by Kanan Makiya
“Are you capable of standing up to an imperialist offensive?”
He was looking straight at us. Large eyes in dusty climes like ours were supposed to blink all the time, but not his. Perhaps that was why men flinched when he stared at them. Unblinking is unsettling. Once it became clear ‘Ali was not going to answer, he answered on his behalf.
“No, of course not…
“It takes generations of hard work to convert discipline and love of order into instincts; thirty years I labored on people like you, and it wasn’t enough. Look at the speed with which all my hard work evaporated! Skin-deep those instincts remained, even among my very best, my own Republican Guard. But it was not from want of trying…and not from want of caring…I just needed time, much more time…
“The way you all crumbled in 2003…Had an officer of mine even dared to suggest the possibility of it beforehand, I would have had him shot; it is not a matter of right and wrong, you understand; it was his duty to tell me the truth as he honestly saw it. But I had the morale of a nation to hold firm; necessity is unforgiving. She it was who made me withdraw from the company of others, not even choosing the company of my family lest it breed weakness of will and resolve.”
He looked away now, as though right through the dirty white walls surrounding the forlorn lightbulb dangling uselessly on its cable. I thought I detected a note of regret when next he spoke in a voice so low I had to strain to hear:
“He would have been right, of course, to warn me. Baghdad should have held out longer…It should have…Seeing it fall like that to foreigners, and looted by its own citizens was the worst day of my life…”
Folding his hands over his elbows, he rested them on the surface of the table, to which his gaze was now directed as though in deep contemplation of its wooden grain. “What difference does it make now,” he said to himself.
Minutes passed. ‘Ali and I looked at one another in bewilderment tinged with relief that the pressure had lifted. Then, as though in unison, we stood rigidly to attention, looking straight ahead, locking our knees, straightening our Kalashnikovs, hoping to distance ourselves from what was turning into a dangerously private moment.
Leaning back in his chair, his face in profile, Saddam resumed talking, still to no one in particular.
“The queasiness, the acidity in the stomach, the rising bile…it all started that day,” he said, the volume of his voice dropping, the tone almost conversational. “April 10, 2003, the day Iraqi sovereignty snapped like a twig, the day my army fled like dogs, their tails between their legs…So what if it threw my bodily fluids out of equilibrium. I am an old man. But no, it is not age. It is the thought of all the things that might have been; that is what does a man in.
“Bah! Why dwell on it!” he suddenly said, lifting up his head, raising his voice, and snapping back into his more feisty self.
“The blame does not lie with you,” he said, looking at ‘Ali. His face was lined, and I noticed wrinkles of weariness around those big black eyes, which he had tried to conceal with powder of some sort. “Dirty though you may be, at least you are trying to be a soldier. It is not your fault. You are poorly served. Liberated lost souls…free to regress daily, accountable to no one,” he said, looking down at Ali’s dirty sandaled feet.
“You imagine you are moving forward but actually you are going backward, sucked by the undertow of your unformed nature into the ways of yesteryear, your great-grandfathers’ ways. Back, back, back…to sandals and pissing and shitting in the outdoors, no running water, no electricity, the way it used to be in my youth. I see it all coming back…When did you last have four continuous hours of electricity, or a street that didn’t smell like a sewer?
“Mark my words! Foreigners already overrun your unguarded cities.
“Think of me, my sons, as the last piece of something called Iraq that you will know. You were born into this world with bits of me wedged in to hold up the ramparts of your characters. You have known no one but me. What will you do when I am no longer there?”
Still seated, he took a long pause. I think he was enjoying himself; at least the eyes were no longer intent on skewering us.
“Did you notice what happened less than an hour ago? Perhaps not…no reason why you should. I will tell you: one of the escorting judges forgot himself at the doorway; he referred to me as ‘Mr. President.’
“ ‘Mr. President,’ can you believe it! Oh, how I relish such moments. Your new leaders forget they are supposed to lead, in spite of themselves. The reasoning part of their brain concedes to instinct! This particular judge knows me well. I appointed him; we unearthed many a conspiracy together, and each time he compromised himself a little more than the last time…Now he no longer knows who he is.
“The old fool instantly checked himself…but it was too late. I turned and looked his way, as if to say I was grateful for the courtesy. He turned red as a beet; I understood his position perfectly; in fact, I was counting on it. Needing to save face before his colleagues, he barked out an order, and said—much too loudly—that today was the happiest day of his life. Why? Because I was about to get my just deserts for ordering his brother’s execution.
“Poor stupid man, and fat to boot! What a combination. Did you know I put my fat officers and government officials on diets during the Great War with Iran, that judge included? Had their weight measured regularly, and salaries docked if they did not meet our guidelines. Probably you did not know; it was long before your time.
“Of course I ordered his brother shot, along with sixteen others if I recall. It was just after the 1991 Mother of All Battles, that most treacherous page in our country’s history. How his brother groveled! I remember him well, even as he informed on six of his friends; there were only ten of them at first, and then my men broke him down, helped him see the light, you might say, which brought the number up to sixteen. More fuss was made of that creature dead than ever was made of him alive.
“I despise informers!…Still, one cannot do without them…to the point of needing to create them. I could not have ruled without informers. Pain, sometimes just the threat of it, is the only way to make a truly gifted informer. The true mettle of a man is always revealed during torture; the sad thing is that in the very nature of the operation you lose the good and are saddled with the bad. I had that judge’s brother shot anyway.
“We shot the lot on a suspicion that they were plotting against me. No arms, nothing in writing, no logistical planning—nothing! Just a lot of talk…not that talk is to be belittled.
“You would think that your new leaders wanted to hang me for something like that, in view of the hundreds of times I have resorted to it…Hmm, that is probably an underestimate. I should have had a count made.
“Think about it! Countless thousands like that judge’s brother died in my torture chambers, and at the top of the list sits your very own revered Imam, your Sayyid’s uncle and the founder of your movement, Sayyid Muhammad Baqir of the House of Sadr. I had him tortured and killed along with his sister in 1980. Now that was a real man—especially seeing him withstand all the things we threw at him. But his death was forced upon me. I needed him to confess and turn on his comrades, only he wouldn’t. I handled it personally, you know, attending to him in his cell. None of it worked. He broke eventually—they all break down—after I had his sister raped in front of him…A last resort; it couldn’t be helped…Sometimes one has to resort to this kind of nastiness.
“Cruelty is a lesser fault, you know, than weakness or stupidity. One has to do whatever it takes. Think of me, my sons, as you would a surgeon, operating on the body of a man riddled with tumors, cutting and manipulating tissue as needed…Why? Because the nation is in need of saving. I am my country’s doctor. And your Sayyid Baqir was my patient. In those days he stood with Khomeini; the fate of Iraq was at stake. He had to be broken. And his death was necessary, however horrible. None of this has anything to do with the undiminished respect I carried for him all through his ordeal
.”
He stopped talking, and after a few moments rose from his seat and started pacing up and down the room.
“Even the best break; the braver they are, the more pathetic the breakdown. There he was, the leader of Iraq’s Shiʻa, the would-be Khomeini of our Iraq, drooling, in tears, entreating me, making promises, all the while mouthing the same primal sounds we all make, whatever civilization we come from: grunts, groans, babblings, screams…We are all the same when we are broken down to the basics of biology.
“Pain is a great leveler, my sons, reducing men to that which they share with everyone else; it destroys language and culture and ideas, and has the whole world collapse into a bundle of sensations and feelings; it is world-destroying. That is when the names come tumbling out…and we pick them up one by one. Did your leaders tell you any of this? Of course not. They don’t want you to know how like the rest of us your great hero turned out to be. But I know. Oh, yes, I know…
“Now I ask you, why am I not being tried for all the terrible things that I did to Sayyid Baqir and his sister?”
It was a good question. I never forgot it, and I still have no answer. I don’t think anyone knew with certainty, before the day of the hanging, what had happened to Sayyid Muhammad Baqir back in 1980. Whatever horrors we surmised he had endured were rooted in gossip, the kind the regime encouraged because it instilled fear.
“I was willing to provide the evidence, and take full responsibility for Sayyid Baqir’s death…The bigger the victim, presumably, the better for them. I told the investigating judges this a hundred times. But your leaders were not willing to go down that road. Why? Could it be because they knew I would tell the world not only why it was necessary for Sayyid Baqir to die, but how he died, whimpering at my feet? His halo would not be worth a pot to piss in after that. Meanwhile, my own would grow, as the arch-monster of our times perhaps, but also as the one who always did what it took to stave off the barbarians at the gates.
“I defeated the country that humiliated America. I annexed Kuwait, in Arabism’s name. I gassed and crushed the Kurds, coming closer than any Arab leader before me to a final solution of the Kurdish question. All these things I did while never stooping to body counts to judge whether I was right or wrong. If I set the oil fields on fire in 1991, it was in order to teach those Gulf rulers a lesson. Shame on them for paying foreign armies to do their fighting! And if I taught you Shiʻa a harsh lesson in 1991, it was so you would not forget who you were. Rising up against your nation at a time of war is gross treachery! And did I not build a nuclear capability, not once but over and over again each time it was destroyed? Why should the Arabs not have that which Israel and the West do not deny themselves? I did these things disregarding the cost in the short term, mindful only of the glory passed on to future generations.
“How the peoples of Palestine and the Arab world cheered me on when I did these things! They at least understood. Is that why the Occupier’s minions did not try me for them? They knew I wanted to be remembered for those deeds! I had earned the right to be tried for them. And so they had to execute me before such trials could be held. They were afraid to look small by comparison with me. And you know what? They were right.
“What am I being hanged for in the end? For punishing men from a defeated little terrorist organization who organized an ambush at a time of war, firing upon their head of state’s motorcade—only to botch the job? By God! Their country was under attack; 1982 was our worst year; the Iranians were pushing back and had taken territory inside Iraq! And botch it where?…In a Godforsaken village called Dujail! I mean, really…no one had heard of the wretched place before!…What a fuss over nothing. Kings have killed for less since the beginning of time, and had their praises sung to the skies because of it.”
—
He had a point. The Tyrant ordered indiscriminate mass killings to crush the Uprising of 1991. Tens of thousands were killed or buried alive in prison camps like Radwaniyya, where my father met his end; others were shoveled into mass graves with bulldozers like the ones being uncovered near Hilla. My father was in one of them. Why was the Tyrant not being punished for what he did to my father?
Could it be because he had executed followers of the prime minister’s own party in Dujail, and the prime minister wanted the small wrong done to his party to go down in history, instead of the enormous wrongs done to the whole nation? If the Great Tyrant is hanged only for the 142 dead of Dujail, instead of the millions of others he had killed, his band of failed conspirators look more important than they actually were. The Tyrant admitted to the executions at his trial. He always took responsibility for his handiwork, dismissing as irrelevant the names in official correspondence. His judges were delighted, thinking that they had nailed him with his “confession,” as he expected them to.
Meanwhile, he had started talking again.
“Do you really think the Americans came halfway across the world with hundreds of thousands of soldiers to punish me for Dujail? Three years of incarceration, endless interrogations, mountains of documents, truckloads of depositions, billions of American dollars spent…and Dujail is the best they can do! Pathetic.
“It took character and leadership to order those people shot. You were both too young to remember,” he said, turning from ‘Ali to me.
“We were in retreat and taking heavy casualties; Iranian saboteurs were crawling all over the country. No doubt some of the people I executed in Dujail were innocent. But could I afford to waste time ferreting them out when Iraq’s fate was hanging in the balance?
“Shooting the lot in Dujail bolstered the authority of your state, which was under attack. Do not imagine I cared two figs about my own personal authority; it was your future that was on the line…It was war! Your fellow citizens were dying. Should I have put their lives in danger as I counted out the one or two who might be innocent? And what if the murderous sons of bitches in Dujail had succeeded? The Iranians would be inside Baghdad within the week, their clerics cutting off your heads for not wearing the right clothes!
“Men pay for their beliefs in blood. It has always been so. The willingness to die, the ability to do it well, like the judgment to kill in Dujail, and be seen doing it with absolute conviction, is a gift only a handful possess: the gift of leadership. This quality is not present in the carpetbaggers whom the Americans put in that courtroom, men like that judge, who wants to be seen by his colleagues getting revenge for a brother who informed upon his friends, some of whose relatives were sitting on the court’s benches judging me.
“You are not like them…are you?…Yes, I am talking about both of you. Don’t be alarmed. I don’t bite.
“It’s the Americans I don’t understand,” he suddenly said, not waiting for an answer and rising from his chair to pace up and down the tiny room. He walked slowly, in carefully measured steps, his age showing through the badly powdered wrinkles of his face.
“Did they not have a plan for the day after?” he went on, talking to himself. “How can you defend your interests as an Occupier with such people in command? There was a time when nations sought to surpass one another, to defeat each other in battle, and then to the victors went all the spoils. The rules were simple; I applied them in Kuwait. Gut the place; take everything; teach the bastards a lesson. But these Americans are different; it is not spoils they are after—those are anyway going to their enemy Iran.
“They seem to have come with this strange idea of wanting a whole country to love them and be in their own image. It is like the English and their dogs: they are never so proud as when they think they have succeeded in making their dogs love them, and never so disappointed as when they realize that not all dogs want to love their masters.”
He stopped abruptly and thumped the wooden surface of the table with his fist, turning his gaze right at us; his eyes now held ours in thrall, like a snake fixating on a bird.
“Tell me, what glory is to be had from a competition between things that are all the same? It is t
he differences between nations that are interesting. Strangely, inside America it is the opposite; each person is a nation unto himself. And yet they are all the same in that they have no other love or idol but for themselves. Pure egoism binds their men and women to the world…the opposite of our own Arab experience.
“On the outside we Arabs are composed of a great variety of countries and communities. But deep down, where it matters the most, and when the nation is at its most glorious and at one with itself, which happens from time to time…we are as one, everybody coming together in a common cause, all parts striking as one fist. I live for such moments!
“Tell me, young man,” he said, looking straight at me, “do you love America? Or you,” he said, turning to ‘Ali, “do you wish you were an American?”
We said nothing. Poor ‘Ali seemed to be fading away into a trance, staring grimly at the cracks running through the floor slab. He looked sick. There was nothing in the rulebook that we had not been given to tell us what to do in circumstances like this. I began to worry ‘Ali might do something stupid.
“I thought so,” he said.
“Then again,” he said in a lower voice but still boring right through us, clearly coming to a conclusion of some sort, “perhaps I have got the Americans all wrong. Perhaps they never intended to turn Iraq into America, but were seeking revenge for their defeat in the Mother of All Battles in 1991!…Perhaps they want the descent into the anarchy and chaos that now engulfs us. Perhaps that is why they never took me up on my offers to negotiate and went along with that charade of a trial.”
—
He returned to pacing up and down the bare concrete floor of the room, carefully avoiding the cracks, his hands clasped behind his back, calibrating each step, adjusting its length, working things out. Minutes passed in silence, until he seemed to arrive at a decision. The private portion of his musings had come to an end. He looked up, and asked us to relax and be at ease—not an easy thing to do under the circumstances.