Other of Saddam’s close and highly privileged relatives abused power, but as Uday reached high school, he took this to baroque extremes. He lived out a prolonged arrested adolescence that lasted well into midlife. He was “like a child,” one of his government interpreters remembered. “His ideas were not clear…. He was not really mature.” Tariq Aziz dismissed the adult Uday as “just a kid” whose conduct admittedly “went beyond what is acceptable.”
