Republic of Fear
1989
KANAN MAKIYA PUBLISHED Republic of Fear under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil. It was a wise precaution for a native Iraqi who was informing the wide world about the tyranny that was destroying the life of the country. Why was there so much violence in Iraq, he asks, and why did the intelligentsia collaborate so willingly in silencing themselves, and also where were dissenters? The book came out in the brief interlude between the end of Saddam Hussein’s eight-year war with Iran and his follow-on invasion of Kuwait, in other words, when Saddam Hussein was proving that violence was the medium in which he operated naturally. Shi’ite, but secular and worldly-wise, intellectual by inclination, Makiya first studied architecture at MIT. Saddam had erected in central Baghdad the so-called Victory Gate, actually casts of his forearms some forty yards high in the air and holding swords that cross 130 feet up in the air. Still under his pseudonym, Makiya published The Monument, a discussion of the relationship between art and politics in the mind of a dictator. He then lectured on contemporary issues at Brandeis, a university with Jewish associations. His mother was English, daughter of a schoolmaster, which explains his soft-spoken Oxford accent.
The cover of the pseudonym was soon blown. Here was an Iraqi with the courage to stand up to Saddam and to look to the United States to liberate Iraq. This was altogether too much for Edward Said, the American–Palestinian academic who accused Makiya on the basis of the printed word of being an agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. Said was not in the least troubled that this outburst placed him in the unwelcome position of defending Saddam and tyranny.
Shortly before the campaign in 1991 to reverse the invasion of Kuwait, I had an exchange with Douglas Hurd, then the British Foreign Secretary. Arabs, I said, well understand overthrowing and then hanging an oppressor like Saddam. It has been almost customary that the one taking power in Iraq makes sure to kill the one losing it. Grimacing, Hurd replied, “There is no question of that.” Then call the whole thing off right now, I went on, because Saddam’s survival would be seen as evidence of a conspiracy so deep-laid that ordinary people are unable to fathom it and so are left resenting the British and the West even more bitterly than before. I parodied the hymn of the old-time Church Militant:
Backward Christian soldiers
Slinking from the war,
So that the great tyrant
May slay thousands more.
In the event, the Allied coalition took no special steps to lay hands on Saddam and bring him to justice. Their policy was instead to encourage Shi’ites and Kurds to rise in rebellion. These two communities amounted to approximately three-quarters of the population. A minority but accustomed to power, Saddam and his fellow Sunnis subjected the whole country to terror, torture, the use of poison gas and mass murder. Mass graves are still being discovered. Anfal is the Arabic term for this atrocious campaign akin to civil war and Makiya documented it in another book, Cruelty and Silence, published in 1993 under his own name. He familiarized Anfal the way that Solzhenitsyn had familiarized the Gulag.
Operating mostly in exile, the formal opposition to Saddam was Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. He came from a prominent Shi’ite family, some of whom had held high office under the old Iraqi monarchy. Articulate and very well informed, he was a skillful political operator. Too skilful in the eyes of the State Department where they thought Chalabi was bouncing the United States into a war the Department didn’t want to fight. Washington floated rumors about supposed misdeeds of his, especially concerning a small bank in Jordan that his private money had launched. The rights and wrongs of it are obscure, but when we met I questioned him and ended up believing his side of the story. It has been a lasting pity that he was denied the role of a de Gaulle in the liberation of his country.
In 2003 the Allies (with the exception of France) were determined to overthrow and capture Saddam. Combat in this case was more like tourism. Instead of Iraqis, American officials were appointed to administer the country although they had little or no relevant experience or knowledge, not even of the language. Chalabi had called on Makiya to draft a constitution with the clear goal of sharing power equitably between Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis. Instead, one Shi’ite strongman after another has kept hold of power at the expense of everyone else. The United States lost out completely in Iraq, Chalabi was thwarted and Makiya became one of the best Prime Ministers that poor country never had.