The Rope

by Kanan Makiya

  What happened that day? I did not know then, but I do now: Doubt happened. Radical doubt—the kind that admits that not everything can be understood, that even facts no longer speak for themselves. Doubt of this sort is hard for a defender of the faith, a soldier in the Army of the Awaited One, a Shiʻa Muslim, and a male Believer. We Believers are, after all, sworn to submit to God’s will. Submission is the mark the Prophet left upon the face of this earth. Is there room for doubt in total submission?

  Our father, the Prophet Abraham, God’s friend, did not experience doubt when God commanded him to sacrifice his son—so great was his Belief. I used to think that Abraham’s noblest quality was this act of total submission. I am no longer sure. Today, I wish that this Prince of Faith had been touched by doubt; I want to know the hand holding the knife trembled in the air, hesitated, before He stopped it from plunging into his son’s breast. But the Good Book tells us that did not happen. Abraham didn’t flinch. He didn’t doubt. Tell me I am wrong, God, please! Don’t condemn me to live suspended in the gap between what Abraham did and what I wish he had not been able to do.

  I am being told the Barbarians are knocking at the gates. Is it possible? Can I afford to wallow in doubt with Barbarians at the door? Should I be wasting my time on pencil and paper and storytelling? Shame on me! They are saying Baghdad will not hold. The city will fall; all around me cities are falling. Whole chunks of territory are acquiring new names. Baghdad is surrounded. They are in Abu Ghraib. They have taken Mosul. Iraq is no more, they are saying. Clerics are issuing a call to arms. “Protect the Holy Places!” they shout from the rooftops. “Pick up your guns!”

  The politicians still argue, still jostle against one another for a seat at the table, still give speeches and appear on television, still make statements and strike deals, still promise, still bribe and take bribes. Why aren’t they picking up their guns and rushing to the front lines?

  But where are the front lines? And where are they, those Barbarians? How can I tell who they are? They look like me. Certainly they are outside the city. I hear the sounds of their artillery. Perhaps they are already inside. Car bombs are exploding everywhere. So they are inside. And they are outside. Where are they? Who are they?

  There are no walls that can protect us from ourselves, no barricades to man, no front lines to defend in the dark corners of our souls. I will need my old Kalashnikov, sitting over there in the corner. No doubt about that. They will come for me. Of that I can be certain.

  Acknowledgments

  In Republic of Fear, published in 1989, I acknowledged being indebted to Iraqis who could not be named for obvious reasons. Sadly, three decades later, I am obliged to do the same. People who do not wish to be named gave generously of their time, trusting me with sensitive information without in any way being responsible for the uses I put their trust to. I am solely and wholly responsible for what is in this book.

  Among those whom I can thank by name are Ma’ad Fayadh, Kamran Qaradaghi, Salem Chalabi, Ahmed Naji, Mustafa al-Kazimi, Hassan Mneimneh, Harith Hassan, Azzurra Carpo, Laura Gross, Alan and Pamela Berger, Lawrence Weschler, Naghmeh Sohrabi, Cyrus Schayegh, Emmanuel Farjoun, and Roger Owen.

  I have made use of a number of nonfiction works that must be mentioned. I owe the “feel” of wartime conditions in Najaf during August 2004, and the stories that go into the chapter “War in Najaf,” to discussions with Dexter Filkins and Warzer Jaff, who were there. See Dexter Filkins’s compelling accounts in the New York Times, August 29, 2004. I am also indebted to him for the scene with Muqtada slipping furtively out of Sistani’s house, and the dead donkey and its owner, shot by snipers, which both Filkins and Jaff witnessed and was retold by Filkins in one of the finest books of frontline reporting that I have read: The Forever War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Other nonfiction works I relied upon are the excruciatingly honest insider account by Hamed al-Khaffaf, a senior aide to Ayatollah Sistani, Al Rihla Al Ilajiyya Li Samahat Al Sayyid Al Sistani Wa Azmat al-Najaf (The Curative Journey of H. E. Al Sayyid Al Sistani and the Crisis of Najaf), 5th ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Mua’rikh al-‘Arabi, 2012). I could not have written the chapter “Names of Things” without the extensive classificatory research into the armed militias operating inside Iraq during 2006 by Sayyid ‘Ali al-Husayni, published online as Kharitat al-Tandhimaat al-Musalaha fi al-’Iraq (The Map of Armed Groups in Iraq), published originally in 2005 and reissued online in the fall of 2007 at iraker.dk/v/50.html.

  On the apocalyptic ideas of 1990s Iraqi Shiʻism associated with Sayyid Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, I am grateful for the comments of Roy Mottahedeh and the in-depth discussions and e-mail exchanges with Hassan Mneimneh and ‘Ali Mamouri.

  In ways too numerous to mention, Judith Shklar’s seminal essay “Ambiguities of Betrayal,” published in Ordinary Vices (Harvard University Press, 1984), helped me think through the many quandaries of the phenomenon. More generally, Part Three of this book, the conversation between Saddam and my narrator, is indebted to great precedents such as Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” and George Steiner’s strange The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (Faber & Faber, 1981), in which Hitler implicates Western civilization in his emergence, much as I have Saddam do for Arab Muslim civilization.

  Cormac McCarthy’s inimitable darkness is a balm I seek when I am thinking about Iraq; likewise, Seamus Deane’s weave of family grief and politics in Reading in the Dark (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) and Vasily Grossman’s telling of the Battle of Stalingrad in Life and Fate (New York Review Books, 2006). I don’t know why this should be so, other than that it is uplifting to find beauty while one is groping to describe darkness. The same can be said of the poetry of Nâzim Hikmet, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert, whose sensibility haunts this book. Lawrence Weschler, whose own books are always an inspiration, first introduced me to Herbert and Polish postwar poetry, with its deep insight into societies that have been traumatized by nationalism, war, and totalitarianism.

  A different kind of gratitude, finally, must go to my editor, Dan Frank. He not only believed in this book from early on, but he always knew how to separate the essence of what I wanted to say from the words that I dumped on his desk. And he did it, time and again, with such grace. This is a far better book because of him.

  A Personal Note

  I lived in Iraq for most of the time between 2003 and 2006, the period covered by the events in this book. They were momentous years, which abruptly changed the course of a nation and ultimately foreshadowed upheaval in the whole region. As time passed I stopped asking myself whether the ugliness of the fallout from the tyrant’s overthrow and U.S. occupation could have been avoided. To be sure, the occupation was brainless, and made worse by the fact that the regime it replaced had rotted during the 1990s. The Baʻthi state of 2003 was not the Republic of Fear I wrote about in the 1980s. But even that does not explain the scale of what went wrong.

  The snowballing of the catastrophe that is post-2003 Iraq transfixed me: the speed of it, the underlying passions, the strange new ideas that suddenly possessed people like demons, but above all, as I witnessed it, the self-destructing Iraqi agency behind it all. That agency is what I had to write about.

  Iraqis, not Americans, were the prime drivers of what went wrong after 2003, not only the ones who had suffered and lived through the regime of the Baʻth between 1968 and 2003, but also Iraqis who rode in from abroad, as my narrator observes, “on the tanks of the Occupier.”

  Necessarily my attention was drawn to society’s fate, or what the characters sometimes refer to as the “idea” of Iraq, an idea that was up for grabs, and instantly discarded the moment the American occupying authority appointed the “Iraqi Governing Council.” But it was not Americans who did the discarding; it was the Iraqis they had empowered, the nucleus of the new governing elite that still dominates politics in Baghdad today.

  I, like many others, knew that “Iraq” was an idea bound to be challenged after more than thirty years of a dictatorship that was never comfo
rtable with the borders of post-Ottoman Iraq and that launched two wars of expansion to change them. What did it mean to be an Iraqi once the great dictator was gone? Was it possible to cobble together a new kind of Iraqi identity, not based on the bombast of “the cradle of civilizations” or the supposed glories of the Abbasid era? No one knew; Iraq had “turned into a question for itself,” as the narrator’s uncle in my story puts it.

  However, no one predicted the speed with which the new Iraqi Arab political elite would abandon an idea nearly a century in the making, and which they had spent decades in opposition claiming to defend. When an idea such as Iraq is abandoned, the country is sure to follow, as it is doing as of this writing. In this book, set long before there was something called ISIS capturing great big chunks of Iraqi territory, I try to explore not the causes (much too difficult) but the way the abandonment happened, its human and felt side. Even that I know I have not done justice to. There is much more painfully critical research and writing to be carried out.

  Ideas by their very nature are general; people are not. The conflict is as irresolvable as the fate of “Iraq” is today unknowable. I have tried to imagine the two bouncing off one another through the experiences of my characters. This is not a polemic directed at others, as some of my other books have been; it is an exercise in self-examination, an attempt to show, if only by way of reminding myself, what happened to Iraq during those three crucial years.

  My characters are not real people; they are composites, sometimes exaggerated, assembled mosaic-like in search of underlying truths that might illuminate how Iraqis, especially Shiʻa Iraqis like myself, so abysmally failed not only the whole country after 2003, but also their own community. I hoped to exploit the close-up view I was granted by virtue of my previous work examining tyranny in Baʻthi Iraq, to imagine how perfectly competent, well-educated, and intelligent individuals drove the country into an abyss, and, perhaps more generally, what that says about what counts in the politics of great historical turning points in the lives of nations.

  Friends and colleagues urged me to write a different kind of book. I owed it to those who went along with my justifications for the 2003 war to critically examine my previous support for the war, they said, or the fact that I never wrote about Abu Ghraib (of which I am ashamed). Was it all worth it in the end? Would I in retrospect still say the things I said before 2003? Did I not owe it to the memory of all those who died to apologize, perhaps, for the disgraceful way Iraqis treated what the United States did for them by toppling their very own homegrown tyrant? And then, of course, there was the delusion I propagated of building democracy in a country that almost immediately descended into the worst kind of civil war imaginable.

  These are legitimate questions that need to be addressed not only by me, but by anyone who argued for the 2003 war. Whether they are good reasons to write a book is moot; the point is, that is not what this book is about. The fact is for years I couldn’t write, because had I done so it would have been in anger and bitterness, in a work filled with recrimination and wallowing in guilt. I did not want that. Perhaps I couldn’t write, period. I don’t know. At any rate, I shunned all opportunities to comment or write about the deteriorating situation in Iraq. Perhaps I was too close to events, or had too many scars in the failed attempt to make a better job of the opportunity the United States, for its own post-9/11 reasons, offered the people of Iraq—I still think that is what it was—and which we Iraqis so abysmally failed to take advantage of.

  In my defense, I want to say that while I always thought of democracy as a possible and unquestionably desirable outcome, in my heart of hearts I never believed it was necessarily the path that a post-Saddam order would take. I conceded, when pushed by Bill Moyers on his program NOW in February 2003, that the chances for a successful transition to democracy were very slim—the bleakness of all my previous books is evidence of that. Nonetheless, I argued on the program that even if the chances of a successful democratic transition were extremely low, they were still worth fighting for from an Iraqi point of view (I make no such claim from an American point of view; there is a difference between the two, as difficult as that may be for a believer in the universality of human rights, like myself, to swallow). The most important changes in politics are by definition unpredictable and happen at the very outer limits of what is possible—they are not a function of the lowest common denominator of a society as abused as Iraq’s had been for thirty years. At any rate, democracy is not as important as the cessation of abuse. On those grounds alone, I still stand firmly with the war of 2003. The terrible thing, of course, is that egregious abuse did not end in 2003; it began all over again, as victims turned into victimizers and vice versa. Could it have been otherwise? I believe so.

  Mine was the politics of hope, as some have called it, of daring to believe that the unimaginable before 2003 was possible after 2003. Of that I am guilty. But in that respect, I am no more guilty than the brave young Arab activists of 2011, who also took issue with the odds and lost; the only difference being many of them died for what they believed, while I returned to live in the West; a big difference to be sure, but not a political one.

  Two would not return: my friend Ammar Shabandar, who was killed by a car bomb on Saturday, May 2, 2015, in the Karrada district of Baghdad. And Mustafa al-Kazimi, who washed and buried him in Najaf, and to whom I always knew I was going to dedicate this book, long before dear Ammar was killed. Exemplary journalists, but more important exceptional human beings, they covered abuse and war on a daily basis, delving deep into the pain of ordinary Iraqi men and women (and children in Ammar’s case), while almost everyone else looked out only for themselves.

  The two are also, like myself, “Foreigner Iraqis,” the unfriendly term I coin in this book for all of us who returned to build a New Jerusalem in Iraq. Both returned from exile in Sweden to serve. In the flurry of e-mail exchanges following the shock of Ammar’s death, we friends of his—Hassan, Rend, Mustafa, and I—worried about Mustafa, still in Iraq, fighting the good fight against all the odds. Hassan in heart-wrenching words urged Mustafa to leave Iraq. I have been doing the same for years. He won’t; I know. Our entreaties fall on deaf ears because Mustafa, like Ammar, is that rare kind of soul who is still able to bestow on that tired and abused word “patriot” a good meaning. I bring this up for a larger reason. Criticism, of the sort I try to practice in this book, is not worthy of the name if it is not born in love.

  We Arabs who took issue with the abuses of our regimes, and acted upon it, and especially I who was up there in the limelight calling for the toppling of the dictator, have an obligation to answer for the sectarian turmoil that ensued, symbolized by the disgraceful way in which Saddam was executed in 2006. You knew it was over when that particular circus was concluded. The mountain of Iraqi dead since 2003, most of whom were killed by other Iraqis, compares in its scale to the worst excesses of the Saddam era. I acknowledge I have a responsibility to them, to Ammar, and to the living who still believe and who refuse to leave the front lines, like Mustafa. This book, scathing as it is toward the men who created the politics that gave rise to all the killing, all friends of mine, is all I know how to do by way of atonement.

  —

  Iraq, it turns out, was the dress rehearsal for what befell an entire region. In fact, the main event did not end up being an Iraqi one; it is an all-Arab rolling affair, today being played out in Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Yemen; tomorrow somewhere else. To describe it as a “crisis” is grotesque; it is a civilizational breakdown that began half a century ago, when it gave us the tyrants activists such as Ammar and Mustafa so much wanted to rid us of. Then followed all the wars, and the civil wars, and the intifadas, and the al-Qaedas, and the Hizbollahs…until finally we come to the failed states and the ISISs of our own time. Yes, it was ISIS that killed Ammar, but it might as well have been the Cabal of Thirteen, or the entire class of Iraq’s Shiʻa politicians who between 2003 and 2006 created the politics upon which ISIS
thrives.

  It all began in Iraq; perhaps the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1989) was a foreshadowing. But Iraqi-style sectarianism was more lethal. And it was not invented as a way of doing politics because America chose to get rid of Saddam Hussein in 2003; it is infantile to think that, although many in the region still do. The rot goes much deeper. For the sake of all those Iraqi dead, such as Ammar, and for the sake of the living, such as Mustafa, I had to tell the story of how we made our own failure in Iraq, and why we own it, not the great big bogeyman of the West.

  Iraq is also the arena that best shows why our failure is an all-Arab and all-Muslim one, neither merely Sunni nor merely Shiʻi. The failure is too big, too deeply rooted in what has been happening in the interstices of Arab culture for so many decades now, to dress it all up with labels such as “made in the USA.” Far too many otherwise intelligent men and women continue to say such things, some of them leaders empowered by Western action in 2003. They look you in the eye and say: ISIS is an American or a Saudi or an Iranian creation. You know the irrational is supreme when you see American warplanes pummel ISIS in Tikrit, and Iraqi Shiʻa leaders, who would otherwise be rotting in Saddam’s jails, making such statements even as the bombing is being aired on television.

  The triumph of the irrational, however, is not a permanent or a lasting state of affairs, written into the genes of who we are as a culture. Mustafa and Ammar know this. One day, a new generation of activists acting in the spirit of the defeated democratic activism of 2003 and 2011, people like Ammar and Mustafa and not like the Cabal of Thirteen, or the Governing Council, will morph the darkness into light, into a new beginning for Arab Muslims, returning them to the fold of civilization.