Behind the Bastards - Saddam Hussein: Erotic Novelist

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

How well do you know Saddam Hussein? In Episode 1, Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus (The Bechdel Cast) and they discuss Saddam Hussein's childhood, his career as an erotic novelist, his demise and much more. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, I am Robert Evans, and this is, again, Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the world. Today we are talking about Saddam Hussein, dictator, genocide ear, and romance novelist. With me today is Jamie Loftus, writer, podcaster, other art maker of things.

Yeah, I'm a comedian. And a comedian. Are you ready to get your Saddam on? I am fully ready. All right, well, Saddam Hussein, Abdelman, was born on April 28, 1937, and we know that much for sure. Everything else about Saddam's early life is kind of up in the air.

Reading about his back story is a little like asking the Joker to explain where his scars came from. You get different stories depending on who you talk to. Right, there's the Jared Leto version of Saddam Hussein, and then there's the Heath Ledger interpretation, and everyone brings something different to the table. Yeah, and I went full ledger on this one. You went, oh wow, okay, inspiring.

Okay, well yeah. It is a little bit. So, you know, early on Saddam is kind of an underdog from the start. His dad disappears like six months before he's born. He was probably murdered by bandits, but we don't really know. Saddam's older brother died while he was still in the womb. One common myth states that his mom tried to kill herself

and abort her baby after these deaths. She leapt in front of a bus and was reportedly saved by a local Jewish family, and after they stopped her from committing abortion slash suicide, she is alleged to have screamed, I'm carrying Satan in my belly. This fetus has already killed his father and his brother, and wants to be the only man in the family.

Okay. Really quick. This, I feel like, where people bring up the baby Hitler paradox all the time of like, if you could go back in time and kill a baby, if you could save six million people, would you? I feel like this anecdote effectively answers that question. Because she tried.

His own mom was like, you know what? When something is awry, there's, wow. This isn't going to end well. I can tell it like the second trimester. So the real villains were the people who saved the babies, effectively answering the baby Hitler paradox. Kill the baby. 100% kill the baby.

Yeah, the villain in this story definitely isn't Saddam's mom. She tried to do the right thing. No. God, she was sacrificing herself. To kill this evil baby. To kill the evil baby. That's upset. I mean, yeah, kill the baby. I'm learning. Kill the baby. Yeah, I feel like we answered that question.

Well, please bring this argument to court in a few years when I kill the baby. Oh, when time travel exists? Or are you just going to find another baby? There's evil babies born all the time. That's the really horrifying thing is there are. There's an evil baby born every day. Right now, someone is being born

who will later really hurt people. And yeah, I have that feeling because every time I see a baby, they almost all look like Dick Cheney. And it's like a percentage of them will turn out to be like Dick Cheney. We just know that. It's crazy. My best friend just had a baby

and I look at her son and I'm like, you're going to gaslight someone so hard one day. They're going to be so upset, but right now you're so damn cute. Right now, you haven't done anything terrible, but I can just see you kicking a dog in 24 years. You're feeling nothing. Nothing at all.

Just bone quiet on the inside. So Saddam's mom did eventually give birth to a healthy baby boy. She named him Saddam, which means one who confronts. So solid name game. Okay. I mean, in terms of naming a baby

you already view to be satanic. To be the devil. Seems a little on the nose, but sure. I mean, that's what he spent his whole life doing. That's true. His family was very, very poor. His hometown of Al-Ajjah was a very violent place, so he grew up tough.

One version of the Saddam myth says that he was enchanted by math, learning, reading, and writing, but that his mother told him his destiny was as a farmer and she wouldn't let him go to school. Okay. So she's trying to suppress the devil. Like, let's not educate the devil. Let's just give him a rake and hope for the best.

Yeah. The last thing this boy needs is math. Wow. I've got a lot of respect for Saddam's mom right now. She tried. She's doubling down on thinking her son is pure evil. Yeah. She really put in the work to try to stop this. Wow. Okay.

But yeah. So Saddam's home was a one-room mud brick hovel, no electricity, no running water. Just him and mom? His brothers are dead or his brother is dead. He said to have had a rough upbringing, the other kids in town mocked him for not having a dad

and because he had no older brother there was nobody to defend him, so he started carrying an iron bar as a weapon. This is like six-year-old Saddam walking around with an iron bar, just beating other kids. Wow. Just like Tanya Harding.

He's like colluling everyone in the village. All right. Yeah. Well, and he wound up with a stepfather at one point, but his stepfather was apparently quite vicious. His name was Hassan the Liar. So maybe not great choice on mom's part there. Wow.

Hassan lost me for the first time in this story. Yeah. Maybe don't marry Hassan the Liar. I mean, especially if he comes with that title. Yeah. Even imagining the house party they meet and it's like, you know, I'm Hassan the Liar. Hello.

Maybe you like cow shit. Maybe he's like, I'm Hassan. Date five, you're like, oh, it's the Liar. That's what he was saying the whole time. Hassan's weapon of choice was a large pipe soaked in boiling tar, which he would use to beat Saddam with. Whoa. Oh, that's horrible.

I know. There's a little bit of this story where you're kind of on Saddam's side. Okay. Okay. I'm on this journey. So one of the peculiarities about writing about Saddam is that you either get really sympathetic towards him or wildly negative towards him, depending on who writes his backstory. But it's pretty safe to say either way

his childhood was shit. Like if you look at the CIA analysis of Saddam, you can see the CIA analysts like feeling sorry for little kids about Saddam. Really? Okay. That's like a normal part of learning about Saddam. Right. So one night when he was around 10,

he was said to have snuck out of bed and gathered up his few possessions into a hobo bundle and made it to the town across the desert or whatever to find some other members of his family. Across the desert? Well, a little bit of a desert. Not a lot of desert. He wanted to go to school and his mom wouldn't let him.

So he sneaks out and he finds some relatives and he says, I want to go to the city where my uncle lives. Can you guys help me get there? And they say yes. And they give him cab fare and a gun. He's 10. He's 10. Now I'm like, this kid just wants to learn math

and he needs, and he's given all these weapons. You want to go to the city, huh? Can you imagine being 10 years old and being like, I really, I want to learn math so much. I'm going to run away from my family. God, I would have just been a farmer. Well, and their answer being,

oh, you want to learn math? Well, here's a gun and some money. The price of math may be your life. Yeah, you may have to kill somebody to get to math. So no one goes with him. He goes by himself. Yeah, he goes by himself. He finds someone to drive him and has a gun in case someone attacks him on the road.

Okay. But he gets to Decrete, which is the big city, comparatively, and his uncle takes him in and Saddam starts to attend school. That does not go very well though because he was Saddam Hussein and he gets expelled. And when he's expelled, he goes to his uncle

and his uncle gives him a gun and says... But he already has a gun. Yeah, well, he gives him another gun. So far he has an iron bar and two guns and he's not even 11 years old. Yeah, he's not even 11 years old and when he gets expelled, his uncle gives him a gun

and says, go make the principal take you back into the school. Wow. Saddam does. It's not on the... It's like age 11. Hold the phone. This is... So he's like a fifth or sixth grader

and he has to go... He's like, I want to learn math. God damn it. I want to read. And he... Okay, jeez. You got to give him credit. He is dedicated to that education.

He has had more of a life than both of us and he's... He's put back into school after threatening violence on the principal. Because he threatened the principal with violence. Because he threatens the principal. Yeah, so he gets to go back into school. His uncle became his childhood role model.

His uncle's name was Kairala. And Kairala had, before this point, spent six years in prison for fighting against the British occupation of Iraq. He was kind of a Nazi sympathizer. And by kind of, I mean, he was 100% a Nazi sympathizer. So he's...

Can we... Okay, this is actually a question. When we say Nazi sympathizer, are we just saying Nazi? Well, it's a little more complicated because he was a lot of why he liked the Nazis is because the Nazis were fighting the British and the British weren't in control of his country.

So it's not... But he was also super anti-Semitic. So he's a Nazi. He's like a Nazi sympathizer and also anti-Semitic. Well, yeah, and the reason that Saddam idolized his uncle is because his uncle was an author. Okay.

And his uncle's written work that was most famous was a pamphlet called Those Whom God Should Not Have Created, Persians, Jews, and Flies. Okay. I was about to compliment his use of whom, but I take it back. I mean, he got the whom right.

He did a good use of whom and a bad use of everyone else's time. Everything else is terrible. Geez. That pamphlet would go on to have a big impact on a young Saddam because his foreign policy as dictator of Iraq was based around opposing the Persians, Iran,

and Israel. I'm not aware of any anti-fly policies, but I assumed they made it in there somehow, too. So now I'm like not on Saddam's side again because it's like imagine using... I use my uncle's like weird, creepy fan fiction account as a way

to direct a country. We would all be X-Files B characters frantically having sex with each other, so you can't just take your uncle's literature and get to heart too much. Big ups on your uncle. Mine is more like Frazier fanfic,

which is uncomfortable. That's a fancy uncle. I would prefer that to X-Files. We're getting into genre stuff. Molder and that swamp monster thing, that's a hot mix. I'll give you his email. So Saddam

moves to Baghdad with his uncle to attend secondary school, which is what non-Americans call high school. So now he's a teen... Teen Saddam. Teen heartthrob Saddam. I'm going to show you this picture of young Saddam. I saw that picture when I came in and I was like,

God, I hate that he's hot. He's not a bad looking guy. It says Saddam young at the top. That was the working title of this podcast. Love it. Saddam moves to Baghdad with his uncle. He graduates high school. He spends three years in law school

before he drops out to join the radical Baath political party. The Bathists, in short, are a pan-Arab party. They think that all the different Arab states should be one big country. This is after the Ottomans have fallen, so that's kind of what they want. They're sort of socialist, but they're also anti-communists, so the CIA really likes them at this point.

Okay. So in 1958, there's a big military coup that overthrows the king of Iraq and the Kossom winds up in charge of the country. The CIA didn't like Kossom, because he was kind of pro-Soviet Union, and since the Baath party also hated Kossom, the CIA was like, these guys are clearly our friends.

They've become sympathizers. Okay, got it. So Saddam was working as a teacher during this period of time. What? Yeah, teaching. I'm not sure what. I haven't found any details about it. He's not on rate, my professor. Where are his students at?

What kind of teacher was Saddam? Teaching? I mean, I'm going to guess like teenagers, but I really have no idea. We should not like teens around Saddam. Better if he's teaching like kindergarten? Definitely funnier if he's teaching kindergarten.

Saddam helping little kids put blocks in the right hole? You know, I think that that is a good way to neutralize a threat, is to just put them around a little cutie pies and tell them what the color blue is. Well, a lot of these monsters are really good with kids. Hitler probably would have been an alright teacher.

So he's teaching probably teenagers. Yeah, he's teaching probably teenagers, but I don't know exactly. I'm a hack. Hot teacher Saddam. Yeah, hot teacher Saddam, and his friends wind up getting the attention of the CIA.

And the CIA is like, you guys want to assassinate the president? And Saddam and his friends are like, yeah, we want to assassinate the president. And so the CIA gives them all weapons and helps them plan a daring murder. It is crazy how many people are just down to give Saddam the same guns.

That's his whole child. It's just people giving him guns. What is it about him? Everyone's just like, we've got to arm this man. He's a trustworthy man. You know what this guy's problem is? Not enough guns. I like everything, but what I really could use

is more violence. What if we just strap a gun to him? Now the CIA is giving Saddam a gun. Yeah, and so they get set up to go assassinate President Qasem. And Saddam's job in this assassination is to provide cover for everybody while they run up to the president's car

with machine guns and gun him down. Things instantly got fucked up. Depending on who you believe, Saddam either got so excited when the gunfire started that he rushed up to shoot the president too, or he panicked before the attempt even started and fired his gun into the air. We don't really know what happened,

but the whole attempt has been described as a farce. One assassin was given the wrong bullets for his gun by the CIA. Another assassin got a hand grenade caught in the lining of his coat. So it was just a disaster. The president survived. Saddam got shot in the leg as he was fleeing.

Very Noel Coward vibe to that assassination. Very silly sound. Yeah, you could imagine, like, Yackety Sacks being a solid, like, assassin soundtrack for that. Are we in the 60s yet, or is he still, like, in college age? I think this is the early 60s,

because Qasem took power in 58. Got it. This is Saddam's 60s. It has hilariously failed assassination attempts. Okay. So Saddam gets shot in the leg. The official version of the story, and by that I mean, like, the Iraqi government's official version of the story,

was that he and a friend had to remove the bullet with a razor blade and scissors, so they get a little, like, boondock saints thing there. Okay. And they claimed he was still in high school at the time, and he was on track with the actual time frame. But, like, the version of the story, Saddam wanted people to believe is that he, like,

removed the bullet from his own leg, and then went back to school. Went to math class. I mean, that is a narrative that is exciting to hear. That is a cool narrative, yeah. I got boondocked, and then I went to algebra too. Wasn't going to miss my fucking quiz or whatever. I don't know enough algebra to make an algebra.

Can't fault him for that. My quiz. That's 6% of the grade! Oh, man. But we actually know that he fled the country immediately, so he wouldn't get murdered, as suffer of his friends were.

The CIA and the Egyptian intelligence forces helped him escape to Cairo, where he was put up in a nice apartment and apparently spent all of his time playing dominoes for several years. Wait, for several years? Yeah, yeah, he's there for a few years. Just playing dominoes. Playing dominoes. That is a

sinister game to be playing for many years. You know that scene in V for Vendetta? It's my least favorite scene of all time, where V has set up a room full of dominoes for this one, and it's like, who, it took you, you only live here.

This must have taken 16 hours, and you're just like, hey, Natalie Portman, check this shit out. And then he knocks down the whole thing. You're just like, what are you doing? It's such a crazy person move. Could there be a bigger red flag other than refusing to show your face?

That movie's infuriating, anyways. I'm sure the reality is he was playing dominoes with other people at cafes, but I like to imagine him for just three straight years alone in his apartment just building dominoes. Right, we don't. I guess, yeah, dominoes, I forget dominoes is also a game.

There's a game? I imagine him in a ballroom just assembling dominoes in different patterns and trying to get people to be like, hey, you know what would be really cool? So, 1963 rolls around. Qasem gets assassinated,

and Saddam is able to return to Iraq. Assassinated by a different crew? Yeah, somebody else, not Saddam. I'm sure the CIA was still involved. Saddam goes back to Iraq, but it turned out the new government wasn't a big fan of him and his fellow Bathis either. So he gets arrested in 64

and sent to prison. Thankfully, Iraqi prisons in the 60s kind of acted on the honor system. So after two years of imprisonment, Saddam convinced his guards to let he and some friends go to a restaurant on their way to court. While he was in the bathroom, he walked out of the back door.

I mean, that's fully on the jail. Yeah, that's all them. Fully on them. That is a wild policy. I also thought you were going to say fortunately, prisons in Iraq had dominoes, so he was fine. I assume he's dominoing all throughout this period.

His life was basically unchanged. So he gets out. Yeah, he gets out. He rises through the ranks of the Bath Party and in July 17th, 1968, he helps to launch a coup that finally puts his party in power. Here's a quote from a book I found

about how that morning went down. He began by bringing out all of the weapons and uniforms he had hidden in the house. His wife, Sajida, helped in the preparations as did their son, Uday, who ran around the room picking up hand grenades from the floor, bringing them one by one to his father in the house.

Oh, scary. When did he get a son? Oh, yeah, I mean, he's got a wife and kids by this day. That kind of happens after he's out of prison and such. Oh, okay. So he's like, you know, I'm really going to pull it together now. I'm going to join an extremist party. I'm going to have a wife and kid.

He's getting shit done. So his kids touching grenades. Good, good, good, good, good. I mean, there's grenades all over Iraq. They love those things. There's a lot of aesthetic biography by Nita Rinfrew. You can find it online if you want. It's very much questioned,

but I am choosing to believe that particular depiction because it warms my heart. Right. I mean, a moment for fatherhood. Yeah, that's some quality dadding. So the coup goes off without a hitch. Saddam becomes the vice president. He's number two to a guy named Hassan al-Bakr.

Well, vice president Saddam finishes his law degree and enrolls in the University of Baghdad, where he attends classes in disguise. Whoa, that is a bad movie. That's a bad movie. Secret vice president? Yeah, student Mike Pence.

He's just sitting in a biology class getting angrier and angrier. He can't say anything. Mike Pence putting on a wig and going to someone's chem class. They're just explaining how the age of the universe and he's just red-faced,

sweating and furious, veins bulging on his neck. Did they say anything about what the disguise was because if not, I'm going very silly. Bigger mustache. Gigantic glasses. No, I found no details

on how he was disguised, but he apparently had a lifelong habit of going around in disguise. In disguise? Okay, I'm imagining the disguise kit from The Master of Disguise is one of my favorite movies. He was just dressed up like a gigantic cherry pie

in a college class learning chemistry. That is so bizarre. Someone could have come to his house. We have some ads to break too. We're going to sing a little song for Sweet Lady Capitalism and then when we are back,

we're going to talk about Saddam Hussein's love of reading, his rise to absolute power and his novelist. All that and more after some ads. For most experts, we're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And we are talking about Saddam Hussein, who at this point in our story has gone from an adorable lead pipe wielding child to the vice president of Iraq.

Saddam was vice president for 11 years, although for most of that time he was the power behind the scenes and he was actually in charge of the country. And one of the first things he decided to do as vice president was to spread his love of reading to everyone in Iraq

with what was essentially the most brutal scholastic book fair in history. He required every city and village in Iraq to host reading programs. Attendance was mandatory. He was punished by three years in prison. Every man, woman, and child in the country was forced to learn how to read.

And it worked. Iraq went from majority literate to the vast majority of people there being literate. UNESCO gave Saddam an award. See, that is an unusual move, right? For like an evil ruler

to want people to be literate. Like usually you're like, everyone needs to be as dumb and obedient as possible. That's... God. Saddam was like, you're gonna read and if you don't learn how to read, you're gonna go to fucking prison for three years. You're gonna go to jail.

I imagine it was like specific things you had to read? I mean, I think there's a lot of reading of religious texts and whatnot. During the height of his regime, a lot of fiction was banned, but at this point they weren't banning a lot of books. Like, you know what, just pick up a Junie B. Jones,

pick up an Animorphs, and just go to 10 on 10. 1960s Iraq. If you don't read a new Animorphs chapter book this week, you're going to jail, my friend. You're not. Yeah, they're big fans of the Animorphs. I mean, Saddam was a big reader.

He's a huge Hemingway fan, which, of course. Oh, jeez, what a cock. Really loved Old Man in the Sea. Man, I wonder if he ever picked up any David Foster wallets. Oh, don't get Saddam started at David Foster wallets. He won't shut up.

He stands for Franzen, and it's insufferable. OK. So, we're almost at the end of our positive Saddam stuff, but I do need to mention that he was a surprisingly progressive leader when it came to women's rights. We're talking about the Middle East in the 70s here,

so don't expect, like, a lot. They were allowed to live. They were allowed to work and be in the military. And it's said that he preferred women's advice and insight because he thought they were more honest than men. So... That tracks.

This concludes the good part of Saddam Hussein being in charge of Iraq. OK. He becomes the full president in 1979. He went from, you know, during the time when he was VP, he'd go around and disguise a lot and kind of undercover boss the country.

It seems unnecessary. It seems like something you could delegate to a second party. It's like a thing, though, in Arab folklore. There are layers of rulers hiding amongst the people to learn about their lives and stuff. So it's kind of a thing you do for the PR.

It's like, yeah. Behaving like a fictional character would be like a good... If I was just like, I'm gonna... I'm trying to think of a good example of, like, I'm gonna be a mermaid and die at the end. And that's how I'll prove to you that I'm a cool leader.

So as president, Saddam went from, yeah, undercover thing to making frequent televised visits to various random neighborhoods around the country. Here's another quote from that Renfrew book. Oh, he sounds like... You know what he sounds like?

He sounds like Bill Murray. I find that behavior to be absolutely despicable. I don't like living in a world where Bill Murray is just allowed to show up wherever he wants, and it's news. It's like, he's intruding. Bill Murray showed up at my wedding.

I'm like, he was not invited. He should leave. Saddam's infamous meat poke. Yeah. There's the president just showing up at your house, poking your meat. Bill Murray in your wedding. I just wish Bill Murray didn't do that. So Saddam, at this point,

is very popular. Popular amongst also the other people he's in power with, the other members of the Bath Party. They thought he was intellectual and practical and just a generally nice guy. He was, of course, hiding himself. And in 1979, as he becomes president,

Saddam purges the Bath Party of all of his rivals. He was able to get one member of the party, a guy named Mashadi, to inform on all of his enemies. Mashadi was given the choice to either, number one, confess everything and roll on 22 other members of Congress, basically,

that Saddam wanted purged. Or two, watch his wife and daughters get raped in front of him before being murdered. So that's the choice Saddam gives this guy. Mashadi rolls on his colleagues. Saddam executes all of them. He videotapes the executions and sends copies of the tape to other members of the Bath Party.

That is horrifying and also bold to document. That's okay, so we're in it now. We're in it. Nightmare boss Saddam has arrived. No more book fairs. Book fairs are over.

Well, I mean, everyone can read now. That's good. And in 1980, Saddam Hussein invades Iran. Starts an eight-year war that kills like a million people and bankrupts Iraq. In 1988, he launches a series of chemical weapon attacks against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq and killed around

200,000 people, most of them women and children. Oh, but I thought he was a feminist icon as we discussed earlier. I can't be too strong. Okay, okay. Although he gassed all genders. He did not discriminate

who he would ruthlessly murder. You wouldn't call it a misogynist chemical weapons attack. Okay. It was a woke genocide. An extremely woke genocide. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In 1990, Saddam invades Kuwait. We all know how that worked out.

Yes. Not great for him. So Saddam's life kind of goes off the rails after the Gulf War. Honestly, incredible that it makes it that far. We could do a whole podcast at how messed up Iraq was during that particular time. I'm going to pick just a few of the wildest stories.

Okay. So Saddam had a son-in-law and a second cousin, both at the same time, because, you know, it's a little bit Texan. Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Named Hussein Kamel. He was one of Basadam's favorites and he was appointed both minister of oil

and head of Iraq's weapons development program. Mr. of oil sounds like a fake job. Minister of oil, yeah. You keep being a few. Well, no, actually, get into these. We got to sell them. You're actually going to want to move, right? Hard job. Okay, yeah.

So in 1995, though, he becomes, he and his brother, Saddam Kamel. Saddam Kamel and Saddam Kamel. I know that's a little fusing. Wait, one more time. So Saddam's son-in-laws, the men who marry his daughters, are named Hussein and Saddam Kamel.

So Hussein Kamel, I know, it's a little... It's like they're, like, pranking him. Yeah, it's a common name. Yeah. So they're married to Saddam's daughters, but they wind up falling a foul of Saddam's son, Uday, who's still, well, I don't think he's the heir apparent anymore,

but they're going to kill them and they flee to Jordan, along with Saddam's daughters and a bunch of their friends. Okay. Jordan grants them asylum. Hussein Kamel promises to give the CIA a bunch of inside info on Iraq's WMD program, but he didn't actually have much to give because Iraq wasn't making WMDs anymore.

Right. As we all learned a few years later. Wait, later, yeah. So he starts to become less and less useful for Jordan and the CIA. And for some reason, nobody can really explain he decides to go back to Iraq,

along with his brother. Okay. This is after he's gone on CNN to accuse Saddam of surrounding himself with idiots. So they do that, they talk to the CIA, and then they head back home. Everyone's like, you're going to get murdered the instant you set foot in Iraq,

but they still do it. They're like, what if we didn't? Saddam's like, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. That's the Louise moment, because that's as close as I can get to unpacking that one. There is a little bit of a Thelma and Louise moment

coming in a bit. First off, so that we don't get to, I don't want anyone feeling too sorry for Saddam Kamell and Hussein Kamell. Saddam Kamell, one of the things he was famous for doing a couple of years before this point was he got angry at a guy and he made him drink gasoline,

and then he shot him with incendiary rounds so he would catch on fire. Nobody in this story is a good guy. Okay, so he's like a Tarantino. Yeah. This is the kind of shit that Saddam, if you were close to the Hussein family, when he was in charge, you could do stuff like that.

You could really get creative. You could really get creative with being a monster. It's just important you don't feel sorry for anyone for what comes next, because this is a hell of a story if you can get past that. So, they go back to Iraq. Saddam

orders them to divorce their wives and orders them to show up for judgment and justice. And instead, they hole up in their family house. Okay. Saddam doesn't send the police after them. He doesn't send the military after them. Oh, no. He sends the boy's uncle and his enforcer,

whose nickname was chemical Ali, because he carried out the genocidal chemical weapons attacks. Sounds like a sound club rapper, but sure. Yeah, along with a 40-man tribal hit squad. And before the hit squad arrives, chemical Ali sends the brothers a Honda van filled with weapons and ammunition

so that they can fight. What follows is a 13-hour firefight that kills at least two members of the tribal hit squad. It ends with a rocket barrage that kills one of the brothers, and Hussein Kamal staggers out of the smoky rubble of the house with just the wake of this rocket attack, screams out his name to the sky,

and then is cut down in a hail of gunfire. Why? Because that's how they did shit. That's some puppet master shit. He was like, we could just do this, or... I could take him to prison or 13-hour gun battle. Or a 13-hour gun battle, which is more fun to hear about later. Yeah, and it's pretty badass.

And it ends biblically, too. Shouting your name to the sky and then being shit. I feel like that's almost like giving them a better way to die than just sending someone to, you know, cut their throat and leave. They're like, you're gonna go down in a very dramatic way.

Well, Saddam, apparently these two guys, Saddam was really cared about, like he actually did care about. So this is nice Saddam, how a nice Saddam executes you. He lets you die fighting. You get to die like it's sort of like mission impossibly. Like there's a lot of high drama. Maybe there's music playing.

We don't know, we weren't there. I hope there was music playing. I hope that someone just threw on like a Hans Zimmer score in the background and just kept rewinding the cassette and playing it again. Just keep going, 13 hours. Well, what year is this coming in? What soundtrack are they listening to?

This is like 95? There's a Zimmer, I'll figure it out. Yeah, there's something in there. So, on the less murder and explosion-y sort of thing, Saddam had a friendship with Jordan's King Hussein. During one of the King's visits the two went fishing and King Hussein thought it was suspicious that Saddam and only Saddam caught a bunch of fish.

After a couple of fishing trips, he developed the theory that Saddam had ordered a diver to put fish on the end of his fishing line. Was it? And only his fishing line. Was it true? Well, there's no way to know for sure, but one trip there was maybe a fuck-up with the diver

and a fish wound up on King Hussein's line and he pulled it up and immediately after that a fish winds up on Saddam's line, but King Hussein's fish looks bigger and so Saddam has both of the fish go off with one of his runners to get weighed and the guy comes back and is like, no, Saddam's was a quarter pound bigger.

What a stressful friendship. Jesus Christ. So that's the kind of man Saddam Hussein was to his buddies. I wonder if he's like insecure in any way. If any time you catch a fish, it's like who's... Basically he's just like, well, who's dig is bigger and then just like have some go and weigh the fish. I don't know.

I mean, that sounds like kind of a fun way to torture a frenemy. Yeah. You know, yeah. Only I may catch fish. So as the years after the Gulf War drew on, Saddam gets more and more paranoid. He's constantly afraid of being poisoned and so he has all of his food,

mostly fresh lobster and fresh fish, flown in daily and inspected by nuclear scientists before being fed to him. By the nuclear scientists? By the nuclear scientists. Well, I don't know if they're feeding it to him, but they're inspecting his food. Jesus Christ, okay.

Well, because they're not working on nukes anymore. You got to do something with your scientists. Right, right. I mean, if your WMD is not popping. Yeah. You know, that's, I mean, keeping people employed. Make sure this lobster's fresh. He passed a lot of time reading books

about Joseph Stalin, who was his hero, and... Very chill. Yeah. Very chill way of spending time. And watching movies. Some of his favorites were The Godfather, Enemy of the State, and The Day of the Jackal. Seems a little on the nose.

Yeah. Let's throw in some... If it was like he loved Enemy of the State, The Godfather, and, like, all about Eve. Ten things I hate about you. Stop watching that movie. He had a soft side to him. Yeah.

No, he was not a subtle man. No. In his 60s, his doctors advised him to start getting two hours a day of walking exercise. Since he was Saddam, he did this in the craziest way possible. I'm going to quote from an Atlantic article called Tales of the Tyrant here. Okay.

He used to take these walks in public, swooping down with his entourage into neighborhoods in Baghdad, his bodyguards clearing sidewalks and streets as the tyrant passed. Anyone who approached him unsolicited was beaten nearly to death. But now it is too dangerous to walk in public. The limp must not be seen.

So Saddam makes no more unscripted public appearances. He limps freely behind the high walls and patrolled fences of his vast estates. Often he walks with a gun, hunting deer or rabbit in his private preserves. He is an excellent shot. Jeez, okay. He's just extra.

He's just extra as hell on every single level. Every way. That does sound a little bit similar to, like, when they were trying to hide the fact that, like, Roosevelt was like paralyzed and we were like, we're just going to go way out of our way to make sure that people don't know the ruler has a lamp. Like, but also by calling attention,

like, he could have just rented a place. Yeah. No, I think, I think going on limping walks with a gun and murdering random animals is the better way to get exercise. He needs, listen, he can't go somewhere without a gun. He was basically born with a gun in his hand. He was basically born with a gun in his hand.

So one of the things you get when you study Saddam and you read his writings is it seems like he kind of started to sour on being in charge of Iraq during the late 1990s. Okay. He started taking more naps and playing hooky in government meetings. His former vice president said it sometimes took three days to get in touch with him.

So what was Saddam doing with all of his time now? What was he doing? He'd become a novelist, of course. I was hoping that was the answer. Reading is a theme that kind of runs through Saddam's entire career. And while the standard, like, Arab hero thing is to be a poet, like that's the thing that they really emphasize,

like Russians, it's you're a novelist. If you're an Arab hero, you're a poet. Saddam instead chose to write trashy romance novels. Wow. Yep. And we're going to get into those trashy romance novels and exactly what happened with Saddam's career as an author after the break.

But first, we have more ads for things that you can buy or things that can buy you. I don't know how ads work. Ooh. Here we go. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler

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Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

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that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back and we are talking about Saddam Hussein, Trader, Murderer, Pipe Wielder, and Romance Novelist. Just further proof that there really is nothing more dangerous in this world than a failed artist. Limitless examples of a failed artist

doing something truly hellacious to the world. One of the weird things I found, because we're doing a podcast that touches on Stalin later, is that Saddam is a novelist, but the traditional Arab warrior-hero thing that you can do it as well as a warrior. Joseph Stalin wrote poems and the standard Russian man-of-substance thing is to be a novelist.

I don't know, that's just weird to me. Saddam is a big fan of Stalin and they kind of wind up... Ships in the night, baby. They would have been great friends. I mean, I'm sure. It sounds like Saddam is a little bit like a fanboying out over Stalin for some time. You could call him a Stalin nerd.

He's a little bit of a Stalin stan, if you will. So Saddam Hussein publishes his first novel, Zabiba and the King, in 2000. It's an instant bestseller in Iraq and sells millions upon millions of copies. Under his regular name? No, under... The name that it was published under is basically

He Who Wrote the Book. Whoa, what a cool pen name. What a cool pen name. It's basically like the middle finger emoji written by whose fucking business is it? Written by the guy who wrote it, asshole. J.D. Robb, sure. But everyone knows that Saddam, the word gets out

and of course they all buy a copy because like, you don't want to be caught without your copy of Saddam's stupid fucking book. You can buy the English translation of this book online right now for $12. It was republished by an American during the war. The cover is just Saddam? It's just Saddam with a beard on a red background.

It's not the original cover. And a pretty gnarly looking font, I would argue. Not a great font choice. It looks like it was self-published on Amazon. It kind of was. It was just a guy who translated it, who got a copy, translated it and published it as quick as he could.

His justification was, I thought Americans fighting over there might want to read this book of the guy they deposed. I see that and there's definitely a historical value to Saddam's creepy book. Wait, what's it about? Well, first off, a short review. It's not good.

It's not good? It may lose something in translation from Arabic, but it is not a good book structurally. I think we're okay to not give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt. You lose that after the first genocide. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once you hit a million people, you're out.

Yeah, about a million and a half deaths at this point, probably, conservatively, something like that. But he's finding the time to follow his bliss. He actually wrote like three books in four years, something like that. So he's very dedicated to it. Damn.

He's Stephen King, his way through the shit. He's like banging coke lines and writing garbage. Okay, so the basic plot is that a king who represents Saddam Hussein falls in love with a beautiful local woman named Zabiba, who represents collectively all of Iraq. I wonder if she's much younger than him. Yes.

Oh, okay, good. Yeah. Unfortunately, Zabiba has a husband, the United States, who became betrothed to her during an arranged marriage, and she spends a lot of the book being forced to have sex with him. No. Yeah, it's sad.

So we've got Saddam as a protagonist. We've got a much younger, hotter, female avatar. I'm assuming she doesn't have a personality. And we've got a rape fantasy. She does have a personality. She's the smartest one in the book, who spends the whole book lecturing everybody. Feminist icon Saddam Hussein.

It's kind of weird, but she is not the character you'd guess from that plot synopsis, where she's just like... A hollow. Like she is just instantly in love with him for no good reason, but she spends the whole time lecturing him about politics, and he's portrayed as kind of a dumb guy.

Interesting. It is weird. It's not the book you'd expect. And it has a really strange structure. So it's framed as a story being told to a group of young children by an old grandmotherly woman. Like a princess bride kind of set up? Yeah, it's exactly that.

It's a princess bride kind of set up, and it sort of works at the start. But the whole book has periodic rants by Saddam Hussein put into these characters' mouths. So a lot of Saddam's rants wind up in the mouth of an old lady talking to children. So at one point, this old woman spends a whole page lecturing small children about how sexy mouths are.

I'm gonna quote from the book here. And if the meaning of the mouth is that great, should not a man be jealous about the mouth of the one he loves? Her laughter, every movement of her lips? Clearly, one understands why then our mothers and grandmothers cover their mouths in front of strangers. Ew. So that is a quote from an old lady talking to children.

Oh, God. I feel like maybe he forgot that was happening sometimes in the book. He did, because he forgets for like 100 pages to bring it back to her, and then he brings it back to her. He's like, oh, hopefully everyone will forget about that whole time when she was telling kids how hot people's mouths are. Just wait.

So on page 127, Saddam writes, and again puts this into the mouth of an old lady talking to kids, even an animal respects a man's desire if it wants to copulate with him. Doesn't a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the north of Iraq? How would you know that? Where is this info coming from?

He's just throwing shade on the Kurds by saying they have sex with bears, and putting that in the mouth of an old woman talking to kids. Yeah. Oh, Christ. OK, how long is this book? It's like 300 pages. That's too long.

I read, I'm pretty sure I read all of it. I fell asleep four or five times, because it is there's just pages of rants. Like, it's not a good book. I pulled the highlights out here. OK, OK. So yeah, we've gotten through the bear sex, the weird mouth rant.

So the main purpose of the book is to allow Saddam to throw shade at his enemies, kind of like Michael Crichton in that regard. Yes. Ooh, hot Crichton ref. Rest in Paradise Crichton. Some of it's what you'd expect. He attacks the US and Israel a bunch.

He's Saddam Hussein. But weirdly enough, he spends most of the book raging against businessmen, the concept of a hereditary monarchy, and apparently all of the people who worked for him. That's a wild platter of topics. So at one point, like, there's a, Zabiba is visiting the castle and the king,

she has an altercation with some guy, and the king apologizes, and she's like, isn't it true that those who surround the king are exceedingly more cruel than the king himself? She's kind of like Saddam being like, I didn't kill all those. I just, bad people working with me. He's like, yikes, trust no bitch,

lesson learned. Yeah. Right. There's also a lot of points in the book that make it clear he's kind of tired of being a dictator. Did not the soul of the one who had surrounded himself with a multitude of useless things become burdened by the intricate maze of his palaces,

their furniture and thick walls. Had not his soul died as a result, having completely lost its aesthetic sense. Whoa. Yeah. That's a little emo lyric. Yeah, there's a little bit of like Saddam feeling, sitting in his palace feeling sorry for himself.

Oh, this is so lame. I'm the prisoner. When you think about it, everyone should feel bad for me. Do you think Saddam ever like pulled out bright eyes and was like, you know what? I always imagine him as more of a the cure guy. Okay.

I agree, I actually agree. So it's a surprising book. When I went through the synopsis other people had put up, it sounded like a straightforward propaganda diatribe against America and pro-Saddam. But it wound up being way more complicated than that and not good, because again, this is an awful book. Right.

But it's complicated. So at one point Zabiba asks Saddam, does a common woman like me need freedom? And Saddam's like, yes, I want my people to be free. It's good for people to be free. It's like you say one thing, which you do the other. And so Zabiba tells him it would be a good idea

to have like a people's council, that's elected leaders from the populace help the king reform the country and maybe even run the country someday. And Saddam is the king is like, that's a great idea. So like there's weird stuff in here. That's a misdirect. Yeah, the whole book carries a very strong anti-royalty line.

Okay. It's made repeatedly clear that the hereditary rule of a country is really dumb. The book is also filled with, you know, casual anti-Semitism, chauvinism and weirdness. But there are some oddly woke passages. Like this one when Zabiba comes after the king for his privileged life.

Have you ever known famine? Have you ever had to borrow money to buy a piece of bread for your family or paid rent for your house so that you would know the afflictions of the needy? And have you ever tried to convince a woman like a common man that you are worthy to sleep with her, that your relationship would grow stronger if you did so? In your case, does the woman who is supposed to sleep with you

even have the right to decline? Whoa, he wrote a passage on consent? Yeah. I think Saddam Hussein is a fucking consent head. That's okay. Saddam is, he's a surprising guy. He's literally addicted to consent, okay? Yeah, he's having people murdered

at the same time he's writing about, like, consent. He's having women write, but he's also, like, consent rules, okay? Yeah. I feel like, to me, that passage is very much like, I was raised poor with a single mom. Yeah. That is what that passage screams.

And I think there's some of that in there. You know, he was pro the king getting overthrown and he just, like, hates people who grew up rich because he had a rough upbringing. I mean, same, but, like, there's ways to manage those feelings. Yeah, you don't have to kill a million and a half people. Kill a million people. Yeah.

There's other ways. Have a feeling that they were not all extremely wealthy people. Have you tried alcohol and painkillers? Yeah. It works great for America. Love self-medicating. It neutralizes you as a person. It neutralizes your potential.

Yeah, I would love, if I could have just gone to Saddam in 1970 and been like, these are Vicodin. Like, you're going to really like this. Hot tip, self-medicate and never learn math. And you will be a neutral force in the world. It's how to avoid being Saddam. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm not going to complain the book is a bastion of progressive thought. And just so I'm being totally fair here, here's another paragraph that Saddam wrote about women that's significantly less woke. Truly, a woman, if she decides to do so, will get a man by any means. And if she chooses to destroy a woman or wages a war with her in the process for the one she loves,

she will not hesitate to go as far as murder. Wow, woman on woman violence. Yeah, there's a lot of that in here, too. We should be lifting each other up, Saddam. Grow up. There's a subplot where the king's first wife hates Zabiba and yadda yadda yadda. It's a bad book.

So, it's not at all the book I'd expected, though. Zabiba winds up getting raped by her husband, America, when she tries to leave him. Her husband, America. Wait, her husband stands in for America. Oh, oh, I thought that was his literal name. No, no, no, no. It's a little more subtle than that.

He doesn't have a name. Oh. You're gonna be like, Joey. His name is Joey. We don't find out the king's name until, like, a third of the way through the book. It's not like, what's the annihilation, where they're not using people's names as a stylistic choice.

As a choice, right. It's just a bad book. We'll get around to it. We'll get around to it. We'll name some of the characters. Also, the king's name is Arab. Oh. Oh, okay.

This is his bad writing. This is his bad writing. Yeah, he's not good. He's not good. Okay. So, yeah, the Zabiba is raped by her husband, America, when she tries to leave him. And America and an evil prince who represents Israel

raise up an army to try to invade the kingdom. Again, a surprising part, the king does basically nothing in the defense of the kingdom. He's fighting there, but we don't hear anything about him. Instead, Zabiba leads the defense. She puts on armor and leads the army of the country to defend the kingdom. And she dies fighting.

She pulls a fatal moulin, basically. Whoa. Yeah. Again, surprising. That is interesting. Yeah. That's the first time in this book I feel like, whoa, that's a good twist.

And after her death, the king appoints a council made up of normal men and women from around the country and then dies off screen. So, the book ends with this council of, like, grandmothers and bakers and whatnot in charge of the country figuring out how to move forward. So, she did not die in vain. She didn't die in vain.

I'm not used to things that women do having. I'm not used to things that female characters do having impact on the plot of anything. He is more woke than a lot of Hollywood screenwriters. That is wild. He's doing laps around Sorkin right now. Yeah, especially since it's 2000. I think, I didn't double check, but I think this

passes the Bechtel test. But I'd have to go through it again to know for sure. I mean, very important to me. Wait, what other things came out in 2000 that this is more woke than? A short list. More woke than gladiator. More woke than almost famous.

More woke than American psycho. More woke than memento. More woke than requiem for a dream. Damn. I am impressed. I should note also that one of this Democratic council's first acts is to kick out a Jewish guy and take all of his stuff. This is still Saddam we're talking about.

I need to add an asterisk to the Bechtel test to be like, you cannot possibly pass the Bechtel test and be Saddam. It's just not allowed. That's a good, the Saddam corollary to the Bechtel test. A lot of asterisks. It's not a perfect system.

So yeah, and all of this weirdly progressive stuff is actually why a lot of experts on Saddam are pretty sure he wrote this himself and he didn't have a ghostwriter because no ghostwriter would have been allowed to like end a book with Saddam's self-insert dying and a democracy being established. Right, they'd get killed.

Yeah, they'd get killed. So it's probable Saddam actually wrote this and maybe then his other books too. Yeah, he wrote like four novels in his last three years in power, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, for sure. So in 2003, the United States is getting ready to invade Iraq. One of Saddam's last actions in power

as like the first Marine units are crossing into his country. One of the final things he does is send off a draft of his last novel, Be Gone Demons, to Tariq Aziz. Drama, drama queen. I got to deal with defending my country from an invasion, but first, I need some notes.

Take a look at this draft. Can I get some notes? I'm not sure that I've quite used the comma correctly. Yeah, I didn't go with the Oxford. I switched about halfway through. Where does Saddam stand on the Oxford comma? I don't know, because they're originally written in Arabic. So there's no way to know how he did it.

I mean, there is a way, but I don't read Arabic. You'd have to ask a lot of people. So I have been unable to find a copy of Be Gone Demons in English. We are working on that because it was translated into Japanese, so we may be doing a special Japanese Be Gone Demons podcast. A live reading. Something like that. I was able to find a telegraph article that contains some extracts from this novel,

and it's amazing. So the basic plot appears to be that Romans and Jews invade Iraq, and Iraq beats them by 9-11ing them. So here's a quote. Drawing from these events, got it. In this quote, Ezekiel Heschel is the king of the Jewish people. Then Ezekiel Heschel, and the king of the Romans, saw the twin towers of the Roman city on fire.

Ezekiel Heschel was beating his face and saying, everything I've collected is gone. One of the Romans was laughing at Ezekiel and advised him, try building another two towers and sell the one and rent the other to the Roman king. Both you and the Roman king will rot in hell. So that's odd. That's completely unhinged. It's like very unhinged fanfiction.

Once the Iraqis burn their towers down, the Romans and the Jewish people all run away because they've lost their power and money, which was maybe optimistic, because we did lose our power and money in Iraq, but we did not leave. We did not. We are still there, buddy. Oh, jeez. Begone demons. Begone demons.

I just feel like a weirdly Hemingway-esque title. Yeah, yeah. So is Zabiba and the king. Yeah, very true, very true. So the character of Salim is the king of the Arabs in this, and he's Saddam's self-insert. Saddam's Harry Potter, if you will. Yeah, exactly. And I'm just going to read an excerpt from a battle scene that Saddam describing himself fighting. The king of the Romans gave his orders to begin the charge.

The first lion of Salim's army shot at the Roman riders with arrows. When the Roman riders fell down, the women of the tribe beat them with sticks or killed them with swords. So again, kind of. He loves women in battle. Salim freed his long hair. He was so strong. He was fighting the Romans like a hawk. He was riding a white horse and shouting,

Allah Akbar, long live the Arabs and long live Islam. How many masturbation breaks do you think he had to take in the running of that passage? He just wanted long hair and pecs out to here. He wanted to just be Fabio. He was so strong. He was so strong. He was so strong. I feel like that's basically him being like,

OK, this is what I want for cover art, please. He is so strong. His hair is so long. Really long. So long. Like a L'Oreal commercial. He's herbal-essencing all the way out. I'm worth it, too.

He was so strong is maybe the most vulnerable sentence I've ever heard in my entire life. It really cuts to the core of his soul. I had a full body reaction to hearing that. Oh my God. So Saddam was captured on December 13th, 2003. He was taken into coalition custody and eventually tried by the Iraqi government. During his incarceration, he was watched over by a team of 12 young American soldiers. Now, their story and a lot of other stories are chronicled in the excellent book,

The Prisoner in His Palace by Will Bardenwerper. I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail here. I recommend reading that book because it's filled with great anecdotes. But the gist of it is these young kids, they didn't know dictator Saddam. They didn't know massacring people, Saddam. They knew he'd done all that. But when they met him, he was a sweet old bearded man who talked to them about their lives and their problems. So one of his medics, they weren't all young, one of his medics was like a 51-year-old black guy from Compton

who he and Saddam kind of clicked because Saddam had a rough upbringing too. They both have a lot of experiences with violence in their youth. Again, this sounds like a bad movie. There's a scene where that guy, the medics' brother, dies. And he goes over to see Saddam before he gets flown back home to attend the funeral and he's like, I'm going to be gone for a few days. My brother just died and he's clearly broken up about it. And Saddam grabs him by the shoulders and looks him in the eyes and says, I will be your brother.

How do you politely be like, you know what, I'm good. No, they all liked him. They all really liked him. At least most of them really liked him. He would smoke cigars with them. He would give them advice on girls and advice on life. And he didn't seem like Saddam. He was a sweet old man to them.

Right. And they really dug him. They would do nice stuff, like find him furniture and help him set up his little cell so that he could live kind of nicely. What a mind, fuck. He had cigars the whole time. We don't know who gave them to him. Someone would just give these soldiers money every week for Saddam cigars. Nobody knows who it was.

It had to be someone with some clout. Maybe Bush. I don't know. I don't know. I want to read that book now. It's a very good book. The prisoner in his palace. Like the weird thing is that when he gets tried and executed on December 30th, 2006, these poor kids who have been guarding him for months have to escort him to the gallows.

And they like him. And there's like tears in their eyes as they lead him off to die. And they have to like take his body back. And years later, a bunch of them have PTSD because of what they did with Saddam. I guess you couldn't have predicted they would have loved Saddam. But you should rotate them. Like don't have the same guys with him the whole time and then make them see him die. That's messed up.

And now I mean there's like so many levels to that guilt of like I killed my friend, but also my friend killed a million people. So it makes sense. They're all like he was a monk. Like none of them don't believe he was a monster, but they were also like. And part of it is like anyone who becomes a dictator, you're good at being charming. Like you're good at making people like you. Yeah. Like in a way you could say that was his last fucked up thing was like making all these young American kids be his buddy before he gets hung in front of them.

His final gaslight. Yeah, his final gaslight. The final Saddam gaslight. I just want to do one more shitty thing before I die. He's like let me just fuck 12 more people up. The last 12 people I have access to. I just haven't given quite enough people PTSD. Wow.

So that is the story of Saddam Hussein. And all 12 people like copped to liking him later on. Not all of them, but most of them. So probably all of them. Yeah. Yeah. They were all pretty like nobody was like oh he was just a monster the whole time. Like everyone was like he was a very nice polite old man.

I mean they have rules like that at nursing homes so that like people aren't too traumatized when their patients die. Yeah. Military probably should have called that one ahead of time. Major oversight. But I guess in theory you're like a dictator might charm you. But once you're that deep in casualties, you kind of expect them to drop the act. Yeah. Yeah.

You wouldn't. Seems like most of them would. This sounds like an outlier. Yeah. Saddam's an outlier in a lot of ways. Wow. Yeah. Saddam Hussein.

I feel weird. Yeah. I feel weird. That's the Saddam effect. Yeah. Kind of like you both need a shower and a jog. Yeah. I need one of Saddam's weird murder jogs.

Murder limbs. I just got to go on a walk and shoot some animals. Yeah. Wow. All right. Well, Jamie, you want to plug your plugables? Please. I will.

You can listen to my podcast, The Bechdel Cast. It comes out every Thursday. And you can follow me on. You used to be able to follow me on Twitter. Now you can't. Now you can follow me on Instagram at Jamie Christ Superstar. And that's where I can be found. Fantastic.

Join us next week when we will be talking about someone else terrible. I am Robert Evans. You can find behind the bastards on social media at bastards pod. You can find us on the internet at www.behindthebastards.com, where we'll have pictures and videos and all sorts of other content about these terrible people and their weird, weird lives. So catch me up for Tuesday. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at atiright.

Okay. Two letters. I'll be doing this every week. So be sure to check in and learn something fascinating about someone awful. Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know.

Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.