Day: December 31, 2006

When U.S. leaders decided it was time to despise Saddam Hussein, he made the perfect villain.

He was cocky and cunning. He looked dangerous and deranged standing at rallies firing a gun into the air, conduct unbecoming a head of government.

He was “Hitler revisited,” as the first President Bush put it, lacking the endless armies, but close enough for U.S. purposes. He had a history of atrocities. His black mustache heightened the aura of menace.

America’s quarter-century entanglement with the Iraqi leader ended Friday at the gallows.

The Capitol opened its doors to ordinary people wishing to pay last respects to Gerald R. Ford after dignitaries praised the 38th president as a healer and a rock in the dispiriting aftermath of his predecessor’s disgraced presidency.

Hundreds of people filed into the Capitol Rotunda late Saturday to view Ford’s closed, flag-draped casket. They remembered a leader without pretensions or even the ambition to be president until the job was thrust upon him in the last chapter of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in August 1974.

Thousands of Iraqis flocked to Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Ouja on Sunday, where the deposed leader was buried in a religious compound 24 hours after his execution.

Dozens of relatives and other mourners, some of them crying and moaning, attended the interment shortly before dawn near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad. A few knelt before his flag-draped grave. A large framed photograph of Saddam was propped up on a chair nearby.

“I condemn the way he was executed and I consider it a crime,” said 45-year-old Salam Hassan al-Nasseri, one of Saddam’s clansmen who attended the interment.

Another terrorist attack, a warmer planet, death and destruction from a natural disaster. These are among Americans’ grim predictions for the United States in 2007.

But on a brighter note, only a minority of people think the U.S. will go to war with Iran or North Korea over the countries’ nuclear ambitions. An overwhelming majority thinks Congress will raise the federal minimum wage. A third sees hope for a cure to cancer.

These are among the findings of an Associated Press-AOL News poll that asked Americans to gaze into their crystal balls and contemplate what 2007 holds for the country.

At least 80 Iraqis died in bombings and other attacks Saturday as they prepared to celebrate Islam’s biggest holiday, their first without Saddam Hussein.

The bombings came hours after Saddam was hanged in Baghdad for ordering the killings of 148 Shiites in the city of Dujail in 1982. Despite concerns about a spike in unrest, Saturday’s violence was not unusually high for Iraq, nor did it appear to be in retaliation for the execution.