by Kanan Makiya
During his incarceration the Tyrant repeatedly told his American interrogators that he could stop the fighting in a week. What was he thinking? That he could cast a spell and the insurgents would come to their senses and strike a deal through him, symbol of a people who had been wronged, struggling against the Occupation.
“I am the president” were his first words, spoken in English, when the Occupier’s soldiers dragged him out of his spider hole on a small farm just outside the city of his birth. “I want to negotiate.”
He wanted to negotiate!
Imagine his humiliation, then, at what the Occupier did to him. “Caught like a rat,” a delighted American general said. The Tyrant was displayed on CNN with foreign doctors poking at his teeth, pulling his hair, pretending all the while that they were looking for lice.
What a perfectly executed move—perhaps the only public relations success of their short tenure, reluctant and spoiled men that they were, men who no longer had the stomach for anything called sacrifice. The pictures resonated across the breadth of our Arab Muslim world. But it was the last victory the Tyrant’s enemies would enjoy.
Now imagine this original humiliation being compounded by the chief of the Occupation bringing a cluster of Iraqi politicians, all of whom he had created, all wealthy gold-watch-wearing exiles returned from London, all gawking at the former Iraqi leader the day following his capture. One of them, smartly dressed with slickly oiled black hair dropping to his shoulders like a movie star, shouted: “You are cursed by God! How will you meet your Creator?”
“With a clear conscience and as a Believer,” the Great Dictator replied.
“Why didn’t you have the courage to fight or at least die trying? At least your sons fought before they were killed.”
This was a logic that the Tyrant understood well.
What foreign ditch did they dig him out of? I can imagine him saying to himself while the apoplectic would-be politician with the black hair, who had done so well for himself in London, paced up and down the room, muttering “He’s learned nothing…nothing!” and all the while the Tyrant was silently watching him, seated on his prison cot in his pajamas, his dirt-encrusted toenails showing through the cheap gray plastic slippers supplied by the U.S. Department of Defense.
I cannot see what learning has to do with it. Or cowardice with the Tyrant’s surrender on December 13, 2003. It certainly is not why he allowed himself to be dragged out “like a rat,” as Iraqi television reported, repeating what the American general had said.
The only imperative he obeyed was to live, to live in order to go on and fight another day. That is why in the months since the fall of Baghdad he switched locations daily, “organizing the insurgents,” in the words of his lawyer. This craving for danger was not going to be satisfied by charging out of his spider hole with guns blazing. He needed the deaths of large numbers of men, combatants under his command, to sate his cravings and immense appetites. The insurgency against the Occupier was his creation, and could not be otherwise. He made it; he owned it; it was his to deploy in negotiations. The thought that it might take on a life of its own never crossed his mind. It is said they caught him with documents that corroborate his early preparations for the insurgency, dating back to the months before the invasion. I don’t doubt it.
His first court appearance showed that he fully grasped the drama of his new situation. In the dreams and nightmares, which never go away, I always see him standing there, his eyes flashing, shouting: “This is all theater,” with a dismissive wave to the cameras.
I see him tell the chief judge: “I am not going to answer to this so-called court, out of respect for the truth and the will of the Iraqi people.” And he believed it too; he believed he alone had “respect for the truth and the will of the Iraqi people.”
And then he said, “I always held the people’s interests first…Even today, I can go and sleep peacefully in any town in the country. Can you?” he asked his judges.
The chief judge—a Kurd, incidentally—was at a loss, not knowing how to handle the disintegration of his courtroom. He was dismissed for being too polite. Seriously! Every Iraqi upstart appointed by the Occupier was beginning to realize that, polite or not, there was more authority and self-assurance in the Great Tyrant’s posture and delivery than in any of the judges, prosecutors, or attorneys arrayed before him! And they panicked, blaming a judge for saying “Mr. Saddam Hussein,” instead of “the accused” or “the Tyrant”!
The Tyrant held on to the idea that he represented the nation, believing, not hoping, it was true, while at the same time knowing it was the only card left for him to play in a game now controlled by his captors. The court before which he stood, trained and nudged along at every step by the Occupier, did not know whom it represented, or by what law it was to judge this man who had in fact made all the laws, laws these very same judges had spent entire lifetimes studying and applying.
The world outside added to the mix an entirely new set of words—“universal justice,” “international law,” “human rights,” “crimes against humanity,” and the list goes on—honeyed words dished out on a pillow of empty promises that meant nothing to anyone inside the country; only the Tyrant’s words, illusory or not, meant something to the people watching.
It was a moment that could not be predicted or planned for; it could only unfold.
Think of it as theater staged on the grandest of platforms; a play improvised, embellished, written, and revised constantly by none other than its prime subject, actor extraordinaire Saddam Hussein.
At the point of his transfer into Iraqi custody, on December 30, 2006, then and only then, the Tyrant would have realized the play had come to a stop; he would have given up on the idea that the Americans might take him up on his offer to negotiate.
But Iraqi custody was not the same as the nation’s custody, and so the Tyrant did not, even at this late stage, surrender. Here lies the true measure of the man, the real leader he always knew himself to be, the proof that false hopes were not what had brought the Tyrant to such a point, nor were they a guarantee of success in order for him to persevere.
The Tyrant chose his moment, and switched course whenever necessary; he had done this again and again throughout his career. When the Occupier was in charge of his fate, the whole point of his life had been to live, to fight another day, by arms or through negotiations. Now that the Occupier had handed him over to his loosely cobbled native allies, the point of his remaining few hours remained as always: to save the nation, only this time by dying for it. He would therefore choose to die in such a way as to turn the tables on death itself. The final act was at hand, and for this too, as always, he had come well prepared.
—
Consider “Palestine is Arab,” the next thing the Tyrant trumpeted out to the jeering mob.
Of course Palestine is Arab. What else could Palestine be? He meant the nation “will be victorious” because “Palestine is Arab.” Everyone in that room understood that, which is why it struck a chord in that room on that day. What he was also saying was that every person in that room, all of whom believed Palestine is Arab, were in truth hypocrites, traitors to the fundamental principle of the Arabness of Palestine, which they all said they believed in, but which he alone was prepared to die for. Your Arabness passed muster only if you truly believed, deep in your heart of hearts, that Palestine was Arab; waver over it, as the Kurds might, or approach it less than enthusiastically, as we Shiʻa did (for fear of Sunni dominion), and you were instantly suspect.
Palestine is the litmus test; it always has been.
The quality of being an Arab to Saddam meant that he and the jeering mob still had many things in common, what he and his party liked to call the nation’s “eternal message.” Blood, language, territory, religion, history were useful but not essential attributes; the nation, first and foremost, was Spirit. And so, in that execution chamber on December 30, 2006, everyone was potentially an Arab, but only Saddam was the genuin
e article.
Would the crowd in the room understand him? Think about it differently: replace the word “Spirit” with “Belief,” and instantly all Muslims in that room understood what the Tyrant was saying. As I said: of course Palestine is Arab. What is Islam but a Community of Believers? What is Arabism but a Community of Believers in the same Spirit?
The Tyrant wanted to follow up the words “Palestine is Arab” with the Muslim profession of faith, first pronounced by our patron saint, the Sayyid of all Sayyids, ‘Ali son of Abu Talib, Prince of the Faithful, when he prayed with the Prophet as a ten-year-old boy in Mecca—words pronounced since by every Muslim multiple times a day.
To profess one’s faith in God is a right given to every man, woman, and child without exception, a right that cannot be denied to infidels and unbelievers, nor even to those accused of apostasy. Moreover, it followed with iron logic from the Arab nature of Palestine, a land that became Muslim and Arab only after the conquest of Jerusalem in the year 634. By ending his eleven-word speech thus, the Tyrant was bearing witness to his dying adherence to Islam.
Decades of finely tuned instinct and experience had been honed into that last performance, which some imbecile captured on a videophone. The Great Tyrant, perhaps the greatest who ever ruled an Arab and Muslim land, never lost his composure, not even when the trapdoor clanged open while he was halfway through reciting his prayers.
—
Why was the Tyrant cut off in the middle of bearing witness to his faith? It had to be deliberate, a final insult, the instinct of small men trying to goad an ogre, not the measured and calculated mistake of one following orders. Inside that chamber, no one was any longer in control of anything. Why did the hangman flip the lever in the middle of the holiest set of words that a Muslim can utter, words that remain holy even if the speaker is a barbarous infidel? I don’t think he was instructed. The government had wanted to showcase their execution, to highlight to the world their achievement in bringing the great Tyrant to justice. At the same time they wanted to stick it to their Sunni citizens, the ones whose first day of the Feast they were deliberately spoiling. The two impulses were at odds with one another, perhaps, but the latter won out because the government that wanted to achieve all those things was no longer in the room, just as it was absent in the country.
The Tyrant, on the other hand, was there. Solidly, his cloaked presence like some grim harbinger of death filled the room. I see his expensive black camel hair overcoat smoothing out the awkward bumps and shapes of his aging form to create a massive and immovable rock of blackness. He was standing for death itself, everyone’s death, not only his own. Yes, he was there. Always he has been there. Only him, his hands bound, the rope around his neck, forever and for all time he will be there, even if around him swirled a vulgar mob, drunk with excitement and thirsty for blood.
The mob was not going to be cheated of its blood. Here were the dregs of the nation the Tyrant had tried to remind us of, my nation, all summed up in eleven words, words that they had heard repeated a hundred times, every day of their miserable lives. In their eyes, as I stood up there on the platform looking down at them, I could see the frenzy of frightened and blind men, men who are blindest when they think they can see, and most frightened when they think they are not frightened at all. The greater their victim, the bigger their fear, even when the object of that fear is tied and bound and a breath away from his demise.
The Rope
Evening
I was not alone in my unease that Saturday; others had misgivings, not that they will admit to them today. For example, my best friend, Haider, who used to live up the street from me in Najaf and with whom I shared an apartment in the Cairo district of Baghdad in the months before the hanging. He was tall and heavy-boned for an Arab of Bedouin stock from Najaf; his lean muscles gave him a grace in motion that was beautiful to watch, qualities I envied, being clumsy as a young boy. Inseparable since childhood, we shared a friendship of opposites, not equals, athlete and scholar, each taking and giving something different to the other. In combination, we felt invincible toward whatever obstacles fate tossed our way. The boy in me saw in my friend the attributes he pined for, and he, I believe, admired to the point of excess my facility with numbers and words. Unfortunately, Haider’s mother did the same, a subject she tirelessly badgered him about. Together we joined the ranks of the Army of the Awaited One in 2003, and fought the Occupier shoulder to shoulder in Najaf in that unforgettable summer of 2004. You could not ask for a truer friend and braver comrade in arms.
Haider was there, in the crowd that watched the Tyrant hang that day. But he was chafing because he had not been chosen for the detail and was not up on the platform with me. Still, he was eager to talk when we found time to be together that evening.
“You didn’t approve, I take it,” he said, noticing how shaken I was by the events of the morning.
“Of what?” I answered, not wanting to talk.
“The Tyrant’s execution, of course.”
“Approval has nothing to do with it,” I replied, avoiding him with my eyes by choosing to busy myself folding my still freshly pressed uniform in readiness to be returned the following day.
“Why so glum, then?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Haider,” I said. “My feelings are still raw. I don’t understand them myself.”
“The affair lacked decorum, no doubt about it,” Haider went on, ignoring my request, “and that is bad, very bad. But don’t read too much into it. With time, men will learn to behave better. We have never hanged a tyrant before!” he said with a laugh. “The important thing is he is dead. You agree he had to die, don’t you? You are not changing your mind about that.”
“Of course not! I wanted him executed as much as the next man,” I snapped back. “But men in ski masks, I ask you! A platform not large enough to fit everyone! A pulley yanked out of a building site the day before, and incompetently fitted to boot! A mob in place of witnesses! I hope it was not you jeering from the floor! Do you want me to go on? It was an embarrassment from start to finish, a disgrace, not an execution but a lynching…”
“Don’t confuse the appearance of a thing with the thing itself,” Haider replied, in a quiet tone of voice designed to calm me down.
“Executions are all about appearance; that is the whole point.”
“But we are, after all, no different from animals, for whom the kill is the end of it. Accept that, my friend, and move on. He is dead; it is finished. Get over it.”
“You are being unjust to animals; they kill neither to humiliate nor to insult; they kill out of necessity. And they go about it with a kind of…what you call decorum,” I replied, calming myself down and sitting beside him on the carpet.
“Okay. Put decorum aside. That was a bad choice of words. It doesn’t matter how we die, nor for that matter how we are born; neither lasts very long in the general span of things. But between the two lies the true meaning of our lives; how we choose to live the years between the natural facts of our birth and our death is all that matters. The Tyrant launched wars, killed millions, and tortured countless thousands; he left our country in ruins. These things count.”
“True…,” I started to say, but Haider would not let up.
“My point is, bigger problems going to the heart of what is happening to this land confront us daily. We are in a war, for God’s sake. And he even claimed to be leading the killers blowing up our mosques and markets and neighborhoods.”
“He never said he was waging war on us Shiʻa; that is what the Wahhabi, Haters of the Family of the Prophet, say they are doing. He claimed to be leading a war against the Occupier, the same war our Sayyid waged in the first two years of the Occupation.”
“Words, mere words. The Tyrant was the serpent’s head; it had to be cut off quickly to get on with what needs to be done. The Occupier dragged the wretched trial out for three years under the hallowed name of procedure. We humored them, and went along with it,
until we understood how ineffectual and weak-willed they are. Now the Tyrant is dead. We can breathe a sigh of relief, and move on.”
“Are you saying the terror will end?”
“Our enemies will never find another leader like him; he is irreplaceable; they will be in disarray. Tomorrow no one will remember how we botched his execution. All that will count is the fact that he is no longer there.”
“Ahh, Haider…Haider, my dear Haider. Is the fact of our beloved Imam Husain’s death on the plains of Karbala centuries ago all that counted at the time? Any fool can snuff the life out of a man. You and I have done it enough times to know. Killing is easy; it doesn’t require intelligence.”
That was a mistake; I should not have made a comparison with the Imam, whose life story was more precious and meaningful to the both of us than anything else. But it was too late. Haider lost his temper:
“Your words border on blasphemy! For God’s sake, man, don’t let others hear you speak like that! The Imam martyred himself for Justice; Saddam was hanged for his sins. Therein lies the chasm between Heaven and Hell!”
“Yes, yes, of course. But I am talking about how men die, and how they go on living because of how they have died. Our Imam was betrayed, and then martyred by his enemies. Our forefathers called upon him to cross the desert and save them from their Tyrant. When he did, they abandoned him to die alone in the desert, his throat parched, his wives and children dying with him of thirst and scorching heat. If we remember the blessed Imam every year, in the month of his martyrdom,” I pressed on, “it is because of our guilt and shame at how he died, his faith intact, ours in tatters—”