Saddam's Brain
BROOKS, DAVID
Saddam's Brain The ideology behind the thuggery BY DAVID BROOKS When faculty members at the Sorbonne gather to discuss who should get the prize for most evil alumnus, they probably rehash all the...
...This is what distinguishes the Baath regime from all other regimes...
...In 1940, Aflaq established a study circle in Damascus called the Movement of Arab Renaissance, which in 1947 transmogrified into the Baath party, Baath meaning resurrection or renaissance...
...This is not a set of beliefs Saddam developed on his own...
...He fills his speeches with references to Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin, and one always gets the sense that he doesn't see them as distant figures, but as living presences, revived in him for the purpose of carrying forward the Arab spirit...
...And socialism in the Baathist sense is drained of almost all its economic content...
...The CIA and the State Department might think otherwise, but we are not all game theorists...
...He died in 1989, and the Iraqi government claimed, dubiously, that on his deathbed he had converted to Islam...
...Michel Aflaq was born in Damascus in 1910, a Greek Orthodox Christian...
...And it was Aflaq who laid down the ideology that continues to dominate Saddam's thinking today...
...Aflaq spent the last 15 years of his life as the inspiration and cheerleader for all things Saddam...
...Let all cowards, piggish people, traitors, and betrayers be debased...
...the Baath party, and ultimately from its founder-leader...
...It is ascension, ascension, and ascension" that guides the revolution...
...In the early 1930s, Aflaq and Bitar returned to Damascus, where they played at being radical intellectuals...
...There has been no respite...
...Truth" is determined by the revolution's immediate needs...
...A people like you cannot but be, with God's help...
...Arguing that all three great religions originated in the Middle East, he asserted that "religion entered Europe from the outside, therefore it is alien to its character and history...
...And most important, he has always been committed to the life of relentless struggle, of ever-widening wars and confrontations, of perpetual revolution, which undermines all objective truth, all stability, all possibility of rest and peace...
...Breaking agreements is not something Saddam does shamefacedly...
...Baath party documents are peculiar because they are at once hysterical and pseudoscientific...
...Nonetheless, Tariq Aziz is right...
...Saddam Hussein has taken such awful risks throughout his career not because he "miscalculated," as the game theorists assert, but because he was chasing his vision...
...He was following the dictates of the Baathist ideology, which calls for warfare, bloodshed, revolution, and conflict, on and on, against one and all, until the end of time...
...Like a lot of intellectuals of the middle of the twentieth century, Aflaq also spent time theorizing about the revolutionary process...
...It is Aflaq whom Saddam cites when he insists, as he does frequently, that the Baath party is not like other parties...
...in other words the writing of Arab history should be from our point of view with an emphasis on analysis and not realistic story telling...
...Though born a Christian, Aflaq believed that Islam provides Arabs with "the most brilliant picture of their language and literature, and the grandest part of their national history...
...Real Baathists refuse to be guided by the principles of their founding, Saddam said, or even by the principles they adhered to six years ago...
...The revolution is everywhere...
...Instead, he says, it is a believer's creed, similar in faith and purpose to early Islam, which offers "spiritual ascendance in the process of the nation's uplift" through "great deeds in conquest, liberation, justice, altruism, and flexibility...
...Certain people—many people, in fact—are driven by goals, ideals, and beliefs...
...And somehow Saddam himself is merged with the revolution...
...The word "revolution" has a special meaning for Saddam, and it is worth quoting a few of the speeches and interviews in which he uses the word in novel ways: "That is why a Revolution has no beginning and no end...
...The Baath saw themselves as strugglers, as people engaged in a permanent revolution aimed at uniting them with the inner perfection that is Arabism...
...Moreover, his theory of history will pardon him if he sets out to commit mass murder against lower races, such as Americans...
...In July 2002, Saddam delivered a speech in which he emphasized that all principles, even Baath principles, are relative...
...For example, in the 1970s, the party engaged in a characteristic bit of Orwellian calisthenics to prove that in its case, a minority is actually a majority: "Every party, including the ABSP, constitutes a minority in proportion to the population...
...But as the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya points out in his brilliant and indispensable portrait of Saddam's Iraq, Republic of Fear, Arab nationalism as Aflaq conceived it is not a secular concept...
...Saddam likes to call himself The Struggler, and his rule has been marked by incessant strife...
...The Baathist must never deal with history and all other intellectual and social questions in this way...
...They are experts in secret organization...
...The revolution is all seeing and never-ending...
...Our decisive criterion," he concluded, "when there are various alternatives and visions in front of us, is not the modest picture, but the highest and purest state...
...Intense, ascetic, and by some accounts effete, he was not cut out for politics...
...Throughout all its stages the Revolution will remain capable of performing its role courageously and precisely without hesitation or panic, once it takes action to crush the pockets of the counter-revolution...
...But it was developing the Leninist party structure that Aflaq had observed in France...
...it is not like a war, and its soldiers must not profit from its spoils...
...For example, in a speech to the Iraqi people last year, Saddam declared, in a characteristic outburst, "You are the fountain of will power and the wellspring of life, the essence of earth, the sabers of demise, the pupil of the eye, the twitch of the eyelid...
...Ideas are not everything...
...and Ali Shariat, the intellectual godfather of the Iranian revolution...
...By the mid-1950s, the Baath party had become a major force in Syria, thanks in part to its merger with the Arab Socialist party, and Aflaq became secretary general and chief ideologist...
...They invited Aflaq to settle there, which he did, eventually leading the National Command of the Iraqi Baath party...
...Sometimes when you read Saddam talking about the revolution you think you are reading Darth Vader talking about the dark side of The Force...
...In dealing with Saddam, then, we are not dealing with a normal thug or bully, but with a missionary whose lofty ideology has not changed in four decades, even as it has acquired, over the past few years, some Islamist drapery...
...But interestingly, he does seem to recognize that the United States is the other nation on earth with a vibrant sense of mission, the living belief that its form of government is the last best hope of earth...
...The ideology of Baathism calls for relentless struggle, ever-widening conflict, until some ideal culmination of history is achieved...
...The Revolution chooses its enemies, and we say chooses its enemies because some enemies are chosen by it from among the people who run up against its program and who intend to harm it...
...For Arabs to become nationalists, "they need to forget what they have learned so that they can return to a direct relationship with their pure original nature...
...Aside from this radioactive faith in the holy mission of the Arab people, the other great Aflaqian concept that appears and reappears in Saddam's speeches is the concept of ascendance through perpetual revolution and struggle...
...These days, it's common to say that Arab nationalism was a secular movement that has been displaced by Islamic fundamentalism...
...The argument has been over weapons of mass destruction, unilateralism vs...
...In 1966, he lost an intraparty power struggle and left for Lebanon, then Brazil...
...So be as you are, and as we are determined to be...
...His addresses are filled with references to "disease loving" Zionists and Americans...
...It bears stronger resemblance to the Nazi party because it is based ultimately on a burning faith in racial superiority...
...It established its own army, in addition to the regular Iraqi army, and its own intelligence service, which at first was given the otherworldly name the Apparatus of Yearnings...
...Very little attention has been paid to what Saddam wants and what Saddam believes—which is like analyzing Hitler without reference to the ideology of the Nazi party or Lenin without reference to communism...
...At that point the true unity will be realized, and this is a new kind of unity different from political unity...
...The Baath party, Aflaq felt, embodying the transcendent Arab spirit, needed to be ruthless against those who did not share its beliefs...
...Aflaq's writings were vague and pathetic whenever he tried to address concrete situations, but he did apparently have a gift for painting glorious pictures of future triumph, which appealed to those with a nagging sense of national humiliation...
...Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru's Shining Path guerrilla movement...
...Instead, socialism seems to refer to a way of life, to a life committed to revolution...
...The Baath party is not quite like the Communist parties...
...It is consistent with the holy doctrine of his party...
...Two years later Saddam and his Iraqi Baath cadres staged a successful coup and took control of their nation in the name of Baathism...
...The revolution and Saddam ruthlessly abandon any truth or principle or agreement that no longer meshes with the need to achieve the glorious state of spiritual perfection...
...Leaving the Baath party to join another political group remains in Iraq a crime punishable by death...
...It's odd, but in the middle of his declarations Saddam will occasionally launch into a pseudo-intellectual disquisition on epistemology, on how we know what we know...
...His speeches, from the time he entered government in 1968 until today, have had a consistent ideological, pseudo-intellectual character, even if in the past decade a layer of Islamist rhetoric has been added...
...We cannot rely on one "true" set of criteria to make our judgments, he declares, because the changing needs of the revolution supersede truth...
...It is something continuous, it is a message to life, and the human being is only the bearer of the message...
...He is first and foremost a political activist, a party man...
...He has extremist expectations for the Arab nation because he believes it has been assigned by God an escha-tological mission...
...That which serves the needs of the revolution is true for that moment...
...It is Michel Aflaq who created the party and not I," Saddam told an interviewer in 1980...
...Ambitious young people were compelled to join the party if they hoped to rise, or even study abroad...
...As Tariq Aziz, a longtime party leader, noted in the 1980s, "The ABSP is not a conventional political organization, but is composed of cells of valiant revolutionaries...
...Europeans and Americans, he believed, cannot really be Christian or religious or highly spiritual in the rich way that Arabs can...
...Since the revolution is permanent and relentless, standards of judgment must be flexible so as to be adapted to the latest demands of the revolution...
...But they really should give serious consideration to Michel Aflaq...
...The Baathist ideology demands a revolution in world affairs...
...But in the current argument over what do to about Iraq and Saddam, ideas have been treated as if they were nothing...
...It was Aflaq, too, who in 1963 elevated Saddam Hussein to the Regional Command in Iraq's Baath party, and so set him on his course to dictatorship...
...The Baathist ideology makes all agreements arbitrary, just as it makes all legal standards arbitrary and all truth arbitrary...
...They are organizers of demonstrations, strikes, and armed revolutions...
...In their statements, the Iraqi opposition forces refer to the government of Iraq as the "Aflaqite regime," emphasizing that the regime is not just one evil man...
...The Baathist ideology allows no remorse over the mass murder of those who belong to racially inferior groups...
...It will realize all values, bring to culmination all hopes, and ascend to permanent glory...
...In January 2002, he declared: "The Americans have not yet established a civilization, in the deep and comprehensive sense we give to civilization...
...it creates the unity of spirit among the individuals of the nation...
...In this mystical form, Saddam's pan-Arab zeal has managed to survive the death of pan-Arabism as a practical political project...
...it is a party structure organized around a transcendent ideology, an ideology that produced the monster Saddam, but that is bigger than any individual...
...It is something he does proudly...
...The Arab Nation for him is a transcendent spiritual force, a bit like Hegel's concept of the Spirit of History...
...When Saddam Hussein joined the Baath party in Iraq in the 1950s, it had only about 300 members...
...Once in power, the party behaved, in some respects, as Leninist parties do everywhere...
...He has believed all this in the name of some final and transcendent conquest for himself and the Arab nation...
...He won a scholarship to study philosophy at the Sorbonne sometime between 1928 and 1930 (biographies differ), and there he studied Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Mazzini, and a range of German nationalists and proto-Nazis...
...it is a mystical, never-ending process of struggle, ascent, and salvation...
...Unity means Arab unity...
...He leaps back to ancient glories and imagines future supremacy 500 or 1,000 years away...
...Together, they were thrilled by the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, but they also came to admire the organizational structure Lenin had created within the Russian Communist party...
...Saddam's Brain The ideology behind the thuggery BY DAVID BROOKS When faculty members at the Sorbonne gather to discuss who should get the prize for most evil alumnus, they probably rehash all the familiar names— Pol Pot, mastermind of the Cambodian genocide...
...It was Aflaq, a Syrian intellectual and political organizer, who founded the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties...
...As Aflaq wrote: "In this struggle we retain our love for all...
...Some people, perhaps including Arabs and plenty of Muslims and more than these in the wide world . . . considered the ascent of the United States to the summit as the last scene in the world picture, after which there will be no more summits and no one will try to ascend and sit comfortably there...
...Saddam gets fevered whenever he discusses the subject of the Arab volk...
...Aflaq became active in Arab student politics with his countryman Salah Bitar, a Sunni Muslim...
...What they have established is a metropolis of force...
...The United States and its democracy must be humiliated and brought low so that the dominance of the Arab nation can achieve its final and fitting triumph, and so realize God's plan for the earth...
...No leader, not even a highly ideological one like Saddam, is unfailingly guided by his belief system...
...He led his nation through a bloody eight-year war with Iran that produced World War I level casualties, a ruthless campaign of genocide against the Kurds, the invasion of neighboring Kuwait, a war with the United States and the rest of the world, civil wars in the north and south of his country, and now another potential war with the United States and its allies over weapons of mass destruction...
...When we are cruel to others, we know that our cruelty is in order to bring them back to their true selves, of which they are ignorant...
...The Baathist ideology commands that there be no respite...
...From his first declarations to his last, he has always presented the Arabs as the master race, whose history and accomplishments are glorious...
...The revolution is God and salvation...
...The revolution, in Saddam's terms, is not just a political event, as the Russian or French revolution was a political event...
...Human beings are not all rational actors carefully calculating their interests...
...It was Aflaq whom Saddam installed in a top party post once he became dictator...
...The Baathist ideology requires continual conflict and bloodshed...
...Once back in Syria, Aflaq rejected all Western thought and for the rest of his life denied that Western ideas could have any relevance to the higher civilization of the Arabs...
...That passage gives a sense of the eschatological frame of Saddam's thinking: Someday there will be a great historical culmination...
...Aflaq, like his party, was uninterested in economics...
...The phrase most associated with Aflaq and the Baath party is "Arab nationalist...
...All leaders bide their time, looking for opportunities, looking out for themselves...
...They are the knights of the struggle...
...Once a dictator assumes the Aflaqite belief in the superiority of the Arab race, it is practically inevitable that he will find his arena for genocide, he will find his Kurds...
...He has always had a mystical belief in self-purification through violence, the notion that the soul is elevated through warfare and killing...
...Saddam Hussein, after all, isn't a general who took over a government by means of a military coup...
...He's not only a thug, a ruthless tribal leader, a Don Corleone-style Godfather, a power-mad dictator...
...Saddam grew up as a cadre in the highly ideological and dogmatic Baath party structure...
...Some nation, some people, will establish permanent dominance over the earth...
...The Arab nation is the source of all prophets and the cradle of civilization...
...Struggle necessarily involves sacrifice, he emphasized, but amidst fiery conflict and bloodshed, each person "is forced to return to himself, to sink into his depths, to discover himself anew after experience and pain...
...It built a parallel party structure on top of the normal government bureaucracy to enforce loyalty and conformity...
...In 1977 Saddam delivered a speech to a group of history teachers in which he lectured them to put Baathist analysis before the facts: "Those researchers and historians who call themselves objective might very well be presenting different viewpoints and possibilities to explain one event, . . . leaving it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions...
...Arabs attain spiritual perfection when they achieve solidarity with the Arab Nation and purge themselves of the cancerous influences of the West...
...Aflaq and Bitar ran unsuccessfully for parliament three times each, but they began to win a following among educated, mostly lower-middle-class men in Syria and to a lesser extent in Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon...
...They are filled with highly charged calls for bloodshed, heroism, and martyrdom, and at the same time they are tortured and pompous...
...The Arab Nation is the ideal around which human history ascends...
...The Arab Socialist Baath party, or ABSP, developed internal security and intelligence networks and even theoretical journals to develop party dogma...
...The slogan of the Baath party is "Unity, Freedom, Socialism...
...One feature of the revolution that Aflaq articulated and Saddam absorbed is that it erases and supersedes all objective values...
...The United States therefore is his ultimate rival...
...Moreover, it was through this combat, or struggle, that the Baath could achieve Arab perfection...
...Nationalism is not an idea," Aflaq wrote...
...He inherited it from the zealous ideology on which his party was built...
...Had it not been for him, I would not be in this position...
...Even facts must give way to the needs of the revolution...
...Rather, they are guided by the needs of the future...
...That is why it can never be an average nation: Throughout our history our nation has either soared to the heights, or fallen into the abyss...
...From the first, party statements were marked by a highly charged ideological style, which separated the world into the party of pure good (the Baathists themselves) and the party of pure evil (just about everyone else...
...There were local cells, divisions, and branches, culminating in the ruling elite, the Regional Command and the Regional Command Council...
...He did not see the confrontation with the West in Muslim versus Christian terms...
...As you read through Saddam's speeches and declarations, it is impossible to miss the Aflaqian tones and messages...
...The United States does not escape his disdain either...
...These beliefs and habits of mind he absorbed from David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The Revolution has its eyes wide open...
...The Arab Nation is the culmination of all values...
...Freedom means freedom from imperialist oppression...
...They did some teaching, contributed to magazines, and prowled around the cafes preaching revolution...
...That style of prose, with its abstract categories, oracular tone, and twisted logic, can be found in party documents from Stalin's Soviet Union to Mao's China...
...But when it represents, by its will and daily conduct, the people's will, when its acts correspond to the people's objectives, in present and future calculations, then it constitutes a majority...
...How can I forget what Michel Aflaq has done for me...
...They considered it the end of the world as they hoped for, or as scared souls suggested it to them...
...Their potential will, which has not been clarified yet, is with us, even when their swords are drawn against us...
...We can state without hesitation that our nation has a message," he told an interviewer...
...In one interview Saddam said that Arabs should never be Communists because there is nothing they could profitably absorb from a European idea, though it is perfectly acceptable for Africans or other inferior races to adopt communism as their creed: "What does an African in Rhodesia have to lose when he adopts Marxism, since he does not have the historical depth or the intellectual heritage of the Arab nation, a heritage which offers all the theories necessary for a life of change and progress...
...The writing of history must take on the same specificity as our Baathist way...
...The inferiority of other peoples is also a frequent refrain...
...multilateralism, and nuclear capabilities...
...Saddam's historical frame of reference is much wider...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 9
