Anne Applebaum on Saddam Hussein's reign of terror. A snippet:
The Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya, whose book "Republic of Fear" remains the definitive account of Hussein's Iraq, estimates that in 1980, one-fifth of the economically active Iraqi labor force were members of the army, the political militias, the police or the secret police: One in five people, in other words, was employed to carry out institutional violence. The result was a country in which the families of political victims received their body parts in the mail; in which tens of thousands of Kurds could be murdered with chemical weapons; and in which, as Hussein's truncated trial demonstrated, the dictator could sign a document randomly condemning 148 people to death -- among them an 11-year-old boy -- and feel no remorse or regret. As his defense team argued, he believed this was his prerogative as head of state.
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