Saddam Hussein is referenced across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case as part of a broader argument about American military intervention rather than as a subject examined on his own terms. No episode in the excerpts presents a biography, an account of his rise to power, or a sustained treatment of his government. He appears instead as a shared example that guests with different emphases use to illustrate the costs and unintended consequences of regime change.
The check on Iran
In the April 2011 episode featuring Gary Johnson, Saddam Hussein enters the conversation through Johnson’s opposition to the American military excursion into Libya. Johnson, described by Bob Zadek as chairperson of ouramericainitiative.com and speaking by phone from Denver, Colorado, argued that the intervention in Libya lacked congressional authorization and asked where in the Constitution it says that because we do not like a foreign leader we should topple that foreign leader Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011).
Johnson then turned to Iraq as an illustration of unintended consequences. He said that Saddam Hussein was Iran’s biggest enemy, that they were holding Iran in check in the Middle East, and that because the United States had taken out Saddam Hussein, Iran had become a threat that was not there before, since Saddam Hussein had provided that check against Iran. Bob Zadek restated the point in his own framing, describing Hussein as the enemy of our enemy and therefore presumably our friend, and extended the observation to Libya by asking whether the word “rebels” is helpful, invoking the Confederate Army in 1861 and the American Revolutionaries in 1776 as cases in which rebels were not straightforwardly good or bad. Zadek called the approach in Libya chaotic and intellectually dishonest Straight Talk with Gary Johnson (2011).
The exchange is notable for the sequence of the argument: Johnson’s opposition to intervention in Libya is supported not by a claim about Libya itself but by a claim about what removing Saddam Hussein had already done to the regional balance. The same episode also contains a caller, Clay, who asked Johnson why he was not running for President; Johnson, as honorary chairman of OUR America Initiative, said his legal status with that 501(c)(4) prevented him from talking about running for political office.
The last Sunni ruler of an artificial state
The June 2014 episode with Ivan Eland, introduced by Zadek as having spent a good deal of his adult life studying the Middle East and specifically Iraq, treats Saddam Hussein as a product of Iraq’s artificial construction. Zadek opened by asking whether Iraq was an unnaturally formed country drawn on a map, grouping it with much of Africa, much of the Middle East and the old USSR as countries formed by European diplomats sitting around a conference room table United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Eland agreed and gave the history: after World War I the Ottoman Empire was on the losing side alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary and collapsed; the British wanted oil in Iraq, so they glued three provinces of the Ottoman Empire together. Those provinces, Eland said, had little relationship to each other before the British glued them together, though they each had a relationship with the central Ottoman government. Lebanon and Syria, he added, were artificial countries in the same manner, drawn by the British and the French United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
Within that frame, Eland placed Saddam Hussein at the end of a line. In Iraq for many decades since World War I, since the British established the monarchy there, the rulers were Sunni, and the Sunnis are a minority in Iraq; the last of those Sunni rulers was Saddam Hussein. He was overthrown, and now, Eland said, there is a Shia ruler, Maliki, oppressing the Sunnis and the Kurds. Eland’s recommended remedy, from a 2009 book called Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, was that before leaving Iraq the United States would negotiate with the three different groups—the Sunnis, the Kurds, and the Shias—and help them moderate a partitioning of the country, with each group controlling its own autonomous area and a weak central government United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014).
The structural claim Eland makes is that a strong central government in a country with these divisions will be captured by one group and used to oppress the others, and that a partition into a loose confederation of autonomous states removes the prize over which the groups fight, because they provide their own security and their own judicial systems within their own autonomous areas. Saddam Hussein functions in this argument as the last holder of a captured central government, not as an anomaly.
Barely cobbled together
The March 2021 episode with Jeff Deist of the Mises Institute approaches Saddam Hussein from the direction of foreign policy doctrine. Zadek asked Deist for the founding principle governing the Mises Institute’s approach to foreign policy, noting that the Institute takes strong and clear positions on the subject and asking what foreign policy has to do with Austrian Economics Austrian Economics Triumphs (2021).
Deist answered that the Institute is against interventionism in foreign affairs as much as against interventionism in the domestic economy, for many of the same reasons, because there are unintended consequences and blowback frequently. He argued that the bright line between foreign and economic policy is misguided, that every dollar taken in taxes and applied to foreign policy is a dollar not spent in the domestic economy, and that the hubris of the idea that governments can remake other countries is dangerous thinking. He distinguished the natural right of self-defense, which he said can be extrapolated to groups or nations, from the utopian version of foreign policy Austrian Economics Triumphs (2021).
Saddam Hussein appears in Deist’s concrete illustration of that utopian version. He described the project of taking three separate ethnic groups in Iraq which Saddam Hussein had barely sort of cobbled together to peace and blowing that up to start over with a new coalition government, done not only with American taxpayer dollars but with the lives and limbs and psychological well-being of young people in the armed forces. He called this not only crazy and wrong but parallel to economics, because it thinks destructively rather than in terms of what causes wealth Austrian Economics Triumphs (2021).
Zadek drew out the terminological point that Deist had used “intervention” rather than “isolation,” and that the difference matters: isolation would mean no contact or trade, whereas the position Deist described favors active economic engagement and trade with everybody who will trade, while declining to intervene in somebody else’s affairs. Deist agreed, saying that what isolates the United States is a belligerent foreign policy, and that there is no better form of foreign policy than trade because people do not go to war with their customers and suppliers as a general rule.
Can you produce a superior outcome
The March 2022 episode with Justin Logan of the Cato Institute contains the most direct treatment of the question Saddam Hussein’s removal poses. Asked by Zadek to give the headline mistakes in American foreign policy and the lessons to carry forward, Logan listed several: do not tell countries what their interests are; do not say things you are not going to follow through on; do not assert your own interests in places where they do not exist; and do not ignore other actors’ assertions of their own interests in places where they appear likely to exist Justin Logan on Ukraine (2022).
Logan then turned to the pattern of taking contemptible dictators—Assad, in the case he was discussing, engaged in a brutal civil war and committing war crimes—and saying we will get rid of this guy, without committing the force needed to knock over the regime or any plan for what comes next. He flagged that this was getting further afield from the original subject of the Iraq situation, then stated the question directly: no one thought that Saddam Hussein was a great guy, but the question becomes whether you can produce a political outcome that is superior to the one that preceded it at an acceptable cost. In that case, he said, the answer was no Justin Logan on Ukraine (2022).
Logan extended the comparison to Syria, where he said the United States spent a billion dollars trying to build up a rebel force that could overthrow Assad and it did not work, while high single-digit hundreds of US servicemen remained in Syria as a potential scraping point for Iran and had been attacked on more than one occasion by Iran. He characterized the pattern as being really, really outraged but not really going to do that much about it, and said that has produced some really bad outcomes over the last couple decades Justin Logan on Ukraine (2022).
Across episodes: the same example, four different arguments
Saddam Hussein is invoked in all four episodes, but the excerpts show no development in how he is treated, because none of the episodes is about him. What changes is the argument he serves. In 2011 Gary Johnson uses him to argue that removing him strengthened Iran. In 2014 Ivan Eland uses him as the last Sunni ruler of an artificially assembled state whose overthrow handed the central government to a Shia ruler oppressing the Sunnis and the Kurds. In 2021 Jeff Deist uses him as the figure who had barely cobbled together three ethnic groups, cited as an example of the hubris of remaking other countries. In 2022 Justin Logan uses him to pose the question of whether a superior political outcome was achievable at an acceptable cost, and answers that it was not. The earlier and later treatments do not build on one another; each guest reaches for the same example to make a separate point within a libertarian critique of interventionism.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no account of Saddam Hussein’s life before his rule, his rise to power, the nature or duration of his government, or the specific events of his overthrow. They do not state when he took office, when he was removed, or by what mechanism, and they do not describe any trial or its outcome. The episodes also do not examine his domestic policies, his treatment of the Kurdish or Shia populations beyond the general claim that Sunni rulers governed a Sunni minority over a Shia majority, or his conduct toward neighboring states other than the assertion that he was Iran’s biggest enemy and held Iran in check. Everything the sources offer about him is instrumental to an argument about American foreign policy.