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Two pairs of shoes still in their boxes: a pair of clean new Hongmahwang loafers and a pair of gilded, tacky Italian slippers. The footwear of a madman caught last December hiding in a rat-filled hole almost within sight of one of his many palaces. More than the beard that made him look like a character from a Harry Potter movie, more than the irony of the squalor of his final underground hiding place, it was those shoes that stopped me in my tracks and brought home to me the basic humanity of a man described for more than a year as possessing a subhuman evil. Picking through the modest compound filled with entirely pedestrian possessions, I was unprepared for the feeling that Saddam Hussein's capture gave me.
The compound is located a few kilometers from Tikrit in north central Iraq and is part of a group of homes that don't quite number enough to qualify as a village; it's more like a modestly populated hillside. A day after hundreds of soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division and a group of highly trained Special Forces soldiers swooped into Al Dawr and captured Saddam, I was whisked to the site in an army helicopter with a small group of journalists. Our military tour guide tried hard-with little success-not to gloat.
It was small, all of it. The contents of the place were strewn about, giving the single room the air of an apartment that had been broken into by thieves who chose their target poorly and, frustrated with the lack of anything worth stealing, decided simply to make a...