The Rope

by Kanan Makiya

  Flabbergasted, I didn’t know what to say. I had never heard someone say that before. Saddam went on.

  “It is the same with Israel. Who made it possible? Who created it at our Arab expense? Imperialism, of course, but that was not enough. Never buy into everything your own side says. We say Israel is a creation of imperialism, but we know there is more to it than that. There was a Jewish national idea, analogous to our own Arab national idea, championed by their own exceptional men, prophets in olden times and clever politicians in modern ones; it is they who forged a Jewish state out of that idea—at our expense, of course.”

  “At Palestinian expense, millions of them! I thought you were never coming around to that.”

  “So these Jewish leaders nudged, connived, warred, and tricked imperial powers to do what was patently not in their national interest to do. Now I ask you: Aren’t your Shiʻa leaders trying to trick the Americans into setting up a Shiʻa state for them, just like the Jews tricked them into doing the same sixty years ago, supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine? There is no difference.”

  “Are you telling me our Prophet Muhammad was the first Arab nationalist?”

  “Yes, he is the leader of the first Arab revolution. I modeled my life upon his example.”

  “You call your bloody wars leading the Arab revolution!”

  “Don’t change the subject! Was our Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, a leader of both the revolution that was Islam and the revolution that is Arabism? Answer the question.”

  “I need to think about it.”

  After a short pause, Saddam quietly said: “There are Arabs, incidentally, in whom the Spirit languishes.”

  “You mean they are not good Muslims?”

  “The other way around, son; I mean they are not good Arabs. You Shiʻa are a case in point.”

  “Are you implying that we do not love Iraq?” I replied angrily.

  “History shows,” he said, ignoring me, “that your elites, your so-called learned clerics, sniff out weak government like rats scurrying about in the garbage. At the outset of our statehood, three of your most influential Ayatollahs issued rulings declaring against Iraq. They boycotted the elections and opposed employment in the state, including the army and all offices of the government; they ruled against Shiʻa children attending public schools. King Faisal, our first king, was far too tolerant with them. Still your clerics would not bend. And so, if you ended up with a state disproportionately populated with Sunnis, it is the fault of your clerics.”

  “How dare you say that? You discriminated against us more than anyone, targeting our clerics, our rituals, and our mosques.”

  “Only when you did not give Arab Iraq your total, unconditional, and absolute loyalty. Sometimes you did, as in the war with Iran, which we would have lost had you not fought so bravely on behalf of this country. And sometimes you did not, as in 1991, that great page of treachery and betrayal. Then, I cut you down mercilessly, and would do so again.”

  “You are the arch-sectarian!” I said, my face red with anger. “Your tanks drove into Najaf in 1991 with the slogan ‘No More Shiʻa After Today’ painted on them. And you accuse us of disloyalty!”

  “That was not my doing. An overzealous commander painted the slogan on his tank. I had him demoted for that. I despise sectarianism.”

  “Liar!”

  “Why would I lie to you today of all days?…All I want is that before we walk out of this room, you accept the essential oneness of three things: being an Iraqi, an Arab, and a Muslim. Unlike your so-called leaders, I never cared two figs how a man prayed, with his hands folded in front of him or straight down by his side! Do you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought as much. Men who play games with the date of the appearance of the crescent moon and the beginning of the Feast of Sacrifice in order to screw their Sunni brothers demean us Iraqis in the eyes of the whole Arab and Muslim world.”

  “I have had enough.”

  “Remember me also, son,” Saddam went on, ignoring me, “as the one who destroyed Atheism and Disbelief in Iraq, not your clerics.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “The fight against communism in the 1970s, of course. Do you not know that you Shiʻa—I mean your fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations, before you were born—were all Communists back then? And had been since the 1940s, when your community turned away from those turbaned crows you call clerics and joined the Communist Party. There was no such thing as an Islamic movement in Iraq when I came to power. There were only Communists…”

  “My grandfather may have been a Communist…”

  “I see from your face that you do not know your own history. Your clerics were terrified in the 1950s after a handful of them woke up to see hundreds of thousands of their very own marching under Communist banners. But they could do nothing about it. I broke Communist power in Iraq because the nation was under threat from imported ideas like Atheism and subservience to the Soviet Union.”

  “How did you accomplish that?” I said skeptically.

  “Ruthlessly.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “I turned them against one another.”

  “How can you claim to love and be so cruel at the same time?”

  “Do we judge God by the same rules we judge ourselves? Does He not kill mercilessly when He has to? Did He not prefer Abel to Cain and create the first murderer, whom He then turned into an outcast? We love Him for these things. He sowed the seeds of violence in us, and we love Him for so doing. Similarly, the selfless leader kills for Justice. He too cannot be hedged about by private morality. Unlike God, however, a leader cannot expect to be loved for killing. He is alone and never knows whether he is loved or not; it is wiser therefore to assume he is not. If Iraqis hate me today, they do so because true Justice is for the most part a cruel business. I long ago accepted that I would pay the price of my people’s hatred for the work I did on their behalf.”

  “You say you turned one Iraqi against the other?”

  “The secret is to hold every individual personally accountable for all the difficult decisions that have to be made, however unpleasant. Every Iraqi, including women and children. If a man is about to betray his country, one must teach his wife and children to inform on him, or punish them until he desists. Complicity in the workings of the state forges ties that cut across all differences. It irons out all blood or ethnic ties, which belong to a more barbarous age, in order to fashion modern citizens. I am not saying it is easy; I am saying it is necessary; it is the ideal toward which one must strive. Teach, but when necessary force, your citizens to get their hands dirty. Do this long enough and your citizens will become as desirous of their state’s continuing success as you are. That is my legacy. Remember me for it, son. Now I am tired of talking. I want to rest.”

  —

  I often think about that bizarre conversation. Not a week passes without my rereading the piece of paper I slipped into my back pocket that day. I served the Sayyid for four years; it turned out he had killed my father’s best friend, and the Tyrant had killed my father. How do the words and the killings fit together? Perhaps they don’t. If I were Sayyid Majid’s son, not my father’s son, would I see things differently? Who is Saddam? Who is the Sayyid? I mean who are these two men really, deep down under the surface of things? Are they different from one another?

  Would either Uncle or the Sayyid be able to separate the words on the pages of text Saddam gave me that day from the person of the Tyrant who wrote them? Suppose I lied and told them I had written the speech; would they fault it? I think not. Uncle would say: “Bravo, son! I like it; I really like it!” And the Sayyid? What would he say? He would approve as well but add that I was being too harsh on the Shiʻa. True, our clerics said those things all those years ago, but they belonged to a different era. True, communism is the devil incarnate, but we Shiʻa would have dealt with the Communists in our midst. “Better not wash dirty laundry in pub
lic, son,” he would have said. “Take those passages on the Shiʻa out.” But, to hell with what the Sayyid thought, and what Uncle might say. What did I think about my conversation with the great Tyrant?

  We were due a rotation, which couldn’t come fast enough as far as poor ‘Ali was concerned. He left the room. I stayed on, missing my tea break. For a short while the Tyrant and I were completely alone in the room, and he initiated our last and perhaps most extraordinary exchange of words. No amount of time will erase their freshness in my memory.

  “You seem to have a little education,” Saddam suddenly said in a conversational tone. “What is your name, boy?” We had been alone in the room for a few minutes. An instinct made me tell him.

  “Hmm…Do I know your father?”

  “You had him killed in the camp at Radwaniyya in 1991.”

  “So he was one of those.”

  “What do you mean, ‘one of those’?”

  “One who carried arms against the Motherland during that black page of treachery and betrayal in 1991 you call an Uprising.”

  “My father had no arms on him when your security men caught him.”

  “In Najaf, wasn’t it? They caught him in a basement, in a house next door to one belonging to the old Ayatollah who died in 1992, Khoei, shortly after we put him on television.”

  I was dumbstruck. How did he know?

  “You are wondering how I remember. Decades of making it my business, son, go into a memory like mine; I try to know every family in this land; their nearest relations, their children, how and to whom they married, into and out of which tribe, the mental abilities of their sons, when and under whom did they serve in my armies, what prizes or honors had they received, whom did they hate and love, and why—always I want to know why men do things—their inner motivation, if you will. Do they become members of the Baʻth Party for convenience or out of conviction? It doesn’t matter to me; I am not going to punish them, but I need to know. I used to keep index cards with names, not the tens of millions of files that those buffoons in my intelligence services keep, and from which they can never find anything when you need it. I would construct family trees in my head, forming patterns of human connections, which I could visualize. Eventually, I needed them less and less. Of course I remember the case of your father.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Why we put him in Radwaniyya, and what happened.”

  “How did he die?”

  “I trusted such details to my cousin; he handled all that; I only remember things I need to remember. Nature has its limits, you know. But rest assured, your father died well.”

  “Why do you say that? What do you mean?”

  “I seem to recall he was a man of principle, like Sayyid Muhammad Baqir of the House of Sadr. He had fought very bravely in the war against that treacherous son of a bitch Khomeini. I am getting old and a bit rusty, but I remember giving him a medal. He held the line in Fao, when higher-ranking officers from my own hometown were fleeing in fear from the numbers of heaven-seeking Iranian teenagers being flung at them. Incidentally, I had them all shot for that, even though they were from Tikrit.”

  “One of those officers from your hometown you did not shoot,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he served under your cousin in Radwaniyya, and smuggled a letter to my mother from my father.”

  “How interesting. I did not know that,” he said with the faintest hint of a smile curling like a wisp of smoke around his lips.

  He gave a little laugh and said: “Perhaps he did not flee the battle, and there was no need to shoot him. But your father was a Shiʻa, a son of Najaf no less; I wanted him decorated, and I wanted his compatriots to see that I had decorated him.”

  “Why decorate a junior officer who was repeatedly denied promotion because he was a Shiʻa?”

  “Ahh…with you Shiʻa I have to be very cautious, and dole out honors selectively, and in proper doses. I chose to single him out in 1988 for bravery above the call of duty because it suited the country’s needs at that time. Anyway, he was brave. Tell me, what was in that letter?”

  “He thought he had been betrayed, but didn’t know by whom.”

  “Of course he was betrayed! Those savages you call revolutionaries were slitting the throats of their neighbors, settling accounts, and denouncing all and sundry! How could I find anybody in that madhouse without an informer?”

  “Who?” I asked, barely able to breathe with anticipation. “Who told you where Father was?”

  Saddam Hussein paused and looked hard into my face before speaking; you could see he was choosing his words carefully.

  “There were two other men with your father that day; they were our main target, not your father. One of them was also an officer in the Great War with Iran; I never discovered his real name until afterward, when he surfaced in London. He was there as protection for a third man, who was our main target, a man your father greatly admired.”

  “His name, what was his name?”

  “Majid, the son of the Grand Ayatollah Khoei. The three of them were planning to break through our lines to ask the Americans for help; American troops were only a kilometer or two away, sitting on a huge arms depot that the traitors were desperate to get their hands on. Majid and this ex-officer made it out, but your father stayed behind, I think to cover their tracks and destroy incriminating documents—that is when we caught him. Just ten minutes earlier, and we might have got all three. Anyway, that which I was unable to accomplish in 1991, you and your friends did for me in 2003.”

  “What on earth are you talking about? And who gave you the location?”

  “I am talking about the murder in the Great Shrine of the Imam in Najaf, on April 10, the day I decided to make a tactical retreat from Baghdad to lead an insurgency against the Occupier. I was reliably informed that his own people shredded his body to pieces, your Sayyid and his men, as a matter of fact. You might say they did our work for us, even if it came thirteen years too late.”

  “Who betrayed my father? Please, sir! Tell me his name.”

  That “sir” just slipped out. I could have kicked myself, and shudder with shame when I think about it—not that I was thinking about what I was doing at the time.

  “Why, your uncle, of course. He had been working with us for years.”

  Saddam must have read the expression on my face.

  “Ahh…I see,” he said softly, the faintest shadow of a smile again forming around a face that looked puffy and was slowly turning grotesque.

  “I thought you knew, son…especially after you joined the Sayyid’s army.”

  AFTERWORD

  BAGHDAD TODAY

  The Tyrant’s ideas opened the doors, and we walked right through. The Tyrant fell, and we became addicted to his legacy: betrayal.

  Endless betrayals…of whole communities, and within them, of victims, of victimizers, of the one become the other, of exiles plotting against one another, of all plotting against the country, of friends stabbing one another in the back, of most learned and esteemed Houses scheming against equally learned and equally esteemed Houses, of brother selling out brother.

  Was it the fault of the Tyrant? Or were we all to blame?

  We Shiʻa of Iraq were born in betrayal when we abandoned Husain son of ‘Ali, cousin of the Prophet, God bless him, to the armies of the pretenders. Annually since, for one thousand years, we have beaten our chests, whipped our backs, and passed swords across our shaven scalps in atonement.

  Did we choose to betray? Perhaps we were forced into it, against our better natures. Perhaps it was written into the war that changed everyone’s life. So many wars…which one? It has to be the last, the war that so easily might never have been—the Tyrant who might still be there; the exiled men from London who would yet be bickering in their conference halls, living on the charity of host governments; the Sayyid who would still be hunkered down in his murdered father’s house in Najaf, knowing the killer of hi
s father and two brothers, knowing and silent, a silence only broken when he cut to ribbons the scion of another great House of the Shiʻa in Najaf: the Ayatollah’s son, the one who did not keep silent…who did not betray.

  But I betrayed him, my father’s friend. All of us betrayed him. And as we betrayed him, we betrayed ourselves. God have mercy on our souls. Forgive me for serving the House that cut him down. Ignorance is no excuse. Not when betraying him sits at the very heart of all the other betrayals, defining the very meaning of the word for us Shiʻa of Iraq.

  —

  Uncle, was it really you? You held the Sayyid in the palm of your hand, and before him his father, whose organization you built to oversee the Holy City’s reconstruction after the Great Uprising. Who paid for it? Who oversaw it from Baghdad? Who wanted it to happen so that long after he was dead he could pull the strings behind the scenes? Uncle, you were there. Always capable: everybody’s right hand.

  I know there are ambiguities. The world that the Tyrant built changed what betrayal is. I know that is what you will say. When everyone is a betrayer, then perhaps no one is. I know you will say that. You must say that.

  But the Tyrant is gone. Now it is our world, not his. We alone occupy it. We cannot go on blaming him forever. He is not responsible any longer. His sins are our sins now. So who is responsible? Are we condemned to build a country in which no one is responsible? Is such a thing even imaginable?

  —

  Everything changed on the day of the hanging. Insecurity and uncertainty shaped the days and months and years afterward, and go on doing so. Even the unborn in this accursed land enter it too soon to understand the pain they will have to endure. Daily, it seems, little by little, I crawl toward the places that hurt the most; it is as though I need to go there and cannot stop myself. The expectations of others joined hands with my own unease, pulling me into an abyss that I still struggle to climb out of. If this was the darkness that I fell into after the hanging, the whole land has fallen into another, much darker than mine.