Saddam Hussein — 24 years of terror, executed at the end of a rope

At dawn on 30 December 2006, Saddam Hussein was hanged in a former intelligence headquarters in the Baghdad district of Kadhimiya, convicted by an Iraqi tribunal of crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 men and boys from the Shia town of Dujail a quarter of a century earlier. The execution, filmed on a smuggled phone and circulated within hours, was the legal endpoint of a regime that had already collapsed: in April 2003 a United States–led invasion had toppled his government in three weeks, and in December of that year American soldiers had pulled him, dishevelled and armed but unresisting, from a camouflaged pit near a farmhouse outside his home city of Tikrit. He had ruled Iraq, a country of some 25 million people sitting atop the world’s then fourth-largest oil reserves, for 24 years.

Saddam rose through the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, which seized power in Iraq in 1968. As vice president and security enforcer under the ailing Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, he was the regime’s real strongman for a decade before formally taking the presidency on 16 July 1979. He marked his arrival with a televised purge: scores of senior Ba’athists were named as traitors before a stunned party congress, dragged out, and shot. It set the pattern. Power flowed through a narrow circle of kin and clansmen from the Tikrit region, enforced by overlapping secret-police agencies and a pervasive cult of personality, and rested on the proceeds of nationalized oil.

His rule was defined by catastrophic wars and mass atrocity. In September 1980 he invaded revolutionary Iran, beginning an eight-year war that killed an estimated half a million people or more on both sides and in which Iraq used chemical weapons. In the war’s final phase his regime turned poison gas and mass executions on Iraq’s own Kurds in the Anfal campaign of 1988, killing tens of thousands and razing thousands of villages; the gas attack on Halabja alone killed thousands of civilians in hours. In August 1990 he invaded and annexed Kuwait, provoking a US-led coalition that expelled his army in 1991, after which he drowned Shia and Kurdish uprisings in blood.

The regime that survived 1991 and a decade of crippling sanctions did not survive 2003. Saddam fell to external force, not internal revolt, but the structure he had built — personalist, sectarian, hollowed of institutions — left no orderly successor and a society primed for the insurgency and civil war that followed. His victims, at Dujail, in the southern marshes, at Halabja and across Kurdistan, remain the measure of what his rule cost.

Manuel Noriega — Panama’s strongman, captured in a US invasion

Shortly after midnight on 20 December 1989, some 27,000 American troops poured into Panama in the largest US military operation since Vietnam, with the explicit aim of removing one man: General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the country’s de facto ruler. Noriega evaded capture for four days, then took refuge in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission in Panama City. For ten days US forces blasted loud rock music at the nunciature to wear him down. On 3 January 1990 he walked out and surrendered, was flown to Miami, and became the only foreign head of government ever brought to the United States, tried in a US court, and imprisoned there.

Noriega had ruled Panama from behind the scenes since 1983, never as president but as commander of the Panamanian Defense Forces — the general who installed and discarded civilian figureheads at will. He was a creature of intelligence work: head of Panama’s military intelligence under the populist strongman Omar Torrijos, and a paid asset of the US Central Intelligence Agency, on its payroll from the early 1970s. For years Washington valued him as a Cold War partner in Central America, tolerating what it knew of his corruption and ties to drug traffickers because he was useful against the leftist governments of Cuba and Nicaragua.

That bargain curdled in the late 1980s. As evidence of Noriega’s involvement in cocaine trafficking and money laundering became impossible to ignore, US federal grand juries in Florida indicted him in 1988. He responded by tightening his grip, surviving coup attempts, and, in May 1989, annulling a presidential election that the opposition had clearly won. By December his rubber-stamp assembly had named him head of government and declared that a “state of war” existed with the United States; the next day Panamanian troops killed an unarmed US Marine. President George H. W. Bush, citing the protection of American lives, democracy, the Panama Canal, and the war on drugs, ordered the invasion.

The operation toppled Noriega quickly but at real cost to Panamanians. Several hundred to over a thousand civilians died, by varying estimates, and the poor Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, near Noriega’s headquarters, was gutted by fire, displacing some 20,000 people. The opposition’s election winner, Guillermo Endara, was sworn in as president on a US base as the fighting began. The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to condemn the invasion as a violation of international law. Noriega spent the rest of his life in custody — in the United States, then France, then Panama — dying in a Panama City hospital in 2017.