Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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Death of the dragon

The Tablet, 19 April 2003

This is, I hope, the happiest obituary that I shall ever want to write. The dragon is dead and what a wonderful day! Over the past 35 years, a psychopath wielding a fire-breathing ideology of hatred inflicted the most intense pain on countless families and condemned millions more to a dull numbness and continuous sorrow.

It would have been best if Iraqis had themselves achieved their freedom. Since that had become impossible, it would have been better if the world had united in rescuing them. But France, Russia and Germany stood to strike gold if Saddam survived, and drove a cart and horses through the United Nations in pursuit of their narrow national interests. So, thank you very much the United States, Britain, Australia and Poland for jumping into the ring. We all know - and approve - that you did not go to war to wind up the torture chambers in Iraq. If you made a practice of that, we would be at war for ever. But you have achieved a great victory for decency, whatever your reasons. Please help yourselves to the oil. My house is yours, as the Bedouin would say.

Where shall I begin the obituary of Iraqi Ba'athism, 1968-2003? Perhaps a quote from a book published in 1959 will do. It was written by Michel Aflaq, a Syrian "Christian" who had founded the Arab Socialist Renaissance (Ba'ath) Party in Damascus in 1947 after studying in Paris and becoming an admirer of the Third Reich. Its extremism and its language are typical of the post-war political ferment in the Arab world: "The Ba'athist must fill his heart with the hatred of all those with the opposing view. The opposite view does not exist by itself. It resides in persons, who must perish so that it, too, may perish. ...When we are cruel to others, we know that our cruelty is aimed at bringing them back to their true selves, of which they are ignorant. Their potential will, which has not been clarified yet, is with us, even when their swords are drawn against us".

Rampant with the hatred of Jews and European imperialists whom they blamed for breaking up the former Arab possessions of the Ottoman empire into small countries, Michel AfIaq's message of Arab unity and socialism found many receptive ears among students and military cadets. These gathered in secret enclaves and planned military takeovers. By 1968, they ruled over both Damascus and Baghdad and were busy massacring all those with "the opposing view".

United at first in a single party under a "Command Council of the Revolution" amid talk of merging the two countries into one, Arab unity soon vanished even among the Ba'athists themselves. They split in two and began sending assassins into one another's castles. In Iraq, a former street thug with a sadistic reputation emerged as deputy president and strongman. After demolishing all opposition to the Ba'ath Party in his ad hoc torture centres, Saddam the Hammer surrounded himself with members of his family and clan from the northern town of Tikrit and turned his attention to rivals inside the government who trembled every time they heard his name. By 1975, everyone knew that the official President was no more than a puppet and that Saddam ran the country on his own. So many among his cronies bore his surname, Tikriti, that he banned the use of surnames to hide the fact.

By 1975, also, Saddam had emerged as a shrewd calculator on the regional scene. With Iraq's sizeable revenues from the sale of oil, he knew he could buy off everyone who mattered. Despite his former massacre of the pro-Soviet Communists, he had got the Soviet Union to equip and train his army to crush the Kurds - with a little help from the Shah of Iran, who suddenly abandoned the Kurds in return for some territorial adjustments - and he had purchased two nuclear reactors from France, whose Prime Minister was Jacques Chirac. (Recently, Chirac's then chief of atomic energy told the BBC that Paris knew all along that Saddam wanted the reactors for developing nuclear bombs. He added: "But what do you do when so much money is involved?) Indeed, what do you do when you are Prime Minister of France? The main reactor, named after Ossirak, the Babylonian god-king, soon became known as O'Chirac, but was bombed by Israel in 1981 before it could produce enough plutonium for a nuclear bomb. If Israel had been less daring, the world might well have held back from going, to war with Saddam to evict him from Kuwait in 1991.)

In 1979, soon after the toppling of the Iranian monarchy by Muslim extremists under Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam officially installed himself at the presidential palace in Baghdad and began to plan an invasion of Iran to take advantage of its revolutionary chaos. His main motive here was not, as it is often said, to capture territory for its own sake but to humiliate the ancient Iranian rival to promote himself as the new champion of Arab glory. If he had succeeded, he would have gone a long way towards establishing himself as the new Nasser of the Arab world.

But he had miscalculated. The Iranians with several times the population of Iraq ant several times its size, had strategic depth and repelled Saddam's forces beyond their borders before too long. Soon it was they who were threatening Iraq. So Saddam turned t( massive borrowing from his neighbours particularly Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, in the name of protecting them from Iranian dominance and Shia fundamentalism. He also turned to Islamic symbolism himself to endear him to his country's Shia majority He looked even more than previously to the Russians and the French for new weaponry, and German companies were particularly active in providing him with chemical precursors and expertise for his new programme of chemical weapons for use against the Iranians and the Kurds. (It has now beer established that the United States and Britain together supplied him only with about one per cent of his arms at this time, with some 80 per cent provided by the Soviet Union and France.)

Hardly had Saddam signed a ceasefire treaty with Iran in 1988 than he turned to the Kurds, using gas on some 280 separate occasions, including in the case of the town of Halabja. Interestingly, he called the military operations against the Kurds in 1988 after a chapter in the Koran. "Anfal" deals with the spoils of war (against non-Muslims), the implication here being that the Kurds were infidels and therefore the shedding of their blood was no sin. Over 100,000 Kurdish civilians perished.

Hardly, again, had Saddam finished suppressing the Kurds than he turned to Kuwait. On 2 August 1990, he captured the country overnight after persuading himself that the United States would not react militarily, that, indeed, the Americans would welcome the emergence of a new, strong Arab leader, with greater wealth at his disposal.

This was the second biggest mistake of his career. The Americans would not tolerate the oil fields of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia falling into the hands of Saddam and, soon, a coalition of 29 countries, including many Muslim states, expelled his forces and returned them to Iraq, followed by a ceasefire treaty that required him to submit, within weeks, all his new weapons of mass killing to the United Nations for destruction.

Thus he was given a chance to forfeit chemical and biological weapons in return for getting the stringent regime of military and industrial sanctions against him lifted. But, true to character for a man who had always seen his survival through instilling fear in the breasts of his rivals and neighbours, he committed his greatest mistake. Instead of showering the United Nations inspectors with disclosure after disclosure about his banned weapons programmes, he dragged out the process for 12 years until, in the end, even the massive diplomatic efforts of Paris, Moscow and Berlin did not prove sufficient to avert an invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies to destroy his regime root and branch. He did not understand that, after the historic terrorist attacks on America of September 2001, the United States had changed for ever.

It had been predicted in The Tablet on several occasions in recent years that the bulk of the Iraqi army would not fight for Saddam. What did come as a surprise was that even the core of that army, the pampered Special Republican Guard, decided to flee immediately it sensed the presence of Western troops on the horizon. Another shock that emerged during the Gulf War of 2003 was the misery and poverty in which the bulk of Iraq's inhabitants, the Shias, who had for ages been excluded from power, had lived for years away from the gaze of the world. On finding themselves free for the first time of Saddam's long shadow, they not only looted the contents of all official buildings, they burnt down what they could not carry away. They even destroyed the precious evidence of 5,000 years of settled life in Mesopotamia, their own ancestral land, because they identified museums with tyranny.

On its demise, Iraqi Ba'athism leaves behind a society that is more miserable and more fragmented than it was on Ba'athism's advent 35 years earlier. But the future is not without hope. The United States and Britain isolated themselves from majority sentiment in the world in invading Iraq. They will be under pressure to create a new polity in Iraq that will be massively superior to what they found there. In the following couple of years, they will be expected, at the very least, to enable and encourage the various peoples of Iraq to devise a federal constitution that allows for the flourishing of their separate regional identities in a prosperous union. But there are also dangers ahead. Powerful neighbours such as Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia have strong reasons for not wanting to see such an Iraq functioning well. The United States, in particular, will have to remain a decisive presence, a watchful guarantor of Iraqi sovereignty for some time to come.

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