One of the things that I love about history is that it destroys the melodramatic worldview that people often have about things and in school a study of historiography showed the "greyness" of the world. I'm bombarded in the media and from my society to hate Saddam Hussein, I don't know the guy, I've never researched about him and thus I've pretty much become indoctrinated from since the Iraq War started (when I was like 7) to hate the man. Apparently he's a militant dictator who like hitler used his power to exterminate a certain group of people.
My 8th grade religious teacher who was a very devout catholic though said something rather against the mainstream view I had been fed. He told me that Saddam Hussein had actually been a very great leader who really helped his country to modernize and also did much to fix 3rd world problems in his country at the time. Also apparently Saddam was an honest man. Nice.
What's the verdict of the historians of reddit? Any good history books on the subject? If possible, I'd like to know the various historical schools of thought regarding the subject.
There aren't really any competing interpretations among historians as to whether or not Saddam Hussein was a hero or villain. It's pretty uniformly agreed that he was a bad guy in the same vein as Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic, or any other number of political figures who committed mass murder. He used genocide as a means to ensure the stability of his regime at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Like other authoritarian regimes, he additionally established a surveillance state so pervasive that Iraqis could not trust members within their own families for fear that they were state informers. While I'm not sure of exact figures, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were locked in prisons indefinitely, where they were tortured constantly. These prisoners included children of Iraqi dissidents. A notable example of this is when U.S. forces were marching toward Baghdad and came upon a prison holding around 100 children, many of them only 8 or 9 years old. None of these things even consider the number of lives lost through governmental incompetence. As one scholar has said, Saddam may have ruled, but he never governed. The Iraqi infrastructure was so dilapidated that when American forces invaded in 2003, things like electricity, water, and transportation were so poor that they literally had to tear down what was left and completely rebuild.
You can check out these books for more information:
Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime
Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq
Joost Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja
One problem in general with this sort of analysis is that it compares the actual record of the dictator with a hypothetical 'no development'. We simply cannot know how a freer Iraq might have developed. Whatever he achieved, Saddam brought his country into two disastrous wars with Iran and Kuwait and committed mass murder. It would take a lot to balance that record.
You might find better answers in /r/socialscience because this is still relatively recent as far as history goes. Someone who is more specialized in more current situations might be of more help than historians who tend to focus on a slightly more distant past. That's not to say someone won't come a long with a perfect answer, but you may want to at least xpost there for more visibility from those who are more likely to have studied a more recent area in depth.