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Kanan Makiya on Arab indulgence of Saddam Hussein. |
Saddam’s Scribes
The New Republic
Since the war in the Gulf, it has been learned just how thoroughly Saddam
Hussein beguiled public servants, business executives and policy "experts"
in the West. Here are the officials who winked at him; there are the corporations
that provisioned him with forbidden technologies; and everywhere are the
"Iraq-watchers" who put the best face on his damnedest deeds.
The techniques of seduction mastered by Iraq compel investigation, because
they point to gaping loopholes in the institutions that define Western democracy,
loopholes that probably can never be closed but must certainly be tightened
if more Saddams are not to waltz right through them.
In the Arab world, too, Saddam had his apologists and appeasers and enjoyed
the support of an impressive array of fellow travelers. Especially among
the intellectuals: when crisis came, they deployed all their ingenuity to
excuse or to justify the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and seeded the clouds
of obfuscation surrounding Saddam's crimes. Their choices before and during
the war made no difference to its outcome, and might still be only an internecine
Arab concern, were not yesterday's allies of Saddam posing as today's defenders
of democracy and human rights in Arab lands. Kanan Makiya's unsparing exposé
will make it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for them to get away
with it.
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Makiya is the Iraqi author of an earlier indictment of Saddam's rule called
The Republic of Fear, which he published under the pen name Samir
al-Khalil. There he argued that Iraq under Saddam "should not be dismissed
as a run-of-the-mill dictatorship with equally nasty counterparts all over
the Third World," since it had become, in the 1980s, a totalitarian
state. After the invasion of Kuwait, Makiya shed his protective pseudonym
to argue publicly that the West had an obligation to topple Saddam. The
West did otherwise, for reasons that betrayed what Makiya calls an "absence
of compassion."
Makiya's new book does not dwell on Western "betrayal," real or
imagined. His critical eye remains fixed on the Arabs. For Makiya, the torment
of Iraq, and of other Arab lands, is self-inflicted, the result of a descent
into cruelty that the Arab intelligentsia has greeted more often with silence
than outrage. Makiya's work purports to be a kind of shock therapy, which
seeks to relive with readers the nights of terror and to confront intellectuals
with the human cost of their words — all in the fervent hope that Iraqis
and other Arabs will take responsibility for the cruelty they have visited
upon one another.
The therapy begins, appropriately, with the telling of lived nightmares.
Each of the first chapters bears the name of a witness who felt the hot
iron of Saddam's wrath. They include a Shiite, a Sunni, two Kurds, and a
Kuwaiti: witnesses who passed through the bowels of Baathist Iraq, even
as Arab writers and poets kissed Saddam's cheeks. There is the interview
with the Kurdish boy Taimour, who somehow pulled himself from the pit where
Iraqi soldiers shot his mother and sisters; the regime exterminated over
100,000 Kurds in this manner in 1988. There is the testimony of Abdallah,
a Kurd who lived through a chemical attack on his village that same year.
Fleeing to the river, he found his children dead and his mother sprawled
in the water, her mouth "biting into the mudbank." There is Omar,
a Baghdad Sunni, who was swept into a hellish prison for forty days on suspicion
of insulting Saddam. There is Abu Haydar, the Shiite army officer who joined
the post-war Shiite uprising in the south, only to see it descend into butchery
and looting before being crushed.
The testimony of these witnesses is the scaffolding for Makiya's own detailed
inquiries, drawing on a still wider range of interviews, documents, and
tapes. The narrative is inspired as no human rights report could be, and
is leavened with personal reflection on the moral ambiguities of tyranny
and resistance. This is especially true of Makiya's account of the Shiite
intifada, an uprising put down with a ruthlessness "that previously
had been reserved for the Kurds." It is believed that many more Iraqis
died in the suppression of the Shiite uprising than in the allied assault
on Saddam's forces. But Makiya does not shrink from documenting the excesses
of the "bungled" intifada, which turned into a "killing rampage"
borne aloft on "a ferocious, hate-filled, vengeance-seeking, and profoundly
intolerant brand of Islam." His reportage of the atrocities, on both
sides, runs the grisly gamut from crucifixions to the dashing of infants'
skulls.
Makiya found "the cumulative effect of the stories unbearable, deadening
to all rationality, even a threat to my own sanity." Yet this brutalization,
far from galvanizing an Iraqi opposition, has paralyzed it, as each faction
claims to have been more victimized than the others. Makiya is certain Saddam
will fall but fears a bloodbath will follow. He would heal the polity by
a general amnesty, a federal state and ironclad guarantees of minority rights.
But the Kurds dream of a Kurdish state and the Shiites call for an Islamic
state, "either one of which is enough to kill Iraq." The Kurdish
dream might be realized with little more bloodshed, or so Makiya imagines;
but Sunnis and Shiites live in an inextricable embrace, and when Shiites
talk of an Islamic state, Sunnis hear a demand for righteous vengeance.
Makiya ends his reflections on Iraq's future with an admonition to Shiites
that they approach Sunnis in a spirit of reconciliation, abandon the idea
of an Islamic state, and promise to set aside retribution after Saddam.
But Makiya has no illusions: "The signs are that Iraq's Shiites are
so traumatized by their own tragedy that they are becoming less and less
able to think and act like Iraqis." As costly as Saddam's rule has
been for Iraq, Makiya is possessed of a foreboding that the deluge is yet
to come.
In the second part of the book, Makiya dissects the intellectuals. Since
1967 most have known the Arab world to be ailing, and many offered penetrating
diagnoses. They affirmed that the Arabs must change and pondered the violence
and repression played out in Beirut, Hamah, and Halabja. And yet they failed
to liberate themselves from the myth of Arab nationalism and its crippling
fixation on the West as the ultimate source of all Arab woes. That myth
finally overpowered every other sensibility when Iraq invaded and annexed
Kuwait — a union unlike any other attempted Arab union, imposed by the strong
upon the weak, with all the brutality of a rape.
Scores of leading Arab intellectuals embraced the move openly or tacitly,
by somehow persuading themselves that Iraq's missiles and chemicals stood
at the service of all Arabs. If Saddam's brutality served to unify them,
it had to be understood as a "national act." Later, when America
awoke and Saddam suddenly seemed destined for defeat, they made him into
an Arab victim, charging that the United States lured the Iraqi leader into
Kuwait in order to crush him. (April Glaspie was the agent provocateur.)
The imagined plot then called for the United States to destroy any possibility
of a so-called "Arab solution," so it could wage a cathartic war
of prejudice against Iraq, Islam and the Arabs. In short, writes Makiya,
"responsibility was being transferred by Arab intellectuals away from
where it so obviously lay, namely, with the Ba'thi state of Iraq, onto the
United States."
Makiya has assembled a collage — a quote here, a verse of poetry there — and
he tends to relegate evidence of equivocation to the footnotes. Still, many
of the quotes are stunning. Pride of place on the scale of power worship
goes to the Tunisian historian Hichem Djaït, who enjoys an exalted
reputation in France and a growing one in America (where he has been a visiting
professor at Berkeley and McGill). "A new perspective is opening up,"
he announced after the invasion of Kuwait, "that of unification. And
Iraq is its pole and motor." Just as wars forged European nations,
so Saddam was "undertaking the beginning of the unification of the
Arab world. Sometimes legitimacy is more important than legality."
His foreign interviewer persisted: What if the war became general? Djaït's
reply was that "war has the merit of clarifying things — with respect
to your contradictions and with respect to ours. We have everything to gain
from this clarification. We have nothing to lose from this war, even if
it ends in defeat." Now this very same Djaït once said of Baathist
ideology that "the Arab nation is not a fact," and that "intellectuals
cannot, without betraying themselves, subscribe to a purely nationalist
ideology that is fatally poor and contains the seeds of fascism"; but
when Saddam flexed his missiles, Djaït swiftly betrayed himself, and
watered those seeds with his words.
Makiya's view of the poets, the "kings of Arab culture," is more
problematic. The spectrum of plausible interpretation is broad, and the
poets are in perpetual motion. In 1984, Nizar Qabbani, the lyric poet of
pessimism from Syria, wrote a paean to Saddam, "who let gently drop
into my eyes the color of green." Later, in 1989, he wrote a poem that
fed the already widespread Arab bigotry against Gulf Arabs ("Drink
the wine of your petroleum to its lees / Only leave culture to us").
Yet Makiya acknowledges that Qabbani took an "honorable stand"
in support of the Kuwaitis during the crisis, and penned a poem that heaped
obloquy on Saddam after the battle. Makiya argues that Qabbani's problem
is ultimately "one of style, not ideological position," and no
doubt Qabbani is an acquired taste. But Makiya never confronts the paradox
of how a poet, whose style reminds him of nothing so much as "early
Baathism," still withstood the siren call from Baghdad at the height
of the crisis.
The poets equivocated; not so the Palestinians. Saddam seduced them first
by exchanging threats with Israel, and later by promoting the idea of "linkage."
The depth of Makiya's disappointment with the Palestinian choice is perhaps
explained by his own odyssey. After the 1967 war, the Palestinian fedayeen
became the hope of the hour, and Makiya writes of starting off in politics
as a "young activist supporter" of the Popular Democratic Front
for the Liberation of Palestine. "As I labored virtually full time
to solidarize with the Palestinian movement, I became aware of myself as
an Arab for the very first time." But the wider Palestinian movement
did not arise to inspire young idealists or save the Arab world. It arose
to carve out a Palestinian state, and its natural allies were power brokers,
not the downtrodden, of the Arab world.
Saddam seemed to command more power than any Arab leader in modern history,
and when he invaded Kuwait, Palestinians rushed to savor what Makiya calls
the "crumb of comfort" that he threw to them. Makiya notes the
exceptions, which include the Israeli-Palestinian writer Emile Habibi and
Harvard professor Walid Khalidi. But most Palestinian intellectuals saw
Saddam as the revered Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish described him in
1986: as the "moon of Baghdad." Makiya's mature disappointment
with the Palestinians has been as passionate as his youthful "solidarizing,"
and one wonders whether the Palestinians really have deserved either. But
if Palestinian intellectuals are now enraged by Makiya, they might ponder
whether their own style of moral arbitrage did not create him.
During the Gulf war, Edward Said demonstrated that style brilliantly. From
the outset, he decided that the crisis was about empire — not Saddam's, America's.
Were Kurds gassed? "At best," pronounced Said in the face of an
avalanche of evidence, "this is uncertain." But he dropped the
evidentiary bar when it came to American culpability, as demonstrated by
his remarkable summation of the Gulf war: "The dreadful Saddam Hussein
provided the U.S. and his reactionary Gulf neighbors with a perfect excuse
to attack him after his brutally stupid and indefensibly criminal occupation
of Kuwait." The real thrust of this sentence is not that Saddam was
dreadful, stupid, or criminal, though it is clear on all these counts; it
is that the United States and Saudi Arabia plotted to "attack"
Saddam before he invaded Kuwait. But the evidence for this simply does not
exist. And the mountain of counterfact about Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and American
policy-making that must have gone into the writing of such a sentence is
breathtaking.
For Makiya, this kind of logic is grounded in the "morally wrong"
premise that the greatest threat to the Arabs is still external. As Makiya
demonstrates in a final tour of cruelty around the Arab world, the region
has become fully self-sufficient in the manufacture of oppression. Yet Makiya's
indictment of the Arab intellectuals goes further: they create the necessary
conditions for tyranny. The source of agony in the Arab world, writes Makiya,
"lies principally in its intelligentsia, not in its regimes."
Here he invokes the authority of Noam Chomsky, whose notion of the responsibility
of intellectuals entered the Arab world through the criticism of "Orientalism."
Makiya skillfully hurls it right back: if Western culture and Western power
are inseparable, so too are Arab culture and Arab power, especially when
that power is so abused.
But here Makiya stands on dangerous common ground. As it is, the rulers
of Arab and Islamic lands need little encouragement to hold intellectuals
responsible, and to hold them to the fire. That is why books are banned,
writers are exiled, journalists are assassinated and Rushdie languishes
under an irrevocable fatwa of death. In places like Baghdad and Teheran,
the "treason of the intellectuals" is judged to be treason, pure
and simple. The Arab world desperately needs to ignore the Chomskian analysis,
and to write a social contract that absolves intellectuals of this kind
of accountability for what they write and say. Such a contract might be
based instead on the idea that governments are accountable for what they
do.
Astonishingly, the very same nationalist intellectuals who, in Makiya's
words, "played into the hands of the worst kind of despotism"
propose to write that contract themselves. The pan-Arab journals now brim
with articles, conference proceedings, and study group reports on the methods
and means of promoting democracy in the Arab world. The rationale underlying
this sudden enthusiasm for political pluralism and free elections is that
if the people were only allowed to express themselves, they would endorse
the nationalist program: greater Arab unity, repudiation of the United States,
withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli peace process. It is a dubious assumption,
and it is not surprising that half of the Arab nationalist intellectuals
in a recent survey believed that Arab unity could only be achieved by force.
Their lips speak democracy, but their eyes remain fixed on the horizon,
awaiting the next Saddam, who may turn out to be Saddam himself.
© Martin Kramer | |
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| this article |
Martin Kramer, "Saddam's Scribes," The New Republic, July 19 and 26, 1993.
The article is a review of Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World, published by W.W. Norton.
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