Even in his fall, Saddam Hussein was not real. It was his metallic double, for so long a soaring figure of fear and power, now chained and broken, who fell, in operatic slow motion, into the liberated ground, to be dragged through the streets of joy towards the final destination of every dictator: the souvenir shop. It doesn't matter whether the original one is alive in a bunker or lying dead in the rubble. Saddam, in the true tradition of dictators, sought immortality in monumental fantasies, in painted mythology, and on April 9, it was his moment of mortality-the bathetic farewell of the last action hero among dictators.

Like a true dictator, Saddam sought immortality in monumental fantasies.

The Saddam story, just another one of revolutionary conceit morphing into absolute terror, was perhaps waiting for such a finale. And in Iraq, it has a historical resonance: in 1958, when the Hashemite dynasty was overthrown in a military coup, the mob dragged the regent's body through the streets of Baghdad. Five years later, when the coup master of 1958 was killed by the Baa'thists, his bullet-ridden body was a televised item worthy of national celebration. Saddam, one of the original Baa'thist thugs, if he is still alive, must be trembling in nightmares for there are so many ghosts to conspire against him.

He was, after all, one of the most ingenious architects of terror in modern history-and graveyards are his legacy. Like his predecessors elsewhere in the world, he too was the wayward child of a dream: Baa'thism. In the beginning it was the slogan of an Arab renaissance and, at its idealistic best, it was pan-Arabism with love, sort of, very much an ideology born out of the poetic sensibility of one of its founding fathers, Michel Aflaq, a Christian from Damascus. When the ideology assumed power, in military uniform, what happened was a familiar transformation: from romance to terror. Wasn't there a text that dreamed of heaven on earth and of the creation of a Brand New Man behind the Great Terror of Stalin? Somewhere in Saddamised Iraq, too, beyond the newly emptied torture cells and prisons, there is an orphaned narrative of a great Arabian dream-"One Arab Nation with an Eternal Mission".

Saddam turned Baa'thism into a theology of violence and Iraq into what Kanan Makiya, a dissident Iraqi intellectual in exile, calls the Republic of Fear. Fear is the most effective weapon of mass destruction. Hitler used it, Stalin used it, Mao used it, Pol Pot used it and every liberator-turned-tyrant in Latin America and Africa used it for survival. In classical dictatorships, the ruler, permanently haunted by the phantom enemy, transfers private fears into the public arena. According to his co-biographers Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam's outlook on life neatly fits into the bleak vision of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes: "He perceives the world as a violent, hostile environment in which the will to self-preservation rules. In such a setting, as Hobbes says, the war of 'all against all' is constant and a man is condemned to a life that is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'."

Self-preservation here means the annihilation of the enemy-if there is not one, one will have to be manufactured. And that explains the Baa'thist bloodlust-also Saddam's legitimate status as a desert Caligula. He was quoted as saying soon after taking up the presidency in 1979: "I am far cleverer than they are. I know they are conspiring to kill me long before they actually start planning to do it. This enables me to get them before they have the faintest chance of striking at me." That was Saddam's own version of pre-emption. At home, it was a purge equalling the Great Terror of Stalinism. The decade-long war with Iran and the conquest of Kuwait were the extra-territorial extension of the Mesopotamian horror show.

Saddam thought the show would be eternal, for he had long ago taken leave from reality. He was simulated Saladin, the slayer of Crusaders, and he was reborn Nebuchadnezzar, the ideal king of Babylon. He needed the protection of fantasy as he went on to expand the dominion of fear and terror. As it happened, elsewhere, the dictator was a jaded museum piece, as in Havana, or a comic strip villain, as in Pyongyang, or a tin-pot looter, as in one of those African capitals; he alone was the hyperactive butcher, daring to strike, within and without, and willing to seek an Arab final solution-all for the eternity of the paranoid.

In Baghdad today, it is the demolition of the fear apparatus of the paranoid. In the liberated streets-the Arab version of Moscow or Berlin in the evening of the 20th century-it is the funeral rites of Saddamism. At this moment the man himself is worthless anyway, his exaggerated metallic copies will have some value at the junk market-or in the souvenir shop.