by Kanan Makiya
He, Saddam, “President of Iraq,” had something important to set before us; it was his testament, he said, which had already been given to his lawyer. He had a copy in the pocket of his overcoat, intended as notes for a final speech “to posterity,” as he put it. He hoped to deliver the speech in the execution hall. But that was before the handover; Iraqis were now going to execute him, not Americans. He knew he was not going to get the opportunity to deliver it. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out several pieces of neatly folded paper, which he spread out on the table in front of him.
“What shall I do with these?” he said in a conversational tone of voice and with a smile on his lips as he looked at us.
‘Ali was looking as if his mere presence in the room while the Tyrant said anything was a punishable transgression. Saddam continued smiling, in a slimy, nasty way, the weariness having been wiped off his face; perhaps he was enjoying toying with us.
I snapped: “Read it!”
‘Ali looked at me, horrified. I had broken a spell. I think those were the first words spoken to the Tyrant since the judge had called him “Mr. President.” Saddam swiveled toward me, and kept on smiling mysteriously as though he were being entertained.
“No…I don’t think I will. Not enough room,” he said, sweeping his arm to embrace the whole room. “But you look like a brave man,” he said, nodding in my direction. “Here, take it. You read it later—you are on duty, after all. Consider it a gift. Pass it on. Sell it if you like; it might make you rich and famous.” He was drawling again, savoring his words in an irritating way. He passed the papers to me. I took the speech and put it in my pocket, determined not to say another word. ‘Ali was looking sick.
I could not but take a peek at how it started.
In this my Last Will and Testament, I declare that an illegally constituted court, an Occupier’s Court, has condemned me to death. Before God you must know that in condemning me, they have in fact condemned you and all your ancestors. For what did I do or teach that all the ancient kings of Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, and after them your Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, and his successors, did not do and teach before me?
“How dare you!” I shouted, forgetting I was not going to speak again. “Comparing yourself to the Prophet!”
“This is neither the time nor the place for modesty,” he said quietly, evidently pleased at having drawn me into conversation. Then he leaned forward, pointing to the wristwatch on my arm indicating the proximity of the time of his execution.
“Know that I am the distillation of five thousand years of your history.”
I took to fumbling with my Kalashnikov, astounded at his brazenness, mumbling something like “You had your moment in court and did not deny your crimes.”
Staring at me again with those unblinking eyes, he said, “Was that your court, or America’s? The only justice I recognize comes from you.”
“From me?”
“Yes, you…and him,” he replied, nodding in Ali’s direction. “And the people of Iraq.
“This so-called court exists,” he went on, “because I stood up to America and America occupied us. It is not your court; it is designed to set us against one another, Sunni against Shiʻi, Kurd against Arab. I never recognized it.”
“No outsider can set Iraqis against one another,” I replied. “We are brothers in suffering.”
“I don’t see you fostering brotherhood other than by mouthing platitudes and looking like a clown with that gun. You won’t need it. Don’t worry. I want to die onstage, before an audience. A life sacrificed in the right way and at the right time is a life well spent.”
“You deserve to die.”
“Why?”
“Because you have no regrets, do not apologize for your crimes, and will not ask for forgiveness from your victims.”
Saddam snorted, tossing his head back: “Would you forgive me?”
“Certainly not.”
“Nonetheless, I am going to ask you to forgive me.”
“For what?”
“For letting you down.”
“How could you do that?”
“By dying…It was not in my destiny to execute the idea that I lived for. And so I let you down.”
“Don’t let it trouble you. Nothing you can say or do today is going to change my mind.”
“A smart one!” he said, amused. “Look, son, why not judge me as one who has been joined at the hip to our people for thirty-five years, longer than you have been on this earth? I am able to teach you things.”
“I doubt it.”
“He who has learned how to die is free in a way that you are not, even with that gun in your hand. I offer you my freedom. Let it be your first lesson.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Ahh…you say that now. But the truth of my dictatorship will survive among you as whisperings,” he went on, “late at night, in your living rooms, talking about the latest outrage. It will survive because it is born naturally in the instincts for unity, security, and order. I gave you those things, and now they are gone. The desire to regain them, however, will not go away, and as soon as you feel that desire, know that my spirit is back, walking among you. Death will be my redemption.”
An ancient doctrine came to mind that I had seen in one of my father’s books. It claimed that the true sovereign had two bodies: one mortal and the other immortal. Why was this arch-manipulative, deceitful, genocidal maniac talking to me about spirits and immortality and redemption? Was it all an act for the benefit of the simpletons he thought ‘Ali and me to be?
“Spirits walking among the living…what rubbish. Your whole life was a crime against this country. If you lived for anything, it was for the palaces you kept on building while we languished.”
“And you, what do you live for?”
“The freedom to be who I am, and serve God.”
“Be careful what you wish for. This freedom the Occupier gave you is a license for gangsters. It originates in the idea that all men are born good and have been corrupted by evil institutions such as the ones I put in place. In their place, he has contrived to erect around you new institutions. These he calls ‘democracy.’ But this great lie he calls democracy, resting on the even greater lie he calls ‘freedom,’ has existed for less than two hundred out of the five thousand years in which your ancestors have known civilization. His so-called democracy has only ever been enjoyed by a tiny fraction of our race, that very same fraction that occupied, colonized, divided, stole, and ruled at everyone else’s expense. His principles and lofty so-called human rights, a doctrine designed to demote the future of a nation over its present, rest on a history of violence far greater than I ever practiced. Is this what you live for?”
“Of course not!”
“Ask yourself then: Is the Occupier’s view of human nature convincing? I say not. Men are born weak, and the notion of ‘tricking’ their weakness through mechanically contrived institutions like democracy is both stupid and foreign to our Arab nature. You and your friend over there,” he said, “are supposed to be soldiers. Are you?”
“Of course we are.”
“Don’t lie to me, son,” he drawled. “I don’t have the time for it.”
“Okay, okay. In a manner of speaking, I am not in the Iraqi Army. My superiors in the Army of the Awaited One asked me to put on this uniform for today.”
“I suppose your leaders arranged all this behind the backs of the Americans?”
I didn’t answer, and fell silent. My leaders had switched armies on me for one day, the day of the hanging, and dressed me in a New Iraqi Army uniform. I was told not to boast or talk of my temporary membership in the New Army. Previously, I had never been encouraged to look upon the government as anything other than the Occupier’s puppet. Now I was a soldier of said government, elected in 2005, even though I never had a day’s worth of training in my life, and did not vote for anyone in the elections. In fact, the first man I killed during the fighting in Naja
f in 2004 was not an American but a fellow Shiʻi from the same New Army whose uniform I was now wearing.
“Our Iraqi nature is more deceitful and meaner than most,” Saddam went on in a voice tinged with sadness. “If among the Palestinians, for instance, envy takes the form of trying to educate oneself to be better than the next man, in Iraq, the preference is to denigrate excellence. If a man is rich, the Iraqi will wish him to be poor; if a man is generous, the Iraqi will insist it is for the sake of business. Another’s helplessness rarely stimulates compassion; more often it excites ill will. Any threat to self-importance is enough to create a lifelong resentment in a real Iraqi man. The success of my dictatorship relied less on terror than on understanding and working with these vices…Add up your current rulers, son, by which I mean all the ones now in government, the ones who were in earlier incarnations of the Occupier’s government, along with all their advisors and those buffoons they put in Parliament and their advisors…Don’t forget them. Roughly, how many people are we talking about?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ten thousand or so, I say. Not more. Fair enough? Not counting secretaries, clerks, and the like, of course. Here they are, then, all ten thousand of them, filling important leadership posts in the shiny new democratic institutions the Occupier has provided…Now tell me, according to whose view of human nature are these people today behaving, mine or the Occupier’s?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Does their behavior in the service of the people who elected them support the view that men are good? I am asking you to tell me if that is the case based on your own experience. Or, do you find support for my view that men are at their core selfish, desirous of enriching themselves at the expense of those they are meant to serve?”
“I don’t understand…”
“I think you do, son. You don’t like where the argument is taking you.”
“And where is that?”
“To the truth of my dictatorship, which is grounded in how naturally rapacious and disgusting people are. You see them bleeding your country dry at this very moment in the name of your Occupier’s freedom and democracy. Don’t deceive yourself, son!”
—
I didn’t want to go on, and he was beginning to look tired. Several awkward minutes later, musing to himself, he appeared to contradict everything he had just said.
“Among the meanest Iraqis I have seen shooting stars of greatness, scintillating moments of kindness. These light up the sky if only for moments before fading away…I lived for them, son. Nothing I have said is intended to denigrate my people. It would be wrong of you to understand me that way. You see, I am like you, I am one of you…We are one.”
“You were never one of us!” I shouted. “You set yourself apart and had us killed in your prisons and never-ending wars.”
“The true dictator is a lonely man; he holds back parts of himself that at great personal expense he has to make indifferent to family and friends. He lives a radical kind of loneliness, like a prisoner in one of his own cells, loving no one, and expecting none to love him. The people he trusts the least are always the ones who claim to love him the most. Strange, is it not, how everything in the end is reduced to one form or another of love…Do you love Iraq?”
“Like I love my own life. It is why I am carrying this.” I lifted my Kalashnikov, pushing it in his face. “It is why I am here.”
“Well spoken! Arab Iraq!…That is the idea I have lived for and will die by. It seems we do have something in common.”
“Not on your life,” I said, getting angry again.
“Let us start with the fact that I am your president.”
“You are a criminal awaiting execution.”
“Never mind. I was your president. And you are my children, whether you like it or not; even those bastards who sat in judgment over me are my children. You may not have loved me, but you knew I was strong and you feared and respected me. Compare me one last time with your current crop of rulers, that class of ten thousand or so individuals we talked about earlier. Notice how desperate they are to enhance their authority. They do so not because I was popular—I never stooped to curry favor, not even from you. They do so because they are so spectacularly unpopular. They desperately want to be seen by you as something they know in their hearts they are not. More people praise me in Baghdad today than praise them. Why?…Because not one of them loves an idea bigger than his own self. Of Iraq they are wholly ignorant. Instead they bow before your enemies, sometimes Iran, sometimes Saudi Arabia, and always America…Tell me: What is Iraq to you?”
“My country, my nation, the cradle of civilization. We invented writing, law…Do you want me to go on?”
“Nicely put. And the essence of every nation is singularity, oneness, is it not? You are of it, or you are not. You are with it or against it. There are no half measures. Agreed?”
“Yes.”
“This essence of the nation is just an idea, an idea wrapped in mystery; its origins can be many things: a lie, a myth, or perhaps something inherently unknowable. It does not matter. The point is never to confuse the idea of the nation with the purely mundane. No nation, however great, was founded on something called fact. We always begin with an idea, which, as I said, can even be a lie. The details of the lie serve to differentiate nations from one another; in and of themselves they do not matter.”
“So what matters?” I asked, feeling a bit lost.
“Faith in the nation matters: unyielding, unbending, and unthinking faith. Feelings, instincts, and traditions…these go into the making of such faith, and come before utility and logic. Love of the nation matters. Blind love. Faith is that all-encompassing, unreasoning blind love. Are you with me?”
“I think so.”
“The fountainhead of your love, your faith, is the deep well of our own particular Arab past. That inheritance shapes your hopes and desires; it is who you are. The problem of the Occupier, the stone upon which his rule shall stumble in Iraq, is that it treats these fundamental things like goods that can be bought and sold in the market. The Occupier finds them charming, perhaps, but as a foreigner does a bazaar full of fake antiques. The Occupier is incapable of understanding the innermost core of your singularity, the very fundaments of who you are as a person.”
“I think I see what you are driving at.”
“Now look at these same things through a different prism: Are you a good Muslim?”
“How dare you…”
“Keep your shirt on, boy. I am merely trying to reason together, as it were, step by step; think of it as an exercise. Do you have something better to do?”
“Go on.”
“So you are a good Muslim, a man of True Belief. Your faith is the object of your love. Another word for it is Spirit, a Spirit that is to the nation what your soul is to the cells of your body; blood, bones, and organs, these mundane things return to the earth, but your soul has a separate connection to God, whose realm it hopes one day to enter. So it is with the nation, whose physical attributes are separate from its Spirit. Now, this Spirit is a truly remarkable thing; it is capable of outgrowing earlier incarnations; it evolves and changes, perfecting itself over time while essentially remaining the same. And yet those earlier incarnations belong to it; they are still present, so to speak, in the deep well of your patrimony.”
“I don’t see the point of all this.”
“You will. I said the nation is an idea wrapped in mystery, and you agreed. I asked if you were a good Muslim and you said you were. Now I say the living proof of that mystery is what makes you a Muslim.”
“Proof?”
“Our Holy Book, the Quran, revealed to us Arabs by God through an Arab Prophet and in our own Arabic tongue. No coincidences or accidents of fate there; just God’s will. His proof: the Quran. He chose us Arabs over all the other nations on earth at the time, just as in an earlier manifestation He chose the Jews.”
“I don’t like where this is going.�
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“Why? Because I brought up the Jews…They didn’t do anything by creating Israel that we don’t want to do as Arabs and Muslims.”
“You are putting Arab victims on the same plane as Jewish victimizers.”
“I understand your feelings. My point is that some of our Muslim clerics would have you believe, wrongly, that being an Arab nationalist and being a good Muslim are two different things. They are not; they are one and the same. The Occupier also wants you to forget your umbilical connection with Islam, the essential Spirit of our nation; he calls it separating religion from politics, and his minions are trying to do just that by breaking up that gigantic singular Arab tree called Muslim Iraq into the easily scattered and broken little twigs that you are turning into today.”
“But religion is prior to nationalism,” I said lamely; “it is more fundamental.” No sooner had I said that than Saddam changed course:
“Didn’t you say you loved Iraq, son?”
“I am not your son,” I snapped back, irritated at my inability to press home an argument.
“Don’t be rude,” he said, pointedly raising his voice, like an elder admonishing his junior. “Have respect for your traditions. How solid is your love of Iraq? Answer the question!”
“I already did.”
“Then which comes first: your love of Iraq or your love of Islam?”
“That is a false choice. I reject the dichotomy.”
“Precisely!…You have made the point I was looking for,” Saddam replied.
“Islamic community in times past is Arab nation in times present,” he went on. “These words are cut from the same cloth. But how is God’s will carried out? How does the nation come into being? Do you think it is something to be found in nature, sitting out there like ripe fruit hanging on a tree? Of course not! It has to be made, forged into existence.”
“By whom?”
“Exceptional men, of course. Exceptional men like our Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him. His inner resources gave birth to a Community of Believers, uniting warring tribes and factions into a magnificent fighting force that changed the world. In so doing, our Prophet became the first Arab revolutionary. Only he didn’t call what he did an Arab Revolution; he called it an Islamic Revolution.”