Dark Truth in Saddam's Iraq
Makiya, Kanan
Kanan Makiya is one of Iraq's leading intellectuals in exile. Under the pseudonym of Samir alKhalil he published Republic of Fear in 1989. It quickly became essential reading for anyone seeking...
...This clumsy, unprincipled, hands-on/hands-off policy of a musclebound superpower saved Saddam Hussein in 1994, just as it had saved him from the retribution of ordinary Iraqis at the end of the 1991 war...
...Victimhood and the Future in Iraq In conditions like those that prevail in a Middle East torn apart by civil wars, revolutions, intifadas, individual and state terrorist actions, and nationalist totalitarianism, the temptation is great to identify with victims of gross abuse...
...This was the first time that the Kurds had been mentioned by name in a UN resolution, and it was also the first time that the United Nations had asserted a right of interference in the internal affairs of a member state...
...Iraq after Saddam is going to be a country in which justice is both the first thing that everybody wants and the most difficult thing for anyone to deliver...
...Three divisions of the elite Republican Guards had been moved northward to threaten Iraqi Kurdistan in March (just as they were to threaten Kuwait in October of the same year...
...That would have entailed shifting attention to the plight of the people of Iraq...
...One needs some kind of moral reassurance, some handle on the hellishness of the world, in circumstances where God and religion are undeniably absent (at least for me...
...The confrontation came to a head with the expulsion of U.S...
...In the spring of 1994, even Saddam had begun to show signs of the strain involved in constantly trying to outwit American presidents...
...Within hours there was a meltdown of authority in Iraq...
...It works because so much of what we hold dear about ourselves arises from the expectation we have of what other people are going to think of us...
...That has been the experience of Israelis, particularly since they became an occupying power in 1967, and it has been the experience of Palestinians and Kurds under self-rule in recent years...
...The governor would then be humiliated, often through violation of his womenfolk, after which the men would whip off their masks, showing their faces, and disappear into the night, killing no one...
...But did the violence stop, or even abate...
...POST SCRIPT: In the time since the events described in this article, Saddam Hussein, always the gambler, has precipitated the largest and potentially most damaging confrontation between his regime and the combined resources of the United Nations and the United States...
...On the way back, the party would be ambushed by a group of armed masked men...
...Following the murder of a doctor in the southern city of Nasiriyya by an amputee, and the storming of the headquarters of the Ba'th Party in the city of Amara by a crowd that cut off the ears of Ba'thi officials, several hundred doctors went on strike to protest having to carry out the new punishments...
...In a dark time, the eye begins to see," begins a poem by Theodore Roethke...
...As a consequence the networks through which civility is normally produced and reproduced have been destroyed...
...Republic of Fear is about how such horror stories became the norm inside a hitherto ordinary developing country...
...They are given food and plenty of money...
...Almost any post-Ba'thist future in Iraq is going to be like walking a tightrope, balancing the legitimate grievances of all who have suffered against the knowledge that if everyone is held accountable who is in fact guilty, the country will also be torn apart...
...And they put the revolution down rather than turning the wrath against Saddam Hussein...
...I made this point in my book Cruelty and Silence in relation to those fellow Arab and "pro-Arab" intellectuals who so idealized Palestinian victimhood that they became blinded to the nature of the regime in Iraq...
...The danger in such identification is that it can lead to a diminution in one's critical faculties, one's feel for the reality of the world...
...Humanrights abuses are growing steadily under the new National Authority in Gaza (including "official" murders of Palestinians thought to be "dishonoring" their Palestinianhood by selling land to Jews), and they have grown in northern Iraq ever since the outbreak of fighting between Kurdish factions in May 1994...
...Hence the positions they took during the Gulf crisis, which ended up serving the interests of the Iraqi dictator at a historic turning point in the region's fortunes...
...Iraqi newspapers reported that thirty-six thousand cars had been stolen in 1993, many of them in broad daylight on the main streets of Baghdad...
...A column of Iraqi tanks fleeing from Kuwait happened to roll into downtown Basra, Iraq's southernmost city...
...A crowd assembled...
...The war had ended on terms favorable to Iraq...
...Taking advantage of the regime's rout in that war, they even revolted, capturing two-thirds of the country's governorates, and holding entire cities for a period of one to three weeks...
...Sometimes I think the regime encourages the idea of a breakdown...
...The regime of Saddam Hussein is out of the cold, and even as I write, the United States is withdrawing troops from the Gulf that it hastily sent there to deal with a crisis that was carefully prepared and deliberately stage-managed over a one-and-a-half-year period by the Iraqi dictator...
...In so doing he inculcates in both victim and victimizer the very values that he lives and rules by...
...Yet Saddam Hussein is still in power—a tin-pot dictator in comparison with Stalin or Hitler, but still one who built a formidable modern system that ruled through fear...
...There isn't...
...The next time Saddam Hussein tweaks an American nose, the U.S...
...weapons-of-mass-destruction inspectors in October 1997 and ended five months later with a deal brokered by the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who said in a press conference in Baghdad that Saddam "really wanted to do the right thing" and has shown "courage, wisdom, flexibility...
...In a 1992 attempt to control market forces, Saddam Hussein detained five hundred and fifty of Baghdad's leading merchants on charges of profiteering...
...The danger is that one tends to forget, in such a charged emotional climate, that in a region like the Middle East, victimhood is a condition that may very well have touched everybody, including the victimizers...
...Printed by permission of the University of California Press, ©1998...
...Neither Saudi Arabia nor Turkey, trusted allies of the United States and pillars of the Gulf War coalition, was prepared to let American planes use its territory as a launching pad to deliver the Iraqi dictator yet another pinprick response...
...History is littered with leaders who crumbled at moments such as these...
...Those of us who saw them as an interim measure, pending the overthrow of the regime by an opposition that looked to the West for assistance, have now got to reassess the situation...
...The whole array of arrangements by which the United States had sought to "contain" Saddam Hussein since the Gulf War came tumbling down that summer...
...they seem even to have been terrified by what Iraqis did at the end of the civil war...
...If Saddam Hussein is still in power in Iraq, it is not only because he has consistently outwitted a succession of American administrations...
...Amputation of the hand or foot, or both, is a prescribed punishment for theft under strictly defined conditions (which rarely apply)—but not for desertion...
...Honor and Shame The justification used by the Iraqi president for his new 1994 punishment laws is that the Sharia, Islamic law, was being introduced in Iraq...
...Guilt is a judgment we place upon ourselves because of a perceived moral failure on our own part—something no Iraqi victims of the new punishment laws are likely to feel, since the regime inflicting the punishment has become illegitimate in their eyes...
...There's no question of that...
...After those early experiences, all through the eight grueling years of war with Iran, few Iraqis dreamed of publicly protesting the harsh punishments to which they were routinely subjected...
...Iraq still has not accounted for tons of growth medium fey toxic spores proven by the inspectors to have existed in Iraq, a teaspoonful of which could wipe out a whole city...
...Victims and victimizers change places with the greatest of ease...
...Law and order were collapsing in Baghdad...
...The commander jumped back into his tank and swiveled the gun turret to take aim at the portrait...
...With Saddam Hussein's new forms of punishment, the victim no longer looks like other people, nor is he expected to be rehabilitated by his punishment...
...Shortly before al-Shalchi's death in 1996, I asked him whether he could think of any historical precedent for the punishment laws that Saddam was promulgating...
...Under such conditions it was not possible to shoot and torture everybody...
...All this began to change after the Gulf War of 1991...
...Dealing with Saddam Hussein The promulgation of the horrific new punishment laws in August of 1994 had nothing to do with President Clinton's dispatching U.S...
...Along with the violence is the growing realization in the weapons-inspection community that for all the progress that has been made in uncovering actual weapons of mass destruction and obtaining official admission from the regime that it did fill at least twenty-five missile warheads with anthrax and botulin toxin spores, Saddam Hussein's intention and capability to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons arsenal as soon as the world community issues him a final clean bill of health remain as strong as ever...
...Writers like myself, or those whom I criticized, turn to victimhood as a way out of our own helplessness before what Judith Shklar called "the density of evil...
...This was an improvement on the situation before the passage of these new laws, when the instant and unquestioned penalty for desertion was a firing squad...
...This came at a time when the state was still weak...
...The day after the cease-fire went into effect, Iraqi warplanes dropped chemical bombs on Kurdish villages...
...The Baghdad show trials of 1969 affirmed the power of the fledgling Ba'thist state by a stage-managed, intentionally excessive display of cruelty that dramatized the imbalance between victim and victimizer...
...The clans of Takrit, to which Saddam Hussein belongs, had a reputation under the Ottomans for the way they would "break the eye" of any governor they did not like...
...THAT TRANSFORMING moment in Iraqi politics began the moment a formal cease-fire came into effect, on February 28, 1991...
...SomeExcerpted from Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, by Kanan Makiya...
...It's like saying, 'See what could happen?' if they were no longer around...
...The conversation continued: Jennings: Do I state it correctly when you say that having seen the rebellion [in southern and northern Iraq] develop, you would have preferred a coup...
...With each inconclusive new confrontation, the currency continued its downward spiral, and sanctions bit deeper into the social and moral fabric of the country...
...Expansion of the means of violence—army, police, security apparatuses, networks of informers, party militia, party and state bureaucracies—had undergone the classic inversion: from being a means to an end, the elimination of opponents and the exercise of raw power became horrific ends in themselves...
...thousands were arrested or driven into exile...
...A safe haven was established in mid-April 1991, policed by coalition forces...
...Soldiers and car thieves were singled out for prosecution on the basis of Iraq's new punishment laws...
...The war, the uprising that followed on its heels, and seven terrible years of sanctions and economic privation have seen to that...
...In the 1980s, he was a defender of the "eastern flank of the Arab world," to cite the title of a book very influential in Washington circles in the late 1980s...
...For a quarter of a century, the polity has been built on distrust, suspicion, conspiratorialism, and betrayal, values which in turn have infected everyone...
...It describes how a new, Kafkaesque world came into being, one ruled and held together by fear...
...Scowcroft's answers underline how little the United States understood about the country it had mobilized nearly half a million men to fight in 1990-1991...
...Whether or not these figures are accurate, the punishments were clearly no marginal affair...
...A collapse of values in Iraq has therefore coincided with the destruction of the public realm for uncoerced human association...
...The Iraqi Ba'th is a wholly indigenous phenomenon, and the longevity of its rule can be understood only against this background of public acquiescence or acceptance of its authority...
...And there are no precedents, Islamic or otherwise, for chopping off people's ears and branding their foreheads...
...This, in a police state that took pride in the fact that the crime rate under its regime, especially since the middle 1970s, had plummeted...
...No wonder the deal sought by Bill Clinton and brokered by Annan was greeted in Baghdad as "a great victory" by Tariq Aziz...
...The very opposite is likely to be the case: the victims of cruelty or injustice are not only no better than their tormentors...
...It has happened often enough in the history of the Middle East...
...The other offenses are illicit sexual relations, slanderous allegations of unlawful sexual intercourse, wine drinking, and apostasy...
...However, they did have something to do with why the Iraqi leader was yet again engaged in a game of chicken with the American president and the international community...
...and the whole infrastructure of the opposition in northern Iraq was destroyed...
...In the meantime, the violence inside Iraq continues unabated, with reports that the regime began clearing out its prisons in December 1997 in a cost-cutting exercise that involved executing inmates (a list of four hundred people in the Abu Ghreib prison just outside Baghdad was shown to visiting relatives, who were told not to waste their time if the name of the person they had come to visit was on that list...
...But Saddam Hussein stayed on in power, each time regaining a little bit more of his pre—Gulf War aura of invincibility vis-a-vis Iraqis...
...In search of some historical insight into the mind that came up with the new punishment laws, I consulted the seven-volume Mawsou'at al-Adhab, the encyclopedia of torture in the Arab-Muslim world, written by a great Iraqi spirit, 'Mood al-Shalchi...
...Annan's conclusion that "I think I can do business" with Saddam completely overturns the political environment DISSENT / Summer 1998 59 that existed since the end of the Gulf War...
...Honor, on the other hand, goes to the heart of a much more ancient sense of personal and social identity...
...Yet nowhere in al-Shalchi's encyclopedia could I find clues to shed light on what Saddam Hussein came up with in 1994...
...People are terrified of what they see," said one Iraqi intellectual residing in Baghdad, who insisted on remaining anonymous...
...In most cases they had no choice in the matter...
...Young women from such families were kidnapped off the streets...
...they are more often than not just waiting to change places with them...
...52 DISSENT / Summer 1998 Changing Forms of Cruelty Since I finished writing Republic of Fear in 1986, the chamber of horrors that is Saddam Hussein's Iraq has grown into something that not even the most morbid imagination could have dreamed up...
...Every form of punishment presupposes an idea of human nature and of how it can be manipulated to compel obedience...
...Writing about the IranIraq War, I said, "War, any war, it does not matter against whom, is a not unlikely outcome of the unbridled growth of the means of violence, particularly when it is so structured as to compromise literally masses of people in its terror...
...But the possibility exists of allowing it to open a window otherwise closed to us, a window through which to consider changing the rules by which our lives are organized by those with power over us...
...In 1990-1991, he was worth sending 450,000 Americans halfway across the world to fight against...
...EITHER THE military pyrotechnics of Desert Storm nor the pinprick Tom_ hawk missile attacks of the various Iraqi-American confrontations since the Gulf War can cover up for the failure of the American political imagination when it comes to what ought to have been done about Saddam Hussein: remove him from office, or, at the very least, relentlessly expose his criminality before his own public and in the eyes of the world...
...Saddam Hussein may be made of sterner stuff, but there is nothing inexplicable about his longevity in office, given the importance that a bungling United States has itself chosen to lend him...
...Such an affirmation extends civility into the very same world of cruel facts that act constantly to dismantle it...
...It is breaking down the very fabric of this society...
...No one should doubt that a dangerous new dimension has been injected into the already volatile politics of the Middle East...
...American policy toward Iraq, summed up in two words, "sanctions" and "containment," was left 54 DISSENT / Summer 1998 in shambles...
...Files and publications were captured, and television and radio installations, which the United States had helped to finance, were blown up...
...The book caused hurt feelings, threatened positions in the academic pecking order, and shattered friendships that went back decades...
...The strain could be seen on television during a March 13 speech on the occasion of the Muslim feast Eid al-Fitr...
...Two men whose ears had been cut off immolated themselves in central Baghdad in October 1994...
...In short, the Iraqi president was killing, maiming, and branding his citizens as he continued to pick fights with history's most reluctant superpower...
...All the important issues since then go back to that war's unfinished business, and a veritable American obsession with containing the adversary, as opposed to getting on with the obvious business of helping Iraqis to topple him...
...The Iraqi case has a lot to teach us about what happens to an outlaw state that is not overthrown when it consistently breaches international norms but is subjected to a combined regime of sanctions and unbridled tyranny: it corrodes and rots, devastating and impoverishing the vast majority of the population, without becoming any easier to revolt against or overthrow from the inside...
...A window of opportunity opened up for the whole region with this dramatic transformation of priorities...
...Fear was not incidental or episodic, as in more "normal" states...
...Sanctions do not work the way Western policy makers claim they do...
...They were crushed, and in the years that followed that wild, insurrectionary moment, the system went back to a formula that had worked so well for it in its early days: public displays of extreme cruelty...
...He came up with the story of the tenthcentury Arabic writer al-Khawarazmi, who appears to have been suspected of disloyalty and was permanently scarred on the face by a ruler...
...The commander positioned his vehicle in front of a gigantic mural of Saddam in military uniform located next to this Ba'th Party headquarters...
...A Kurdish opposition radio station based in northern Iraq declared that eight hundred soldiers with branded foreheads were captured by Kurdish forces along the border of the safe-haven zone in northern Iraq...
...The governor, along with his wife and children, would be invited for a welcoming feast in the house of a local notable...
...Whether they should have had is a different question...
...The alternative to identifying with the victim is a descent into the nausea of misanthropy and self-hatred, about whose destructive possibilities this century has taught us everything we need to know...
...Jennings: Did you genuinely believe at this period that somewhere in the labyrinth around .. . Scowcroft: Yes...
...The shame that would attach to the families of these women (as much as to the women themselves) was linked to the public's assumption that it knew what had happened...
...For the insurgents stood alone, rejected by their fellow Arabs and by the Western leaders of the coalition that had expelled Iraq from Kuwait...
...Upon being threatened with having their own ears cut off, the doctors called off their strike...
...It quickly became essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Saddam Hussein's dictatorship...
...A deeply reluctant Bush administration was forced to support a historic statement, UN Resolution 688...
...Periodically he has found it necessary to reshuffle the deck and start all over again...
...The difference this time around was that the absolutism of the Republic of Fear was breaking down...
...aircraft, ships, and troops to the Gulf in October of that year...
...Every Iraqi today, whether in the opposition or outside it, carries the marks of that victimhood deep inside...
...Several thousand helpless civilians died between August 25 and 27, 1988, victims of a genocidal official campaign of extermination of Kurds that had begun in earnest in February 1988, long after the regime had become assured that it was well on its way to winning the war...
...Rank-and-file soldiers were deserting and telling their stories as they had not done before...
...In this world, whose main features had been set in place from about the middle 1970s, Saddam Hussein stood out precisely because, however vicious, he was not primarily a narrowly sectarian leader...
...According to military personnel who escaped to Kuwait in 1994, up to two thousand soldiers already might have been branded on the forehead...
...But not for long...
...forty-two of them were executed, their bodies tied to telephone poles in front of their shops with signs around their necks that read "Greedy Merchant...
...And he has outlasted a formidable array of enemies who have long since died or been voted out of office (Ayatollah Khomeini, George Bush, Margaret Thatcher...
...The Iraqi leader allowed himself to look exhausted before his whole country (something leaders of his ilk must never do...
...Artists and poets, like many of the ancient myths and legends from which they derive their inspiration, have long exploited this presence of darkness in order to open human hearts onto the world...
...After the Gulf War, this long history of violations began to exert its legacy...
...thing must have gone wrong in the case of thirty-seven-year-old Ali Abed Ali, because he had his hand amputated and his forehead branded with an X at the same time...
...Already, before the 1991 Gulf War, the absolutism of the regime had brought about the wholesale retreat of Iraqis from all things public into the suffocating embrace of smaller and smaller units of identity: tribe, religious sect, allegiance, and finally individual self-interest...
...Saddam lost his face, literally, in a classic revolutionary moment, one that sparked the post—Gulf War Iraqi intifada...
...Iraqis began to speak out and tell their stories like never before...
...Looking back on the debris of it all, what I am now trying to say is that the all-too-human mistake we might have fallen into—each in our different ways—was that of allowing ourselves to believe that there is something morally redeeming in the quality of victimhood itself...
...His government had just offered a ten-thousanddollar reward to anybody who killed a United Nations relief worker in northern Iraq...
...DISSENT / Summer 1998 57 Amputation and branding extended this same logic to males, with the difference that post– Gulf War offenses like desertion and stealing represented a new and genuine threat to the regime's stability, something certainly not true of women abducted off the streets of Baghdad...
...This used to be a rich country," an Iraqi intellectual who describes himself as having been a fervent Saddam admirer confided to Youssef Ibrahim of the New York Times...
...president would be well advised, before deciding how to reDISSENT / Summer 1998 55 spond, to ponder the implications of the fact that Saddam Hussein is more afraid of losing face before his enemies (above all his own citizens, who are his greatest enemies) than he is of the entire military arsenal of the United States...
...The president was uncharacteristically angry, slapping his thigh while fulminating against the West for the most recent renewal of the UN sanctions...
...A scholar of the medieval Muslim world, al-Shalchi had argued against capital punishment after his experiences as a trial lawyer and a prosecutor in the 1930s in Iraq...
...Only after being caught for desertion a third time would a soldier be executed...
...Branding was a punishment of first resort in England during the Restoration, along with the stocks and whipping...
...The reaction of ordinary Iraqis to the new laws was unprecedented...
...0N AUGUST 18, 1994 President Saddam Hussein promulgated Law 109...
...Branding was an inspired afterthought, following the 56 DISSENT / Summer 1998 same trajectory as its precursor...
...The secret police followed in their wake, penetrating deep into Iraqi Kurdistan, killing hundreds and arresting thousands of oppositionists who had believed in American promises of protection...
...Hundreds were killed...
...The crimes "for which their hand was cut off" were theft and desertion...
...If the regime falls, you can imagine the chaos that will result, with the poor attacking the less poor...
...In a dramatically weakened regime consumed by the knowledge that it can no longer control society as it used to, even draconian punishment laws of the sort I have been discussing were not enough...
...It did so in reaction to images of Kurds fleeing Saddam's vengeance and dying at the rate of a thousand a day on the mountain slopes of Iraqi Kurdistan in April 1991...
...This knowledge was perceived as a greater outrage than the violations perpetrated on the women themselves...
...Ali was shown on Iraqi television on September 9, 1994, in the hospital, still under anesthetic, with his bandaged arm and close-ups of his branded forehead...
...Thus ended a fiveyear experiment in autonomy and self-rule for the Kurdish 20 percent of Iraq's population...
...EDS...
...But those Iraqis who had sought to change the regime in Baghdad with Western assistance paid the highest price of all...
...The rest of us are drifting into this surreal kind of poverty where university professors sell their family's possessions to eat...
...On the contrary: it turned in on itself as it had done before, from 1968 to 1980, the year the war started...
...Half a century later, working in exile in civil-war Beirut, al-Shalchi spent his retirement years recording in meticulous detail everything he could unearth from the classic works of Islamic civilization and history on the enormous variety of ways in which the bodies of men and women have been subjected to pain by those in authority...
...it is principally because the Sunni populace that he is trying to forge into his new (and considerably reduced) social base is rightly afraid of what will happen to it when he is gone...
...It gave way to imprisonment by an act of Parliament in 1779 that simultaneously abolished the practice and authorized the construction of penitentiary houses...
...Branding is a violation of that honor, irrespective of anything the victim may or may not have done...
...Cruelty feeds on itself...
...HEREIN LIES an entry point into the anthropology of Saddam Hussein's imagination...
...Scowcroft: Oh, yes...
...It is...
...For nearly twenty years every Iraqi knew that he or she lived in a torturing state, but the omnipotence of the state's repressive capability lay in the fact that all opposition to it had been crushed...
...Ordinary people who are living in the experience inside Iraq understand this (even if nationalist intellectuals sitting outside don't...
...Such a governor could never again preside over the affairs of Takrit...
...He is currently teaching at Brandeis University...
...A new edition is about to appear, and this essay is an abridged version of its new introduction, which tells the story of Iraq's tragedy from the Gulf War to today...
...Losing face and the breakdown of authority have a very long history in this part of the world...
...The national security adviser under George Bush, Brent Scowcroft, told ABC's Peter Jennings what he thought of the insurgency that was calling upon the allied armies to help Iraqis overthrow the tyrant and finish the job that the war had started: "I frankly wish it hadn't happened—because the military were faced with the problem of maybe a revolution inside Iraq...
...KAMAN MAKIYA is also the author of Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (Norton, 1993) and The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (University of California Press, 1991...
...That is what those who would overthrow Saddam Hussein now need to do...
...it had become constitutive of the Iraqi body politic...
...CERTAINLY that is the case in Saddam Hussein's Iraq...
...As it happens, Republic of Fear was to a large extent about how the Ba'th under Saddam Hussein had been organizing its regime since 1968 to become "coup-proof...
...Not only did American policy makers not understand this...
...Everybody would assume that they had been sexually assaulted in some way, but no one would say anything about it, including the victims themselves...
...Most Baghdadis are able to tell the story of how aristocratic Baghdadi families associated with the ancient regime of the monarchy had their "eyes broken" by Saddam Hussein's son and his entourage...
...The regime turned to inculcating sectarianism, confessionalism, and tribalism as its new legitimating instruments of rule...
...The politics of bodily disfigurement, for instance, came out of a Ba'thist tradition that was established long before Saddam Hussein introduced his 1994 punishment laws...
...It is indispensable to our comprehending, and coming to terms with, a side of our history whose existence we do not often want to acknowledge...
...He saw himself as the leader of all Iraqis, and proceeded by inventing and reinventing his enemies from the entire mass of human material that was at his disposal—including members of his own family, among whom he conducted purges and killings...
...To its everlasting credit, Western public opinion, driven by the Western media, pointed the way forward...
...In this world, the ideal citizen became an informer...
...Nearly everyone here has arms, and the country is slipping into chaos...
...According to the Sharia, punishment for theft is classified with four other punishments, known collectively as the hudud, the justification for which is haqq Allah, "the right of God...
...The levels of cruelty attained actually required that the army be subordinated to the secret police in a way that had no precedent in the modern history of Iraq...
...Desperation ruled the south, which had spearheaded the March 1991 uprising...
...How it progresses in a polity, or why those subjected to officially sanctioned cruelty react differently at different points in their lives, is very revealing of the most fundamental questions in politics...
...His crime: stealing a television set and two hundred and fifty Iraqi dinars (worth about fifty cents at the time...
...The book is a compilation of retold stories classified under such headings as dragging, trampling to death, pulling by the ear, hanging by one limb, hanging by two limbs, hanging by the breasts, castration, burying alive, denying sleep, sawing to death, and so on...
...In post–Gulf War Iraq, on the other hand, amputation was on its way to becoming the new punishment of first resort...
...From that day until his death, Khawarazmi would not venture out in public without wrapping a turban twice around his head to conceal his disfigurement...
...And they draw obvious political conclusions from that understanding, seeking to avoid at any cost the drama of endlessly reciprocating cruelties into which they fear they will inexorably be drawn...
...His work is, in effect, the voice of physical pain in the Islamic Middle East...
...But victimhood is not a quality...
...Invariably it is a condition that diminishes both the victims and us, who have not been hurt, but who write, and who make mistakes when we are consumed with outrage or shame...
...The Iraqi economy had been in deep crisis for four years, with a plummeting currency, cuts in government subsidies for basic food items like rice, wheat, and sugar, and skyrocketing prices...
...Nothing in Iraq today is as it was in the heyday of the regime's absolutism...
...Everything was secret where punishment was concerned, from the arrest to the charges, the interrogation, the extraction of the evidence, the trial, the judgment, and the exDISSENT / Summer 1998 53 ecution of the sentence...
...Yes, we clearly would have preferred a coup...
...Since 1990, human-rights organizations have taken major strides in documenting the abuses of the Iraqi Ba'th, which were described by Max van der Stoel, special rapporteur for the United Nations on Iraq, as being "of an exceptionally grave character—so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War...
...And that expectation has everything to do with "loss of face," or how we look...
...In these conditions, the first task of a new politics is to reject barbarism and reconstitute civility...
...Nothing that came out of the Iran-Iraq War, that eight-year-long meat grinder, was going to be the same as what went into it...
...Standing atop his vehicle and addressing the portrait, he denounced the dictator in a blistering speech: "What has befallen us of defeat, shame, and humiliation, Saddam, is the result of your follies, your miscalculations, and your irresponsible actions...
...In itself, of course, cruelty does not guarantee anything, least of all the emergence of something like forgiveness or toleration...
...Branding with a red-hot iron was being introduced in Saddam Hussein's post—Gulf War Iraq as a new form of punishment for these crimes...
...They are those who uphold Saddam's rule and those who protect him...
...The world of the Iraqi Ba'th was Kafkaesque in 1980, but by 1997 it had become even stranger...
...It has shape and form, follows patterns, obeys its own rules, and has its own history...
...Still, their actions had to be justified, and ended up legitimating a regime whose emergence could not be blamed on any outsider...
...The new law was formulated in general terms: stealing anything worth more than five thousand dinars—worth twelve dollars in 1994—by anyone who was not a minor had become punishable by amputation in the first instance and in the second by branding...
...The experience of cruelty, of seeing into the bottom of the abyss, can turn those who inflict it or who are subjected to it in on themselves, or it can help them reach outward in the urge to remake and affirm life...
...They would disappear for a few weeks, and then reappear...
...The point is to dishonor him by literally branding him as a thief or coward, making him feel shame rather than guilt...
...However, urbane, educated middle-class citizens were also learning what it meant to be hungry for the first time in their lives...
...THERE IS nothing irrational about this strangeness...
...it is a condition...
...It read: "According to Section 1, Article 42, of the Iraqi Constitution, the Revolutionary Command Council has decreed that . . . the foreheads of those individuals who repeat the crime for which their hand was cut off will be branded with a mark in the shape of an X. Each intersecting line will be one centimeter in length and one millimeter in width...
...On the eve of the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War, in September 1980, Saddam Hussein presided over a regime that had changed all the parameters affecting societal and state-organized violence in the country...
...58 DISSENT / Summer 1998 So severe has the assault on civil society been under the regime that around four hundred Iraqi writers, professionals, artists, and businessmen in exile were driven to put their names to a document that opens with this admission: Civil society in Iraq has been continuously violated by the state in the name of ideology...
...The accumulation of little victories turned into a large strategic victory for Saddam Hussein on Friday, August 30, 1996, the day he sent his tanks and forty thousand crack Republican Guard troops into Arbil, inside the safe-haven area set up by the allied coalition in 1991...
...The Ba'th developed the politics of fear into an art form, one that ultimately served the purpose of legitimizing its rule by making large numbers of people complicit in the violence of the regime...
...The resolution condemned "the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq," and demanded that Iraq allow immediate access for relief purposes...
...Today I'd say not more than one million Iraqis are living in any real sense of the word...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
