It was inevitable that the man condemned to the gallows would speak of his imminent death in religious terms. It has always been like this with Saddam Hussein.
The quintessential secularist who had terrorised the Shi’ite seminarians of Najaf and the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood with equal brutality fell back on religious symbolism whenever calamity struck.
There was that time, in 1991, in that uneven battle with an American-led military coalition, when he told his commanders that “angels of mercy” would come to the aid of Iraq’s army and that thus they would emerge victorious over the infidels. He had lost his air force, his army was surrendering in droves, but there remained the outward piety.
There was the moment, in the aftermath of that war, when the Islamic invocation Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) was added to Iraq’s flag, and there was the fitting spectacle, during his long trial, of Saddam the steadfast believer turning up at court with a copy of the Koran to face the victor’s justice.
He had risen through the underground, and through the intensely secular Ba’ath party, only to end it all with an appeal to the “merciful God who helps those who take refuge in him and who will never disappoint any honest believer”.
Curiously, it did not have to end this way for Saddam Hussein.
THE Tikriti upstart took apart a turbulent country and reduced it to silence and obedience. He also mastered, by all appearances, the rules of his neighbourhood. He was once, in the 1980s, an enforcer of the Sunni Arab order of power, its gendarme against the hurricane of the Iranian revolution from the east.
A child of destitution and petty crimes, he befriended the emirs and sultans of the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf. He took up his sword against the “fire-worshipping” Persians, and gave himself the task of quarantining the revolutionary brigades of Ruhollah Khomeini.
The Arabs needed swagger, and the Tikriti adventurer supplied it. They had been haunted by their technological inferiority, and this new order on the Tigris that came into its own a quarter-century ago held out the promise of a regime at home with modern weapons.
Grant the man from Tikrit his due; he had a keen sense for the mood of the crowd and of “the street”. He had come into a void: Egypt had walked away from its pan-Arab burdens, and the perennial hunger of a thwarted culture for a would-be redeemer gave Saddam his moment in the sun.
The role that had been Gamal Abdel Nasser’s in the 1950s and 1960s was there for Saddam to claim. In the way of a neighbourhood enforcer he was shrewd and cunning: he walked with the rulers of Arab lands, partook of their summits, but the menace was never far away.
The man who dispatched his forces to Kuwait on the morning of August 2, 1990, played by his own rules. A principality with a long settled history of its own was declared the “19th province” of the man’s dominion. He had been strapped for cash and he came to collect it. He had fought for the Arabs against Iran, and the conquest of Kuwait was, by his lights, the payoff due him for being Saif al-Arab, the sword of the Arabs.
He was rebuffed and thrown back across an international frontier; his scheme had backfired. The avenger of the Arabs, their standard-bearer, made legitimate a big western military presence in the lands and sea lanes of the region.
Even before the Anglo-American war of 2003 decapitated his regime, the country he had put forth as a Prussia of the Arabs, destined to unite them, lay prostrate at the mercy of the Powers, its oil and trade subject to an international regime, its air space and a good chunk of its land mass under the control and supervision of outsiders. And on Iraq’s borders those “brotherly” regimes he had sought to herd into his sphere of influence had scurried for cover in search of western protection. “The knight of Arabism” had delivered the Arabs into a new season of tutelage and dependence.
THE paradox of this man is easy to see: had he been possessed of a scant measure of introspection, Saddam might have wondered at the ironic turn of fate that has made his country — and a good deal of the region around it — a battleground between the Pax Americana and Persian power.
He loathed both America and the Iranians. In his moments of hubris he thought of himself as a worthy challenger of the Pax Americana; he was convinced that America was a declining power, that he could position himself as a master of the Persian Gulf, and that powers beyond would sue for an accord on his terms.
It had been understood for several decades that American imperial power had marked the Saudi realm as a place apart, inviolate and a vital interest of its imperium. Yet Saddam all but ignored those red lines.
He hadn’t thought much of the Saudis, and he set out to overturn the American security doctrine in the oil lands. Nor did he give the Iranian state next door the regard owed it by virtue of its demography and weight in the scales of power.
There can be no better illustration of the man’s obtuseness than the virtual absence today of the Arabs from the contest of nations. From Iraq and the Gulf to Beirut and the Mediterranean, the Arabs now seem spectators to their destiny as the battle unfolds between Pax Americana and the Persians. This, in small measure, was the harvest of what Saddam had sown in the years of blind and clumsy terror.
No one in the Arab world was able to rein him in. His fellow monarchs and rulers were in no position to stand up to him. No Arab cavalry was set to ride to the rescue of his Shi’ite and Kurdish victims. The regime he had put together worked skilfully with the hidden atavisms of the Arab world.
He presented his dominion, and the terror at its heart, as a pan-Arab secular enterprise. But Arab nationalism had been, for decades, covert Sunni hegemony, and the ruler in Baghdad had going for him the silent acquiescence of his world. No League of Arab States operatives ever threatened Saddam Hussein, and the circle of brutal men around him, with moral and political censure.
He assassinated or put to death great Shi’ite men of letters and jurisprudence. But the Shi’ites were strangers to the Arab courts and to the intellectual class alike. They were the Arab world’s stepchildren.
In the most cruel of historical swindles, Saddam “Persianised” his Shi’ite countrymen, even though Shi’ism in Iraq was Arab through and through, its adherents bedouin Arabs who had converted to Shi’ism at the hands of clerics in the trading towns of Najaf and Karbala.
No Arabs of note stepped forth to contest this forgery; the bigotry of the man was but an extreme version of the bigotry of his world. In the same vein, the terror unleashed against the Kurds in the 1980s took place against the background of a wider Arab silence.
That petty tyrant in Baghdad did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world’s sins of omission and commission. It is no surprise today that Arab rulers — Egypt’s master in particular — speak with dread of Saddam’s execution.
He ruled alone, he hoarded public treasure; he gave every sign that he had in mind a dynastic succession for one of his sons after him; he made a mockery of national elections. In all this he was at one with his neighbourhood.
“You go not till I set you up a glass, where you see the inmost part of you,” Hamlet says to his mother. In his years at the helm of political power, and in those shameless protests in the Palestinian territories and in Jordan that have erupted now and then in support of this terrible man, Saddam Hussein has held up a mirror for the Arabs. And the image in the mirror has never been pretty.
IT IS the luck of Saddam’s victims that he was so unusually brazen, and that he never read the balance of forces in the world beyond Iraq, Iran and the Arab order of states.
It was never fated or maktoob (written), as the Arabs would say, that Saddam would be flushed out of a spider hole by American soldiers, and that he would be condemned to “execution by hanging until death”, as the appeal court in his country ruled. Had he let well enough alone, had he read America’s mood after September 11, 2001, he might have been able to stay out of harm’s way.
On Saddam’s western border, his nemesis Hafez Assad, like him a man who had risen from obscurity and poverty to the commanding heights of political power, and very much in Saddam’s mould in his attitude toward authority and dissent, died in power, a natural death. Syria gave Assad a grand funeral and had no choice but to acquiesce to the succession of his son.
The Syrian despot had been careful not to offend the Powers. He had all but erased an international frontier, stripped the small Lebanese republic of much of its independence. But he had done it over the course of two long decades, and he had done it, it has to be sadly admitted, with a green light granted him by the Pax Americana in 1990-91, a reward for riding with the posse that Bush the Elder had assembled to evict Saddam from Kuwait.
Assad’s caution may have been the temper of the man. Conceivably, it was also the caution of his community of Alawites, an esoteric faith of the insular Syrian mountains.
Saddam lacked the guile that might have spared him. His military machine was all rust and decay, but he swaggered and let the world think that he had perfected a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
A great military expedition was being readied against him in Washington and London, but he gambled to the bitter end that the American leader would not pull the trigger. It never dawned on him that the mood had darkened in Washington after 9/11, and that the military response that had begun in Kabul was heading his way.
It did not really matter that Saddam Hussein had not been directly implicated in the terrors of 9/11, and that those terrors had had their origins in the political cultures of Egypt and the Arabian peninsula. Truth be told, Saddam had drawn the short straw.
Kabul and the Taliban had not sufficed, the campaign against radical Islamism had to make its way to the Arab wellsprings of jihadism. Egypt and Saudi Arabia were off limits; they lay within the American orbit. Saddam’s regime was the perfect target of opportunity — menacing but in reality weak and isolated. He was a Wizard of Oz; behind the curtain his realm was a domain of make-believe.
The Iraq war may now be an orphan in the court of American opinion. But on the eve of it well over 70% of the American public favoured upending Saddam’s regime.
In retrospect, the scaffolding of the war would come under steady attack, and the critics would maintain that there had been no operational links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. But those fine distinctions had no standing and no force in the countdown to war. It was Saddam’s fault that he drew attention, and fire, when ducking for cover would have been the better part of wisdom.
It will be said on the “Arab street” and by the critics of the Iraq war worldwide, that this verdict, and the entire judicial process that issued the death sentence, were an affair of the American occupation, cut to America’s political needs. Iraqis from Kurdistan to Basra will pay these quibbles no heed.
If it took a foreign war to bring about this justice, and to introduce into Arab politics the principle of political accountability, so be it.
So much of the political and economic life of the Arabs today — the satellite television channels railing against the West, the intellectuals who condemn the West in perfectly good western idiom, the oil industry that sustains practically all that plays out in the region — has its origins in western lands.
Nuremberg, too, was the victor’s justice. The Iraqis who endured the tyranny while the world averted its gaze from their suffering are owed their moment of satisfaction.
Fouad Ajami is the author of The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University
