, he'd go around and disguise a lot and kind of undercover boss the country.
Seems unnecessary.
It seems like something you could delegate to a second party.
It's like a thing, though, in Arab folklore.
There's stories going back a thousand years of like rulers hiding amongst the people to learn about like their lives and stuff.
So it's kind of a thing you do for the PR.
It's like, yeah.
Behaving like a fictional character would be like a good idea.
Like, if I was just like, I'm going to, I'm trying to think of a good example of like, I'm going to be a mermaid and die at the end.
And that's how I'll prove to you that I'm a cool leader.
So as president, Saddam went from, yeah, doing the whole undercover thing to making frequent televised visits to various random neighborhoods around the country.
Here's another quote from that Renfrew book.
One day he would turn up suddenly at an ancient Christian monastery.
Another day he would visit Kurdish peasants in their homes, inspecting their sanitary and refrigeration facilities, perhaps poking a bit of meat to see if it was fresh.
Before long, it was understood that the president could drop in anywhere at any moment.
Oh, he sounds like, you know what he sounds like?
He sounds like Bill Murray.
I find that behavior to be absolutely despicable.
I don't like living in a world where Bill Murray is just allowed to show up wherever he wants and it's news.
It's like he's intruding.
Bill Murray showed up at my wedding.
I'm like, he should not, he was not invited.
He should leave.
Saddam's infamous meat poke.
Yeah.
There's the president just showing up at your house, poking your meat, Bill Murraying your wedding.
I just wish Bill Murray didn't do that.
So Saddam, at this point, is very popular, popular amongst also the other people he's in power with, the other members of the Baath party.
They thought he was intellectual and practical and just a generally nice guy.
He was, of course, hiding himself.
And in 1979, as he becomes president, Saddam purges the Baath Party of all of his rivals.
He was able to get one member of the party, a guy named Mashadi, to inform on all of his enemies.
Mashadi was given the choice to either, number one, confess everything and roll on 22 other members of Congress, basically, that Saddam wanted purged, or two, watch his wife and daughters get raped in front of him before being murdered.
Oh my God.
Yeah, so that's the choice Saddam gives this guy.
Mashadi rolls on his colleagues.
Saddam executes all of them.
He videotapes the executions and sends copies of the tape to other members of the Baath party.
That is horrifying and also bold to document.
Yeah.
That's okay.
So we're in it now.
We're in it.
Nightmare boss Saddam has arrived.
No more book fairs.
No more book fairs.
Book fairs are over.
Well, I mean, everyone can read now.
That's good.
Yeah.
And in 1980, Saddam Hussein invades Iran, starts an eight-year war that kills like a million people and bankrupts Iraq.
In 1988, he launches a series of chemical weapon attacks against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq and killed around 200,000 people, most of them women and children.
Oh, but I thought he was a feminist icon.
Well, as we discussed earlier.
Icon may be too strong.
Okay, okay.
Although he gassed all genders who he would ruthlessly murder.
You wouldn't call it a misogynist chemical weapons attack.
Okay.
It was a woke genocide.
An extremely woke genocide.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, in 1990, Saddam invades Kuwait.
We all know how that worked out.
Yes.
Not great for him.
No.
So Saddam's life kind of goes off the rails after the Gulf War.
Honestly, incredible that it makes it that far.
We could do a whole podcast at how messed up Iraq was during that particular time.
I'm going to pick just a few of the wildest stories.
So Saddam had a son-in-law and a second cousin, both at the same time, because, you know, a little bit Texan.
All right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Named Hussein Kamel.
He was one of Ba Saddam's favorites, and he was appointed both Minister of Oil and Head of Iraq's weapons development program.
Minister of Oil sounds like a fake job.
Minister of Oil.
Yeah.
You keep being a fuel.
Well, no, actually, get into these.
Oh, wait, yeah.
We got to sell them.
You're actually going to want to move.
Right.
Hard to do.
Okay.
Yeah.
So in 1995, though, he becomes he and his brother, Saddam Kamel.
So Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel.
I know that's a little confusing.
Wait, one more time.
So Saddam's son-in-laws, the men who marry his daughters, are named Hussein and Saddam Kamel.
So Hussein Kamel.
Yeah, I know.
It's a little...
It's like they're like pranking him.
Yeah.
It's a common name.
Yeah.
So they're married to Saddam's daughters, but they wind up falling afoul of Saddam's son, Uday, who's still, well, I don't think he's the heir apparent anymore, but he's very powerful.
So they think he's going to kill them, and they flee to Jordan along with Saddam's daughters and a bunch of their friends.
Jordan grants them asylum.
Hussein Kamel promises to give the CIA a bunch of inside info on Iraq's WMD program, but he didn't actually have much to give because Iraq wasn't making WMDs anymore.
Right.
As we all learned a few years later.
Way later, yeah.
So he starts to become less and less useful for Jordan and the CIA.
And for some reason, nobody can really explain, he decides to go back to Iraq along with his brother.
This is after he's gone on CNN to accuse Saddam of surrounding himself with idiots.
So they do that.
They talk to the CIA and then they head back home.
Everyone's like, you're going to get murdered the instant you set foot in Iraq.
But they still do it.
They're like, what if we didn't?
And Saddam's like, it'll be fine.
It'll be fine.
Is this their like Thelma and Louise moment?
Because that's as close as I can get to unpacking that one.
There is a little bit of a Thelma and Louise moment coming in a bit.
Oh, okay.
First off, so that we don't get too, I don't want anyone feeling too sorry for Saddam Kamal and Hussein Kamel.
Saddam Kamel, one of the things he was famous for doing a couple years before this point was he got angry at a guy and he made him drink gasoline and then he shot him with incendiary rounds so he would catch on fire.
Oh my god.
So nobody in this story is a good guy.
Okay, so he's like a Tarantino.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is the kind of shit that Saddam, like if you were close to the Hussein family, you know, when he was in charge, you could do stuff like that.
You could really get creative.
You could really get creative with being a monster.
It's just important you don't feel sorry for anyone for what comes next because this is a hell of a story if you can get past that.
Okay.
So they go back to Iraq.
Saddam orders them to divorce their wives and orders them to show up for judgment and justice.
And instead, they hole up in their family house.
Saddam doesn't send the police after them.
He doesn't send the military after them.
Oh, no.
He sends the boy's uncle and his enforcer, whose nickname was Chemical Ali, because he carried out the genocidal chemical weapons attacks.
Sounds like a SoundCloud rapper, but sure.
Yeah.
Along with a 40-man tribal hit squad.
And before the hit squad arrives, Chemical Ali sends the brothers a Honda van filled with weapons and ammunition so that they can fight.
What follows is a 13-hour firefight that kills at least two members of the tribal hit squad.
It ends with a rocket barrage that kills one of the brothers, and Hussein Kamal staggers out of the smoky rubble of the house with just like in the wake of this rocket attack, screams out his name to the sky, and then is cut down in a hail of gunfire.
Why?
Because that's how they did shit.
They just, that's some puppet master shit.
He was like, we could just do this or.
I could take him to prison or 13-hour gun battle.
13-hour gun battle, which is more fun to hear about later.
Yeah, and it, I mean, it's pretty badass.
And it ends biblically.
It does.
Shaving your name to the sky and then being hit.
I feel like that's almost like giving them a better way to die than just sending someone to, you know, like, you know, cut their throat and leave.
Like, they're like, you're going to go down in a very dramatic way.
Well, Saddam, apparently these two guys Saddam was really cared about, like, actually did care about.
So this is nice Saddam, how a nice Saddam executes you.
He lets you die fighting.
You get to die, like, it's sort of like Mission Impossibly.
Like, there's a lot of high drama.
Maybe there's music playing.
We don't know.
We weren't there.
I hope there was music playing.
I hope that someone just threw on like a Hans Zimmer score in the background and just kept rewinding the cassette and playing the game.
Just keep going.
13 hours.
Just keep like, well, what year is this coming out in?
What soundtrack are they listening?
This is like 95.
Oh, yeah.
There's a Zimmer.
I'll figure it out.
Yeah, there's something in there.
Yeah.
So, on the less murder and explosion-y sort of thing, Saddam had a friendship with Jordan's king, Hussein.
During one of the king's visits, the two went fishing, and King Hussein thought it was suspicious that Saddam and only Saddam caught a bunch of fish.
After a couple of fishing trips, he developed the theory that Saddam had ordered a diver to put fish on the end of his fishing line.
And only his fishing line.
Was it true?
Well, there's no way to know for sure, but one trip, there was maybe a fuck-up with the diver, and a fish wound up on King Hussein's line, and he pulled it up, and immediately after that, a fish winds up on Saddam's line.
But King Hussein's fish looks bigger, and so Saddam has both of the fish go off with one of his runners to get weighed, and the guy comes back and is like, no, Saddam's was a quarter pound bigger.
Oh my god, what a stressful friendship.
Jesus Christ.
So that's the kind of man Saddam Hussein was to his buddies.
I wonder if he's like insecure in any way.
If anytime you catch a fish, it's like, who's basically he's just like, well, whose dick is bigger?
And then just like has him go and weigh the fish.
I don't know.
I mean, that sounds like kind of a fun way to torture a frenemy.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Only I may catch fish.
So as the years after the Gulf War drew on, Saddam gets more and more paranoid.
He's constantly afraid of being poisoned, and so he has all of his food, which is mostly fresh lobster and fresh fish, flown in daily and inspected by nuclear scientists before being fed to him.
By the nuclear scientists?
By the nuclear scientists.
Well, I don't know if they're feeding it to him, but they're inspecting his food.
Jesus Christ, okay.
Well, because they're not working on nukes anymore.
You got to do something with your scientists.
Right, right.
I mean, if your WMD is not popping, you know, that's, I mean, keeping people employed.
Make sure this lobster's fresh.
He passed a lot of time reading books about Joseph Stalin, who was his hero.
Very chill.
Very chill way of spending your time.
And watching movies.
Some of his favorites were The Godfather, Enemy of the State, and The Day of the Jackal.
Seems a little on the nose.
Yeah.
Let's throw in some...
What if it was like he loved Enemy of the State, The Godfather, and like all about Eve?
10 things I hate about you.
He just couldn't stop watching that movie.
He had a soft side to him.
WMDs and Fresh Lobster00:02:01
Yeah, no, he's not a subtle man.
No.
In his 60s, his doctors advised him to start getting two hours a day of walking exercise.
Since he was Saddam, he did this in the craziest way possible.
I'm going to quote from an Atlantic article called Tales of the Tyrant here.
He used to take these walks in public, swooping down with his entourage into neighborhoods in Baghdad, his bodyguards clearing sidewalks and streets as the tyrant passed.
Anyone who approached him unsolicited was beaten nearly to death.
But now it is too dangerous to walk in public.
The limp must not be seen.
So Saddam makes no more unscripted public appearances.
He limps freely behind the high walls and patrolled fences of his vast estates.
Often he walks with a gun, hunting deer or rabbit in his private preserves.
He is an excellent shot.
Jeez.
Okay.
He's just extra.
He's just extra as hell in every single line.
Every way.
That does sound a little bit similar to like when they were trying to hide the fact that like Roosevelt was like paralyzed.
Like, we're just going to go way out of our way to make sure that people don't know the ruler has a lamp.
Like, but also by calling attention, like, he could have just rented a place.
Yeah.
No, I think going on limping walks with a gun and murdering random animals is the better way to get exercise.
He needs...
Listen, he can't go somewhere without a gun.
He was basically born with a gun.
He was basically born with a gun in his hand.
So one of the things you get when you study Saddam and you read his writings is it seems like he kind of started to sour on being in charge of Iraq during the late 1990s.
He started taking more naps and playing hookie in government meetings.
His former vice president said it sometimes took three days to get in touch with him.
So what was Saddam doing with all of his time now?
What was he doing?
He'd become a novelist.
I was hoping that was the answer.
Reading is a theme that kind of runs through Saddam's entire career.
And while the standard like Arab hero thing is to be a poet, like that's the thing that they really emphasize, like Russians, it's you're a novelist.
If you're an Arab hero, you're a poet.
Saddam instead chose to write trashy romance novels.
Naps During Government Meetings00:04:09
Wow.
Yep.
And we're going to get into those trashy romance novels and exactly what happened with Saddam's career as an author after the break.
But first, we have more ads for things that you can buy or things that can buy you.
I don't know how ads work.
Ooh.
Here we go.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
Surprising Bechtel Passages00:15:25
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We are back and we are talking about Saddam Hussein, dictator, murderer, pipe wielder, and romance novelist.
Just further proof that there really is nothing more dangerous in this world than a failed artist.
Yeah.
Like there's so, I mean, limitless examples of a failed artist doing something truly hellacious to the world.
One of the weird things I found, because we're doing a podcast that touches on Stalin later, is that so, like, Saddam is a novelist, and but like the true, like the traditional Arab warrior hero thing is to be a poet as well as a warrior.
Joseph Stalin wrote poems, and the standard like Russian man of substance thing is to be a novelist.
I don't know, which is weird to me that they're a big fan of Stalin and they kind of wind up chips in the night.
They would have been great friends.
They would have, I mean, I'm sure.
It sounds like Saddam is a little bit like fanboying out over Stalin for some time.
Well, you could call him a Stalin nerd.
He's a little bit of a Stalin's down, if you will.
All right.
So Saddam Hussein publishes his first novel, Zabiba and the King, in 2000.
It's an instant bestseller in Iraq and sells millions upon millions of copies.
Under his regular name?
No, under the name that it was published under is basically he who wrote the book.
Whoa.
Whoa, what a cool pen name.
What a cool penny.
It's basically like the middle finger emoji written by whose fucking business is by the guy who wrote it, asshole.
JD Robb, sure.
But everyone knows that Saddam, the word gets out, and of course they all buy a copy because like, you don't want to be caught without your copy of Saddam's stupid fucking book.
You can buy the English translation of this book online right now for $12.
It was republished by an American during the war.
And it's...
The cover is just Saddam.
It's just Saddam with a beard on a red background.
It's not the original cover.
And a pretty gnarly looking font, I would argue.
Not a good book.
Not a good font choice.
It looks like it was self-published on Amazon.
It kind of was.
It was just a guy who translated it, who got a copy, translated it, and published it as quick as he could.
Like his justification was, I thought Americans fighting over there might want to read this book of the guy they deposed.
I mean, I see that.
And there's definitely a historical value to Saddam's creepy book.
Wait, what's it about?
Well, okay.
First off, short review.
It's not good.
It's not good.
It may lose something in translation from Arabic, but it is not a good book structurally.
I think we're okay to not give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt.
You lose that after the first genocide.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Once you hit a million people you've killed, you're out.
Yeah, he's about a million and a half deaths at this point, probably, conservatively, something like that.
But he's finding the time to follow his bliss.
He actually wrote like three books in four years, something like that.
So he's very Dedicated to it.
Yeah, he sees Stephen kinging his way through this shit.
Right.
He's like banging Coke lines and writing garbage.
Okay.
So the basic plot is that a king who represents Saddam Hussein falls in love with a beautiful local woman named Zabiba who represents collectively all of Iraq.
I wonder if she's much younger than him.
Yes.
Oh, okay, good.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, Zabiba has a husband, the United States, who became betrothed to her during an arranged marriage, and she spends a lot of the book being forced to have sex with him.
No.
Yeah, it's sad.
So we've got Saddam as the protagonist.
We've got a much younger, hotter female avatar.
I'm assuming she doesn't have a personality.
And we've got a rape fantasy.
She does have a personality.
She's the smartest one in the book.
And she spends the whole book lecturing everybody.
Feminist icon Saddam Hussein.
It's kind of weird, but like she is not the character you'd guess from that plot synopsis where she's just like a hollow.
Like she is just instantly in love with him for no good reason, but she like spends the whole time lecturing him about politics and he's portrayed as kind of a dumb guy.
Interesting.
It is weird.
It's not the book you'd expect.
And it has a really strange structure.
So it's framed as a story being told to a group of young children by an old grandmotherly woman.
Like a princess bride kind of setup?
Yeah, it's exactly that.
It's a princess bride kind of setup and it sort of works at the start.
But the whole book has periodic rants by Saddam Hussein put into these characters' mouths.
So a lot of Saddam's rants wind up in the mouth of an old lady talking to children.
So at one point, this old woman spends a whole page lecturing small children about how sexy mouths are.
I'm going to quote from the book here.
And if the meaning of the mouth is that great, should not a man be jealous about the mouth of the one he loves?
Her laughter, every movement of her lips?
Clearly, one understands why then our mothers and grandmothers cover their mouths in front of strangers.
Ew.
So that is a quote from an old lady talking to children.
Oh, God.
I feel like maybe he forgot that was happening sometimes in the book.
He did, because he forgets for like 100 pages to bring it back to her, and then he brings it back to her.
He's like, oh, hopefully everyone will forget about that whole time when she was telling kids how hot people's mouths are.
Just wait.
So on page 127, Saddam writes, and again, puts this into the mouth of an old lady talking to kids.
Even an animal respects a man's desire if it wants to copulate with him.
Doesn't a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the north of Iraq?
How would you know that?
Where is his info coming from?
He's just throwing shade on the Kurds by saying they have sex with bears and putting that in the mouth of an old woman talking to kids.
Yeah.
Oh, Christ.
Okay.
How long is this book?
It's like 300 pages.
That's too long.
I read, I'm pretty sure I read all of it.
I fell asleep four or five times because it is, there's just pages of rants.
Like, it's not a good book.
I pulled the highlights out here.
Okay, okay.
So yeah, we've gotten through the bear sex, the weird mouth rant.
So the main purpose of the book is to allow Saddam to throw shade at his enemies, kind of like Michael Crichton in that regard.
Yes.
Ooh, hot Crichton wrath.
Rest in paradise, Crichton.
Some of it's what you'd expect.
He attacks the U.S. and Israel a bunch, you know.
Sure.
He's Saddam Hussein.
But weirdly enough, he spends most of the book raging against businessmen, the concept of a hereditary monarchy, and apparently all of the people who worked for him.
That's a wild platter of topics.
So at one point, like there's a, Zabiba is visiting the castle and the king, she has an altercation with some guy and the king apologizes and she's like, isn't it true that those who surround the king are exceedingly more cruel than the king himself?
It's kind of like Saddam being like, I didn't kill all those.
I just, bad people were.
He's like, yikes, trust no bitch.
Lesson learned.
Yeah.
Right.
There's also a lot of points in the book that make it clear he's kind of tired of being a dictator.
Did not the soul of the one who had surrounded himself with a multitude of useless things become burdened by the intricate maze of his palaces, their furniture and thick walls?
Had not his soul died as a result, having completely lost its aesthetic sense?
Whoa.
Yeah.
That's a little emo lyric.
Yeah, there's a little bit of like Saddam sitting in his palace feeling sorry for himself.
Oh, this is so lame.
I'm the prisoner.
When you think about it, everyone should feel bad for me.
Do you think Saddam ever like pulled out bright eyes and was like, you know what?
I always imagine him as more of a cure guy.
Okay, I agree.
I agree.
So it's a surprising book.
When I went through the synopses other people had put up, it sounded like a straightforward propaganda diatribe against America and pro-Saddam.
But it wound up being way more complicated than that and not good.
Because again, this is an awful book.
Right.
But it's complicated.
So at one point, Zabiba asks Saddam, does a common woman like me need freedom?
And Saddam's like, yes, I want my people to be free.
It's good for people to be free.
It's like you say, you say one thing.
Yeah.
Don't you do the other.
And so Zabiba tells him it would be a good idea to have like a people's council where he lets elected leaders from the populace help the king reform the country and maybe even run the country someday.
And Saddam as the king is like, that's a great idea.
So like there's weird stuff in here.
That's a misdirect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The whole book carries a very strong anti-royalty line.
Okay.
It's made repeatedly clear that the hereditary rule of a country is really dumb.
The book is also filled with, you know, casual anti-Semitism, chalvinism, and weirdness.
But there are some oddly woke passages, like this one when Zabiba comes after the king for his privileged life.
Have you ever known famine?
Have you ever had to borrow money to buy a piece of bread for your family or paid rent for your house so that you would know the afflictions of the needy?
And have you ever tried to convince a woman, like a common man, that you are worthy to sleep with her, that your relationship would grow stronger if you did so?
In your case, does the woman who is supposed to sleep with you even have the right to decline?
Whoa.
He wrote a passage on consent?
Saddam Hussein's a fucking consented.
Okay.
Saddam is, he's a surprising guy.
He's literally addicted to consent.
Okay.
He's having people murdered at the same time he's writing about like consent.
He's having women raped, but he's also like consent rules.
Okay.
Yeah.
I feel like to me, that passage is very much like, I was raised poor with a single mom.
Yeah.
That is what that passage screams.
And I think there's some of that in there because he, you know, he was pro the king getting overthrown and he just like hates people who grew up rich because he had a rough upbringing.
I mean, same, but like there's ways to manage those feelings.
Yeah, you don't have to kill a million.
I've got a kill million people.
Yeah.
There's other ways.
I have a feeling that they were not all extremely wealthy people.
Have you tried alcohol and painkillers?
Yes.
It works great for America.
Love self-medicating.
It neutralizes you as a person.
It neutralizes your potential.
Yeah, I would love, if I could have just gone to Saddam in 1970 and then been like, these are Vicodin.
You're going to really like this.
Hot tip, self-medicate and never learn math.
And you will be a neutral force in the world.
It's how to avoid being Saddam.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not going to complain the book is a bastion of progressive thought.
And just so I'm being totally fair here, here's another paragraph that Saddam wrote about women that's significantly less woke.
Truly, a woman, if she decides to do so, will get a man by any means.
And if she chooses to destroy a woman or wages a war with her in the process for the one she loves, she will not hesitate to go as far as murder.
Wow, woman-on-woman violence.
Yeah, there's a lot of that in here, too.
You should be lifting each other up, Saddam.
Grow up.
There's a subplot where the king's first wife hates Zabiba and yada yada yada.
It's a bad book.
So it's not at all the book I'd expected, though.
Zabiba winds up getting raped by her husband, America, when she tries to leave him.
Her husband, America.
Her husband stands in for America.
Oh, I thought that was his literal name.
No, no, no.
Jesus.
It's a little more subtle than that.
He doesn't have a name.
Oh.
You're going to be like, Joey.
His name is Joey.
We don't find out the king's name until like a third of the way through the book.
It's not like what's the annihilation, where they're not using people's names as a stylistic choice.
It's just a bad book.
We'll get around to it.
We'll name some of the characters.
Also, the king's name is Arab.
Oh.
Okay.
This is bad writing.
This is bad writing.
He's not good.
He's not good.
Okay.
So, yeah, Zabiba is raped by her husband, America, when she tries to leave him.
And America and an evil prince who represents Israel raise up an army to try to invade the kingdom.
Again, a surprising part, the king does basically nothing in the defense of the kingdom.
Like he's fighting there, but we don't hear anything about him.
Instead, Zabiba leads the defense.
She puts on armor and leads the army of the country to defend the kingdom, and she dies fighting.
She pulls a fatal Mulan, basically.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Again, surprising.
That is interesting.
That's the first time in this book.
I feel like, whoa, that's a good twist.
And after her death, the king appoints a council made up of normal men and women from around the country and then dies off screen.
So the book ends with this council of like grandmothers and bakers and whatnot in charge of the country figuring out how to move forward.
So she did not die in vain.
She didn't die in vain.
I'm not used to democracy.
I'm used to things that female characters do having impact.
Yeah, he is on the plot.
He is more woke than a lot of Hollywood screenwriters.
That is wild.
He's doing laps around Sorkin right now.
Yeah, especially since it's 2000.
I think I didn't double check, but I think this passes the Bechtel test.
I'd have to go through it again to know for sure.
I mean, very important to me.
Wait, what other things came out in 2000 that this is more woke than?
A short list.
More woke than Gladiator.
More woke than almost famous.
More woke than American Psycho.
More woke than Memento.
More woke than Requiem for a Dream.
Damn.
I am impressed.
I should note also that one of this Democratic Council's first acts is to kick out a Jewish guy and take all of his stuff.
This is still Saddam we're talking about.
But he needs to add like an asterisk to the Bechtel test.
Be like, you cannot possibly pass the Bechtel test and be Saddam.
It's just not allowed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a good Saddam corollary to the Bechtel test.
A lot of asterisks.
It's not a perfect system.
So, yeah, and all of this weirdly progressive stuff is actually why a lot of experts on Saddam are pretty sure he wrote this himself and he didn't have a ghostwriter because no ghost writer would have been allowed to like end a book with Saddam's self-insert dying and a democracy being established.
Right, they'd get killed.
Yeah, they'd get killed.
So it's probable Saddam actually wrote this and maybe then his other books too.
Yeah, he wrote like four novels in his last three years in power, which is pretty impressive.
Yeah.
So in 2003, you know, the United States is getting ready to invade Iraq.
One of Saddam's last actions in power as like the first Marine units are crossing into his country.
One of the final things he does is send off a draft of his last novel, Begone Demons, to Tariq Aziz.
Final Novel Draft Notes00:08:07
God, drama.
Drama queen.
I got to deal with defending my country from an invasion, but first, first, I need some notes.
Can I get some notes?
I'm not sure that I've quite used the comma correctly.
Yeah, I didn't go with the Oxford.
I switched about halfway through.
Where does Saddam stand on the Oxford comma?
I don't know, because they're originally written in Arabic.
Right.
So there's no way to know how he did it.
Yeah.
I mean, there is a way, but I don't read Arabic.
You'd have to ask a lot of people, yeah.
Yeah.
So I have been unable to find a copy of Begone Demons in English.
We are working on that because it was translated into Japanese.
So we may be doing a special Japanese Begone Demons podcast.
A live reading.
Something like that.
Whoa.
I was able to find a Telegraph article that contains some extracts from this novel.
Okay.
And it's amazing.
So the basic plot appears to be that Romans and Jews invade Iraq and Iraq beats them by 9-11ing them.
Okay.
So here's a quote.
Drawing from recent events.
Got it.
So in this quote, Ezekiel Heschel is the king of the Jewish people.
Quote, then Ezekiel Heschel and the king of the Romans saw the twin towers of the Roman city on fire.
Ezekiel Heschel was beating his face and saying, everything I've collected is gone.
One of the Romans was laughing at Ezekiel and advised him, try building another two towers and sell the one and rent the other to the Roman king.
Both you and the Roman king will rot in hell.
So that's that's completely unhinged.
That is like very unhinged fan fiction.
Holy shit.
And once the Iraqis burn their towers down, the Romans and the Jewish people all run away because they've lost their power and money, which was maybe optimistic.
Because we did lose our power and money in Iraq, but we did not leave.
We did not.
We are still there, buddy.
Oh, jeez.
Begone demons.
Yeah.
Begone demons.
It's like a weirdly like Hemingway-esque title.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so it was Zabiba and the King.
Yeah, very true.
Very true.
So the character of Salim is the king of the Arabs in this, and he's Saddam's self-insert.
Saddam's Harry Potter, if you will.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm just going to read an excerpt from a battle scene that's Saddam describing himself fighting.
The king of the Romans gave his orders to begin the charge.
The first lion of Salim's army shot at the Roman writers with arrows.
When the Roman writers fell down, the women of the tribe beat them with sticks or killed them with swords.
So again, kind of loves women in battle.
Salim freed his long hair.
He was so strong.
He was fighting the Romans like a hawk.
He was riding a white horse and shouting, Allah Akbar, long live the Arabs and long live Islam.
How many masturbation breaks do you think he had to take in the rounding of that passage?
He wanted long hair and pecs out to hear.
He wanted to just be Fabio.
He was so strong.
I feel like that's basically him being like, okay, this is what I want for cover art.
Please.
He is so strong.
His hair is so long.
Really long.
So long.
Like a L'Oreal commercial.
He's herbal essencing all the way up.
I'm worth it, too.
He was so strong is maybe the most vulnerable sentence I ever heard in my entire life.
That really cuts to the core of his soul.
Full body reaction to hearing that.
Oh my God.
So Saddam was captured on December 13th, 2003.
He was taken into coalition custody and eventually tried by the Iraqi government.
During his incarceration, he was watched over by a team of 12 young American soldiers.
Now, their story and a lot of other stories are chronicled in the excellent book, The Prisoner in His Palace by Will Bardenwerper.
I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail here.
I recommend reading that book because it's filled with great anecdotes.
But the gist of it is these young kids, they didn't know dictator Saddam.
They didn't know massacring people Saddam.
They knew he'd done all that.
But when they met him, he was a sweet old bearded man who talked to them about their lives and their problems.
So one of his medics, they weren't all young.
One of his medics was like a 51-year-old black guy from Compton who he and Saddam kind of clicked because Saddam had a rough upbringing too.
They both have a lot of experiences with like violence in their youth.
Again, this sounds like a bad movie.
There's a scene where that guy, the medic's brother, dies, and he goes over to see Saddam before he like gets flown back home to attend the funeral.
And he's like, I'm going to be gone for a few days.
My brother just died.
And he's clearly broken up about it.
And Saddam grabs him by the shoulders and looks him in the eyes and says, I will be your brother.
How do you politely be like, you know what?
I'm good.
No, they all liked him.
They all really liked, like, at least most of them really liked him.
He would smoke cigars with them.
He would give them advice on girls and advice on life.
And like, he didn't seem like Saddam.
He was a sweet old man to them.
Right.
And they really dug him.
Like, they would do nice stuff, like find him furniture and help him set up his like, his little cell so that he could live kind of nicely.
What a mind.
Fuck.
He had cigars the whole time.
We don't know who gave them to him.
Someone would just give these soldiers money every week for Saddam's cigars.
Nobody knows who it was.
It had to be someone with some clout.
Maybe Bush.
I don't know.
I don't know.
That's...
I want to read that book now.
It's a very good book.
The prisoner in his palace.
Like, the weird thing is that when he gets tried and executed on December 30th, 2006, these poor kids who have been guarding him for months have to escort him to the gallows.
And they like him.
And there's like tears in their eyes as they lead him off to die.
And they have to like take his body back.
And years later, a bunch of them have PTSD because of what they did with Saddam.
I guess you couldn't have predicted they would have loved Saddam.
But you should rotate them.
Like, don't have the same guys with him the whole time and then make them see him die.
That's messed up.
Oh, that's so...
And now, I mean, there's like so many levels to that guilt of like, I killed my friend, but also my friend killed a million people.
So it makes sense.
And like, they're all like, he was a mon, like, none of them don't believe he was a monster, but they were also like.
And part of it is like, anyone who becomes a dictator, you're good at being charming.
Like, you're good at making people like you.
And yeah.
Like, in a way, you could say that was his last fucked up thing, was like making all these young American kids be his buddy before he gets hung in front of them.
His final gaslight.
Yeah, his final gaslight.
His final Saddam gaslight.
I just want to do one more shitty thing before I die.
He's like, let me just fuck 12 more people up.
The last 12 people I had access to.
I just haven't given quite enough people PTSD.
Wow.
So that is the story of Saddam Hussein.
And all 12 people copped to liking him later on.
Not all of them, but most of them.
So probably all of them.
Yeah, yeah.
They were all pretty, like, nobody was like, oh, he was just a monster the whole time.
Like, everyone was like, he was a very nice, polite old man.
I mean, they have rules like that at nursing homes so that people aren't too traumatized when their patients die.
Yeah.
Military probably should have called that one ahead of time.
Major oversight.
But I guess in theory, you're like, oh, a dictator might charm you.
But once you're that deep in casualties, you kind of expect them to drop the act.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You wouldn't.
Seems like most of them would.
This sounds like an outlier.
Yeah.
Saddam's an outlier in a lot of ways.
Wow.
Yeah.
Saddam Hussein.
I feel weird.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's that's the Saddam effect.
Yeah.
It's kind of like you both need a shower and a jog.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I need one of Saddam's weird murder jogs.
Murder lamps.
I just got to go on a walk and shoot some animals.
Yeah.
Wow.
All right.
The Saddam Effect00:03:34
Well, Jamie, you want to plug your pluggables?
Please, I will.
You can listen to my podcast, The Bechdel Cast.
It comes out every Thursday.
And you can follow me on.
You used to be able to follow me on Twitter.
Now you can't.
Now you can follow me on Instagram at JamieChrist Superstar.
And that's where I can be found.
Fantastic.
Join us next week when we will be talking about someone else terrible.
I am Robert Evans.
You can find Behind the Bastards on social media at BastardsPod.
You can find us on the internet at www.behindthebastards.com, where we'll have pictures and videos and all sorts of other content about these terrible people and their weird, weird lives.
So catch me every Tuesday.
I'm Robert Evans.
You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK, Two Letters.
And I'll be doing this every week.
So be sure to check in and learn something fascinating about someone awful.
Bye.
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