Saddam Hussein

Saadoun Hammadi, a longtime ally of Saddam Hussein and former Iraqi prime minister, has died, a Baath party spokesman and the party's Web site said. Mr. Hammadi died Wednesday in a German hospital, party spokesman Hisham Odeh said. He was in his late 70s and was believed to be suffering from leukemia. Under Hussein, Mr. Hammadi served stints as foreign and oil minister and was speaker of the Iraqi parliament until the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. After Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, Hussein sought to portray himself as more politically flexible and installed Mr. Hammadi, a Shiite, as prime minister in 1991.

WASHINGTON --Vice President Dick Cheney, lashing out at Democrats for the first time since his top deputy's felony conviction, resumed his controversial claims yesterday that the war in Iraq is the central front in the worldwide U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Cheney linked Iraq and al-Qaida even though post-invasion reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the presidential Commission on Intelligence Capabilities found no link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida before the U.S.-led invasion on March 19, 2003.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Bombers and gunmen killed more than 110 Shiite Muslim pilgrims observing a religious ritual and wounded more than 250 others in scores of sectarian attacks yesterday that threatened to derail a renewed effort to stabilize Iraq. In the worst incident, two suicide bombers walking among the pilgrims in the southern city of Hilla detonated their explosive belts within two minutes of each other, killing at least 77 and injuring 127, according to local police. Around Baghdad, gunmen, car bombs and roadside bombs killed at least 35 and injured 137 others.

WASHINGTON -- As the Bush administration began assembling its case for war, analysts across the U.S. intelligence community were disturbed by the report of a secret Pentagon team that concluded that Iraq had significant ties to al-Qaida. Analysts from the CIA and other agencies "disagreed with more than 50 percent" of 26 findings that the Pentagon team laid out in a controversial paper, according to testimony yesterday from Thomas F. Gimble, the acting inspector general of the Pentagon.

Because of geography and the tie of Shiism, Iran is destined to play a role in Iraq. The U.S. might as well work toward making that role a positive one rather than a destructive one. In recent days, Iran has been accused of providing components for explosives used by Shiite militias, and suspected of being tied to the kidnapping and killing of five U.S. soldiers in Karbala; it also wants to establish a bank in Iraq and help finance reconstruction....

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A top international human rights group yesterday called on the Iraqi government to halt the execution of two aides to Saddam Hussein as a trial against the dead dictator and his deputies resumed in Baghdad. The planned executions "highlight the Iraqi government's disturbing disregard for human rights and the rule of law," said the strongly worded statement from the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, adding to an increasingly heated debate over the killing of Hussein's and his cohorts.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- In a final blasphemy, Saddam Hussein, who spent most of his life as a murdering secularist, went to his justified death holding a Quran and offering his soul to God, if God would accept it. If God does, He will have to commute the sentences of Mr. Hussein's mass-murdering predecessors, including Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. These days, not much that makes religious sense comes out of Iraq, or anywhere else in the maniacal Middle East,...

World is better off with Hussein gone Saddam Hussein has been hanged by his former subjects for his enormously evil deeds. And Iraq - and the world - are a far better place ("Executed," Dec. 30). I hope that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syria's Bashar Assad learn from this example. Mr. Hussein's crimes were on a world-historical scale, rivaling in brutality, if not sheer numbers, those of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Only the willfully blind choose to ignore such enormous evil.

I was sitting with President Jalal Talabani of Iraq last month when Iraqi television was broadcasting the trial of Saddam Hussein. The hearings had shifted into their second phase, concerning the mass murder of Iraq's Kurdish minority in the 1980s, and video footage of gassing and shooting had been played in court, to ram home the anguished statements of numberless survivors. There was something both satisfying and unsettling about the juxtaposition. It is fitting that Iraq's first elected president is a Kurd, but I couldn't help noticing that he didn't much want to be drawn out on the subject.

The year ended yesterday with Saddam Hussein in the grave. Alive, he wielded a personal power that defied understanding - he terrified and galvanized the Iraqi people, and he transfixed President Bush and the neoconservatives who came to see him as the devil incarnate. In the face of death he showed neither remorse nor fear, but a disturbingly fierce and self-possessed defiance. He was the conjurer who whipped up the forces that are consuming Iraq today, and that have plunged Sunnis, Shiites, jihadists, Baathists, Americans into war. A conjurer: This was a man with no ties to al Qaida or 9/11, with no weapons of mass destruction.