Saddam wasn’t just a dictator, of course, he was a best-selling author whose books were greeted with rapturous reviews. Of course now that he’s out of power, the critics have reformed their judgment of Saddam’s literary efforts. “Ali Abdel-Amir, a writer, has pronounced his former leader?s novels ‘shallow’. The female characters are ‘always unfaithful and were either Kurds or Iranians’, he said.”