"I first traveled to Iraq because of the phenomenon of Saddam Hussein. In a sense Saddam inhabited a mythological realm, like a throwback to Herod’s day, when warrior kings reigned as semidivine creatures, malevolent and munificent all at once, capable of the greatest cruelties as well as the most extravagant gestures of patronage. There he was, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a head of state who was indisputably a war criminal, an international fugitive who lived a clandestine life in his own nation and who survived in power thanks to—not in spite of—the terror he inspired in his people. Anything that could be said of Saddam had become, somehow, believable."