Henchman's fate uncertain

These kind of claims - that a man like al-Douri would have been just a Saddam Hussein´s "henchman"- that the western media uses will no doubt be like the ones their attorneys will use in coming trials. That all bad that happened in Iraq was the fault of Saddam Hussein&Sons and that they themselves were just henchmen who had no part in decision making and who would have put themselves in risk if they wouldn´t have obeyd.

Of course this is not the truth, at least not the whole truth. No leader, especially a dictator who lacks a popular mandate, can survive without allies, without supporters who have something to gain from the continuation of the leader´s rule and no member of the higher echelons of the Baath regime could have been just a henchman. The henchmen were to be found on the lower levels of government. People like al-Douri were all decision makers and they all had their own bases of power.