Saddam Hussein--supposing that was he on the grainy videotape aired last week barely three hours after the opening salvo intended to kill him--hardly seemed himself. Pictured alone in a cramped makeshift studio, the dictator, 65, looked shaken and tired, his face puffy behind big spectacles he rarely wears in public. His words, rambling and repetitive, were read from scribbled notes on a large pad held in a hand more often seen brandishing a rifle. In that context, his characteristic call to Iraqis to "draw your sword" to defeat "little, evil Bush" sounded like the recoil of a man just hit by a thunderclap of reality.
During nearly 24 years in power, Iraq's strongman never seemed to believe he might face a moment like this. He has always been preternaturally good at dispatching his enemies before they could get to him. And he plans ahead. Beneath the opulent marble palaces from which he has ruled, he built deep concrete bunkers reinforced with steel, stocked with weapons and linked to underground escape tunnels--the architectural metaphor for a dictatorship whose grandiose facade has rested on a foundation of insecurity. As U.S. bombs blasted apart those last-resort fortifications, even Saddam presumably had to take U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seriously when he declared, "The days of the Saddam Hussein regime are numbered."
How did Iraq's tenacious leader arrive at this pass? Saddam, after all, built a spectacular career out of survival. Perhaps his luck simply ran out: in the current President Bush, he may have met an adversary even more single-mindedly determined than he is. Still, Saddam could have saved his regime by coming completely clean on his weapons-of-mass-destruction program. He could have saved himself by giving up political power. Other modern strongmen staring at a similar fate, from the Shah of Iran to Congo's Mobutu Sese Seko, have done it, and Saddam was suspected of stashing away enough secret wealth to make it easy. But he did not, and the reasons lie very much in his own biography.
War was surely not Saddam's choice. He played his diplomatic cards as cunningly as he could to avoid it. But that was as far as he could go. Forsaking unconventional weapons, from his point of view, would have invited his own demise. His obsession with them seems inexplicable to many minds, but it made sense in Saddam's. The weapons, symbolizing Iraq's prowess, are what sustained his claims to grandeur. They made him a feared player on the world stage and earned him dominance among regional rivals. They were crucial to keeping domestic opposition in check--no Iraqi forgets that Saddam sprayed poison gas on rebellious Kurds in the late '80s. And Saddam believed that possession of those toxic weapons forestalled defeat in his war with Iran and later saved his regime at the end of Gulf War I.