If Saddam came back to power it would mean the White House had decided he was their man once again. It'd turn out that all the nasty stuff - the massacres and the torture and so forth - had been the fault of bad advisers, the way it generally turns out with White House mistakes. (Monica was the exception, because there wasn't any possibility of shuffling off the blame on anyone else.)

I think a fresh face as strong man is a lot more likely - though to be viable he'd really have to be someone who hadn't been directly involved with the invasion or with the subsequent occupation backed regime. Ideally someone who had fought agauinst the invaders, but subsequently made peace with them.

But it is pretty likely that the similarities to Saddam would extend to the kind of stuff that Old Guy referred to - "a murderous thieving crook that steals the wealth if the Iraqis and feeds them crumbs". That's pretty standard stuff for "strong men". Though maybe he could get by with delegating that kind of thing to private companies and their mercenaries, which works quite well in some places as a way of massaging the public image.

Never forget - when Saddam was doing the very worst of his crimes he was being supported up to the hilt by the White House. There's no reason to think it'd be all that different with a new "strong man".