Love, Repression, and Drama
Interesting psychological profile of Saddam Hussein in Time, though it's no great to surprise to learn that his quest for nuclear weapons is bound up with with his grandiosity and desire to emulate Stalin.
The incidental details are the most interesting. Did you know that Saddam stopped wearing the military dictator costume and switched to tailored suits because he was advised to do so by image-counselor Kofi Annan? I didn't. (That's a "local legend," anyway, according to the article.) I was struck by this also:
just last week a play based on a novel widely believed to have been written by Saddam, Zabibah and the King, opened at Baghdad's elegant new theater. It tells of a lonely monarch in love with a virtuous commoner who is raped on Jan. 17—the day in 1991 that the U.S. attacked Iraq to expel it from Kuwait, which Saddam had invaded the previous August—and killed by a jealous husband egged on by foreign infidels. The king decides he must follow the martyred Zabibah's advice: only strict measures keep the people in line.