Saddam Hussein's introduction to global fame/infamy also came at the worst time for him to become an 'anti-imperialist' superstar.
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Warsaw Pact and height of Soviet 'new thinking' and Chinese defensiveness and reclusiveness after crushing its democracy movement in front of the eyes of the world in 1989 (on top of a decade of giving the lie to its Socialist, worker-first proclaimed economic ideology), global "anti-imperialist" morale was at its absolute lowest ebb in 1990, 1991, and other years of the early 1990s. This was assisted by the slightly earlier, mid and late 1980s falls of around a dozen or more right-wing dictatorships to democratic movements/governance, the softening, reforming, and ultimate abolition of the Apartheid regime, and other developments, and cease-fires and electoral reconciliation processes in multiple Cold War conflicts like Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola (turned out to be brief), Cambodia that reduced the saliency of right-left polarization globally.
These all led to a mad rush by governments around the world and institutions and NGOs to go with the tide and kiss Washington's ass. Also, although 'anti-imperialist' ideologues had voiced opposition to Zionism on anti-colonialism grounds to some degree or another for several decades [A little since the beginnings of Leninism, more from the mid-fifties, significantly more from the 1970s and Yom Kippur War], previous anti-imperialist heroes - Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh never had *primary* or *major* global identification with anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism. However, Arab Nationalists like Saddam, and Muslim fundamentalists, did have *strong* identification with anti-Zionism, and by extension with anti-Semitism, for appealing to their home audiences. Those inclined to be favorable or casually favorable to 'anti-imperialist' movements and ideologies in the west were much more likely to feel inhibited in the early 1990s by arguments that anti-Zionism equated to anti-Semitism, whereas people of those sympathies now simply have evolved their argumentation to say it that conflation is a bad faith argument. Saddam was too crude, with his mustache and anti-Zionism that made him as easy to compare with Fascist dictators as leftist dictators, allowing western establishment propaganda to confound at least most *western* anti-imperialists with (for them) sacred WWII ("the good war") analogies.
Despite having the US, NATO, and even the diplomatic opposition of Germany [which they made much hay of], the Serbian and Bosnian Serb regimes of Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, racist, genocidal, and *white*, also rang hollow in their anti-imperialist self-portrayals, although starting to gain a small bit of traction by the time of the Kosovo War.
It took the fuller decade of the 1990s, with multiple US interventions, US interventions bypassing UN mandates for convenience sake, and fatigue with repeated US bombings and sanctions in Iraq and Yugoslavia between 1995-1998 [and American economic recovery and full-dimensional 'swagger' about its military, political, AND extra free market economic model] for 'anti-imperialist' saliency, urgency, and therefore morale/motivation to revive. It manifested itself in increased criticism of Desert Fox and the Kosovo War and US foreign policy, and in the Anti-Globalization movement and Seattle 1999 demonstrations.
The second Intifadeh, post 9/11 Global War on Terror, and Iraq War, and NATO expansion in the 2000s only added to the refueling of anti-imperialist causes. Nevertheless, no one given a pass at times for being an anti-imperialist enemy of the western order really has shown sufficient genuine idealism or portrayed enough constructive vision to win global admiration to the degree Ho, Che or Fidel did.
That's long. Sorry. But I think it captures a pattern of the last ideological generation.
