A portrait of Saddam's lawyer:
Like most Arabs, Khalil, who is Lebanese, is no stranger to the hard reality of despotism: Her Iraqi cousins were put to death for rebelling against Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.
But ever since the wintry afternoon she switched on Al Jazeera and caught sight of the bedraggled Hussein in U.S. custody, she has devoted herself to securing his release. Her work on his defense team has invited angry slurs from fellow Shiites, but Khalil views her work as an epic assignment on behalf of the pan-Arab "nation" — a cause Hussein espoused during his years in power. Khalil believes it eclipses religious divisions and the question of whether Hussein was a worthy leader.
"When I met [Hussein], he looked at me and smiled and said, 'These Americans think I am fighting to save my job as president, but I am fighting to defend my homeland,' " said Khalil, who is unabashedly enthusiastic about the Iraqi insurgency. "He never surrendered. He did not quit. If he'd quit, then the whole Arab nation would have been handed to America on a plate of gold."
Towards the end the author, Megan K. Stack, offers the following analysis:
The Arab public didn't have much love for Hussein during the years of his notoriously brutal rule. In a region where most people are unhappily familiar with the bloody repressions of dictators, Hussein was seen as a particularly ruthless leader.
But once the United States pushed into Baghdad, Hussein was held in a slightly more sympathetic light by Arabs leery of U.S. intentions in the region. To people who often complain angrily of their own governments' acquiescence to Washington's wishes, Hussein was, if nothing else, an Arab leader who had fought the United States.
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