He was a street tough who took power in a coup and immediately singled out his enemies for summary execution.

He initiated a nuclear weapons program that the Israelis destroyed by airstrike in 1981.

He launched a war against Iran that led to the deaths of about a million people.

He invaded Kuwait, killed scores of its royal family and raped the country. During the US-led war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control, Iraqi troops briefly invaded Saudi Arabia and frequently launched missiles at Israeli civilians. That makes four of his neighboring countries that he invaded or attacked directly.

He conducted the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, a brutal campaign against civilians that saw the use of chemical weapons against defenseless women and children. By some estimates he was responsible for the deaths of 300,000 Iraqis. He allowed rape rooms and torture chambers to proliferate, and raised his sons to be even worse monsters than he was. He brutally supressed a Shia uprising against him and subjugated the Marsh Arabs to terrible cruelty.

He worked with terrorists Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal, two of the most notorious terrorists of the 20th century, who had American blood on their hands. He paid the families of Palestinian suidice bombers in Israel. He attempted to assassinate President George H. W. Bush. He had at least a tacit relationship with al Qaeda, to the point that the Clinton administration bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan on the suspicion that it was manufacturing chemical weapons for al Qaeda that were of Iraqi design.

Saddam Hussein was an evil man. He was the Hitler that we stopped before he could do even more damage. Tonight he’s dead. Good.