Departures sometimes define dictators

? Dictators die harder than most of us. Having wielded unlimited power in life, they seem to be sustained by a stubborn belief in their ability to stare down death too. But secret police, arbitrary executions and torture finally provide no lasting defense against their own date with the grim reaper.

That lends a particularly morbid, even pathetic, quality to the last days of Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, as it did to those of Francisco Franco and of many other tyrants-in-extremis before el rais Saddam and el jefe Fidel were confronted, respectively, with a hangman’s rope and the withering ravages of disease.

Survival is the dictator’s primary occupation – as well as his justification for ruthlessness. “His main contribution to life, finally, is fear; but fear such as thunder, cancer or madness may provoke,” author William Kennedy wrote of the fictional caudillo that Gabriel Garcia Marquez created in “The Autumn of the Patriarch.” Facing death, the dictator is “the embodiment of egocentric evil unleashed,” Kennedy continued in a masterful 1976 book review for The New York Times.

The year before, Garcia Marquez was in Madrid, as was I, for Franco’s 40 days and nights of dying, inch by inch. Moreover, meetings I had with Saddam around the same time and later with Castro instantly gave me the impression that neither intended to go into the night quietly – or at all. They could not and would not let others pretend to command their people, or allow history to tamper with the image they willed for themselves.

When he ruled Iraq, Saddam left nothing to chance. A visitor who might greet him had to wash his or her hands with a mysterious blue liquid and pass through a maze of metal detectors in his vast palace. Among the scores of guards and aides, only one was trusted to know which room Saddam would use to greet the visitor.

For years after that encounter, I published open letters to Saddam urging him to get out of the dictator business, or at least quit slaughtering his nation’s Kurds, Shiites and Sunni dissidents. I can stop. The approach of the hangman’s rope finally focused his mind on my point.

Or so it seemed in the farewell letter that Saddam’s lawyers claim the deposed tyrant wrote. Released one day after Iraq’s highest court upheld his death sentence last week, the letter urges Iraqis “not to hate, because hatred does not leave space for a person to be fair.” Even U.S. troops should not be hated.

The lawyers would have us remember Saddam as a pious, forgiving ruler concerned about his people’s welfare. They see this as a useful legal tactic. But I doubt it is the way Saddam wanted us to remember him. On the witness stand in his two trials, he remained generally fierce and defiant, refusing to be anything other than a man whom others must fear or else.

Those who would blame all of Iraq’s current evils on the American occupation are already busy airbrushing Saddam’s image. But we cannot let death obscure his role in creating the inferno that is Iraq today. He leaves behind a country successfully recast in his own ferocious image to a degree far greater than I had imagined.

Before 2003, I believed that Iraqis were largely a people held hostage by Saddam, his murderous clan and the Baathist machine. But far more Iraqis turned out to be like Saddam – ready to use torture and assassination in the pursuit of wealth and power – than the world’s best intelligence agencies had predicted, as David Kay’s official analysis of the CIA failure to understand pre-invasion Iraq details. These Iraqis are Saddam’s enduring legacy.

I suspect that Saddam preferred to go out in a grim finale that will be portrayed by his disciples as victor’s justice than to waste away, in solitude and yet under the public’s watchful gaze, as Castro is doing in Havana.

Cuba’s situation after Castro will not be as traumatic or bloody as Iraq, in large part because Castro did not feel it necessary to rule as harshly and sadistically as did Saddam. As Garcia Marquez, Castro’s friend, has written: “The Latin American reality is totally Rabelaisian.” It misshapes Latin dictators in ways different than do the blood feuds of the Middle East.

But both dedicated their lives to what Garcia Marquez calls “the solitary vice of power.” Their deaths will lighten their crimes and responsibilities not a whit.