The man with many mansions was reduced to living in his toilet. When an interrogator offered him a glass of water at the beginning of his first interview, he replied: "If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?" King Lear this is not.
Democracies do not usually sire villains or heroes greater than life size; the constant light from public scrutiny exposes the clay feet that crumble under the weight of what they do. We tease out the nagging flaws that afflict the courageous and look for ameliorating circumstances of even the most vicious among us. We rely on ethics and law to render complex judgments.
But ruthless dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein create a pervasive fear that magnifies lies into mythologies that require absolute allegiance and conformity. Such dictators not only murder those who speak out against them, but their families as well. They weave a deadly web of death and torture, manned by deceivers, informers and finks who fear for their own lives.
In outward appearance, such tyrants are emboldened braggarts, but once no longer safe their cold-blooded ruthlessness turns white, transformed by milk-livered cowardice. When Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi council, asked Saddam whether he was behind the attacks against American soldiers, he replied that he told the Iraqi people that he would personally fight the Americans with pistols, "and I have."
Hah. Shakespeare, as always, says it best:
Who knows himself a braggart,
Let him fear this; for it will come to pass
That every braggart shall be found an ass.