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Iraq is Saddam, he likes to say, and Saddam is Iraq. He has been a ruler, says Coughlin, who "has always had one eye on history." He has longed for his name to go down in Arab history alongside those of the culture's great heroes, like Nebuchadnezzar, who drove the Jews into Babylonian captivity, and Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the Christian Crusaders. He wanted to fulfill the modern-day promise of Egypt's great nationalist Gamal Abdul Nasser, restoring Arab unity and the greater Arab nation to its rightful place in the world. In recent years the standard-bearer of secular Baathism even turned to prayer to exploit Islamic ardor, building gigantic mosques and lacing his speeches with the language of jihad.
That great need for the most dramatic of legacies, U.S. war planners fear, might make Saddam choose not only death but a Samsonian version of it: the dictator, as psychiatrist Post imagines it, "lashing out with all the resources at his disposal." President Bush must agree, which is why he sent those bombs crashing into Saddam's bunkers, hoping to get Saddam before he could bring down Armageddon on anyone else. --Reported by Douglas Waller and Adam Zagorin/Washington, Aparisim Ghosh and Helen Gibson/London, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Simon Robinson/Nairobi