Saddam Hussein was never under any illusion about the consequences of losing his grip on Iraq. He once advised a relative of one of his victims to accept proferred compensation rather than waiting for revenge because, as he said: “If we ever lose power, there will not be a sliver of our flesh remaining by the time you get to us.”

The formalities of his execution, complete with lofty final statements about “sacrifice”, last meals and possibly even a final Cuban cigar, stand in some contrast to these grimly realistic expectations. He certainly didn’t grant such ceremony to his own victims, not least the 148 men and boys of the district of Dujail, whose liquidation in 1982 on Saddam’s order provided the specific grounds for his own death warrant.

He will leave behind an Iraq in which the rule of law, which at least retained some outward form under Saddam’s tyranny, has all but disappeared, both in form and substance, supplanted by the regime of the death squad and suicide bomber. True, Saddam’s trial and appeal had the outward show of a regular judicial procedure, but there were enough flagrant irregularities — with defence evidence routinely excluded by the judge, and the results of his appeal pre-announced by an Iraqi government official — to have reminded the defendant of the way he used to run things.

Other ironies include the expectation that Saddam’s execution will spark a further escalation of sectarian warfare. He always presented himself as a champion of nationalism, both Iraqi and Arab. It was this identity that commended him to his former sponsors in Washington, London and Paris. That was a time when repressive Arab rulers could earn the blessings and support of Western powers so long as they kept their subjects in order, maintained at least some distance from the Soviet Union and, in Saddam’s case, obligingly confronted the ascendant regime of revolutionary Iran.

That era has now all but disappeared, succeeded by one in which the stresses and strains of Arab societies are exacerbated by outside influences.

Though the Baath party that brought him to power promoted an Arab nationalist and socialist ideology, Saddam was the product of a rural tribal society rent with feuds and violence. Years later, Saddam explained the urgency of building a major Iraqi weapons industry to a visiting Kuwaiti delegation by telling of a man who had once walked unarmed through his native village of Auja, outside Tikrit. Horrified villagers berated him, saying: “Why do you affront God by walking without a weapon and thereby cause violence by tempting people to attack you?”

If this was the norm when he was growing up in the 1940s, it is hardly surprising that Saddam accepted the present of a gun from relatives when he first set off for school in Tikrit, aged 7. By the time he was 10, he was warding off the threat of expulsion by threatening to kill his headmaster.

Saddam had dreamt of following his fellow Tikritis to the Royal Military Academy in Baghdad, but his application was rejected. Instead he gravitated to the world of underground revolutionary politics, specifically the small, conspiratorial Baath party, with which he had potent connections, in the form of his uncle Khairallah and his cousin Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, a rising army officer. Initially, the party employed him as a hitman, his first recorded victim being a local Communist party official. Twenty years later, in dutiful accordance with tribal custom, Saddam, by then second-in-command of the country, returned to hand over blood money and a pistol to a relative of that first victim.

His first major assignment for the party was as part of the back-up team for the assassination of Abdel-Karim Qasim, the leftist general who took power after the bloody 1958 revolution toppled the monarchy and ended British influence in Iraq. The attempt, in 1959, ended in failure when Saddam opened fire too early. Wounded in the leg, he escaped Baghdad and ultimately the country, after a nocturnal swim across the freezing Tigris, to Syria and then Egypt. His flight was subsequently elevated to Homeric status.

Saddam’s Egyptian exile was his only real experience of life in the world outside Iraq. It ended in 1963 when his Baath colleagues overthrew the tottering Qasim regime. After the coup, they launched a round-up and massacre of opponents such as the powerful Iraqi Communist Party, a move that was anticipated and applauded by coup sponsors at the CIA. “We rode to power on a CIA train,” the party’s secretary-general, Ali Saleh Sa’adi, admitted later.

The chief of the CIA’s Middle East division at the time, Jim Critchfield, later reminisced that it had been “a great victory”. Saddam was too junior in the party hierarchy to play much role in this Baath Government, which was booted out in another coup the same year.

Thereafter, however, he adroitly profited from the feuds and splits that beset the party, rising rapidly through the ranks thanks in part to his control of its internal security apparatus, an ideal vantage point for someone with his talent for ruthless intrigue. When the Baathists again seized power in 1968, Saddam became deputy to his cousin Hassan al-Bakr, who became President.

Staying out of the limelight, Saddam kept his position as No 2 a secret from the public for over a year after he got the job. Even when he did emerge in the public eye, it was as the modest “Mr Deputy” who had himself photographed diligently darning the sleeve of his little daughter’s dress.

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