WASHINGTON (AP) – When US leaders decided it was time to despise Saddam Hussein, he made the perfect villain.

He was cocky and cunning. He looked dangerous and deranged standing at rallies firing a gun into the air, conduct unbecoming of a head of government.

He was Hitler Lite, or as President George HW Bush, the current president’s father, put it, “Hitler revisited”, lacking the endless armies, but close enough for US purposes. He had a history of atrocities. His black mustache heightened the aura of villainy.

America’s quarter-century fascination with the Iraqi leader ended Friday at the gallows.

His hanging closed the books on a man who dealt with and benefited from the United States, then defied it, then ran like a rabbit into a hole in the ground, reduced to an army of one.

Saddam’s capture December 13, 2003, was a rare day of triumph for the United States after the Iraq invasion. In contrast, his execution brought worries that violence would spike beyond its usual chaotic level.

Saddam was vilified by the US Government probably more than any dictator since Adolf Hitler.

And this is a country with a long and still-active tradition of personalising its enemy, making conflicts less about competing interests than about specific villains – Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Moammar Gadhafi, Fidel Castro, the wanted-dead-or-alive Osama bin Laden.

While others cry “death to America”, America assembles a rogues gallery.

Colin Powell, writing in his memoirs about the lead-up to the first Gulf War, objected to the portrayal of Saddam as the “devil incarnate” by the elder President Bush and aides.

“President Bush has taken to demonising Saddam in public just as he had Manuel Noriega,” said Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Gulf War, then secretary of state for the Iraq war launched by President George W Bush in 2003. He suggested US officials “cool the rhetoric. Not that the charges were untrue, but the demonising left me uneasy”.

Yet a decade later, in the words of the younger President Bush and aides, including Powell, the case for war was about “Saddam’s chemical weapons business”, “his weapons of mass destruction”, “his terrorist associations”, his “massive clandestine nuclear weapons programme”, “his evil mind”.

US officials were never comfortable with Saddam but treated him as a useful counterweight to the hostile theocracy in Iran after the overthrow of the US-supported shah.

Iraq was at least a partly westernised and secular presence in a time of rising anti-American sentiment in the region, and had relations with the Soviets that Washington wanted to restrain.

In the long war between Iran and Iraq, the Reagan administration helped Saddam get international loans, restored formal relations in 1984 and secretly provided Iraq with intelligence and military support.

It sent Donald H Rumsfeld, who had served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, on a tour in December 1983 that included a stop in Baghdad and meetings there with Saddam and his foreign minister, Tariq Aziz.

Worried about Syria and oil supplies as well as Iran, Rumsfeld suggested relations between the two countries had “more similarities than differences”, according to his report from the meetings. An equally accommodating Saddam suggested his part of the world had more in common culturally with Washington than Moscow.

In his meeting with the foreign minister – but not Saddam – Rumsfeld parenthetically raised subjects that hindered the US from doing more for Iraq in its war with Iran. Two decades later, with Rumsfeld as defence secretary, these subjects would be used to summon rage against the Iraqi leader.

“I made clear that our efforts to assist were inhibited by certain things that made it difficult for us, citing the use of chemical weapons, possible escalation in the Gulf, and human rights,” Rumsfeld wrote back then.

By 1991, the United States was at war with Iraq, assembling a coalition to force Saddam to reverse his invasion and annexation of Kuwait. Saddam was the target of US denunciation from then on, as a sponsor of terrorism, a seeker of weapons of mass destruction, and a ruthless murderer of Kurds, opponents of his rule and inconvenient family members.

Left in power after his forces were driven from Kuwait, Saddam was a volcanic presence in US affairs for another decade, capped but toxic. It was a time of convoluted sanctions, fitful weapons inspections and no-fly-zone confrontations.

A fuzzy Iraqi TV picture captured the 1983 handshake between Saddam and Rumsfeld the envoy on a day when the two men agreed it was too bad a generation of Americans and Iraqis had grown up without knowing each other.

The future would bring the next generations together on bloody streets in a conflict neither side imagined then. And the man who once shook Saddam’s hand would direct the costly war that drove him from power, into the hole and to the hooded executioners.