REPUBLIC OF ANARCHY IBRAHIM AL-MARASHI argues fear may partly explain the problems of post-Saddam Iraq, but may also preclude the country’s progress
EVER SINCE THE first GulfWar, I have been asked questions about Iraq. First they were directed to me as the descendent of Iraqi immigrants living in the US and later, during the second conflict, as an expert on Iraqi affairs. Even after years of researching Iraqi politics, I always try to relate questions about the country to my personal experiences. Prior to the 2003 war, one question I was consistently asked was: “How does Saddam manage to hold onto power?”. It always brought to mind a recurring nightmare I had as a teenager, in which I was entering Iraq for the first time in my life. Even though I was an American by birth, as soon as I set foot on Iraqi soil Saddam’s secret agents would arrest me for my parents’ “crimes against the state” and incarcerate me in one of their notorious prisons. The guards would then torture me in a variety of ways until I would wake up sweating.
That recurring dream is tied to one of my most vivid childhood memories.After I had angered my mother for stealing a candy bar from the grocery store she told me there was a God, who would punish me for my sin and I would end up in hell with the devil and his helper – a man by the name of Saddam Hussein.My parents imbued me with a sense of fear for this man – a fear that entered my subconscious and manifested itself in my worst nightmares.My parents, like countless other Iraqis, fled this nightmare. Nevertheless, thousands of miles away in the US, I still lived in fear from Saddam’s reach – even though I had never set foot in Iraq.
This fear explained how Saddam had managed to stay in power. The many ways he manipulated it to control his regime was detailed in the book The Republic of Fear, written by the Iraqi author, Kanan Makiya. Saddam created such an all–encompassing sense of fear that even after he went into hiding after the 2003 war, Iraqis were reluctant to co-operate with the occupation authorities, certain he would return.
I first read The Republic of Fear in 1989, when I was 16 years old. It sparked in me a perverse fascination with Saddam’s regime, and it was this book that defined my academic interest in Iraq. I wanted to know what elements in Saddam’s regime were responsible for this ‘Rebulic of Fear’.My doctoral studies at Oxford focused on Saddam’s security apparatus: the institution in Iraq that infiltrated society at every level.As an Iraqi, you never knew who was an informant. It could have been anyone: a taxi driver, a neighbour – even your own child.
This security network, along with the Party, were two key pillars of Saddam’s rule, and they incorporated all facets of Iraqi public life into the state, to the point where all elements of civil society were absorbed into a monolithic political structure. Any political activity outside of this structure was deemed subversive and grounds for imprisonment or even execution. It was this system that the US dismantled overnight by ‘decapitating the regime’ – or in other words, by marching on to Baghdad and causing the collapse of the old political order. However, the US did not have a clear strategy for establishing a new political system, and instead opened up a Pandora’s box of rival political factions that had been kept in check in the past out of fear of the previous regime. During my first visit to Iraq in September 2003, one Iraqi summed up the country’s dilemma in a single sentence: “We went from a Republic of Fear to a Republic of Anarchy in one day.”
I was repeatedly asked after the 2003 war, especially by American audiences, why the Iraqis didn’t welcome the US as liberators following the war. After explaining my doctoral research to an Iraqi family friend once, he retorted: “Let me tell you about Saddam’s regime. Saddam is a CIA agent.”His argument was based on Saddam's longstanding relationship with US: since America had covertly brought the anticommunist Saddam into power in 1968, and sided with him during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam orchestrated the 1990 invasion of Kuwait to give his allies a pretext for deploying military forces to the Persian Gulf, and thus enabled them to protect their vital oil interests.My friend then brought up how President George Bush had encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam after the 1991 GulfWar, and then when the Iraqis revolted, the American President failed to deliver any American support.According to my family friend, this was the most blatant demonstration of how the US wanted Saddam to stay in power so that the Islamic Republic of Iran would not emerge as the dominant power in the Gulf.
While I thought such an argument to be absurd at the time, upon travelling to Iraq I heard it repeated on numerous occasions. Many Iraqis, even among the educated elite, argued that Saddam had merely handed over the ‘keys’ of Baghdad to the Americans in April 2003, and they argued that he was not in an Iraqi prison but moved to the US for protection as evidence. Such conspiracy theories are abundant in Iraq, and while outside observers may be quick to dismiss them, they do reveal an important insight into the Iraqi mindset.Why would the Iraqis welcome the US a liberators if they believed the oppressive dictatorial rule of Saddam was a creation of American foreign policy?
My uncle from Baghdad came to visit my family in California in 1993, during the period when UN sanctions were imposed on Iraq. I had expected to receive the same goodspirited, well-fed man I remembered from my childhood, but the man I picked up from the airport was alarmingly thin and disheartened. What I remember most about the visit was his fascination with overweight Americans. Whenever an obese person came into his view he would stare in total amazement and venture a guess as to their weight. His awe was a product of his own hunger: he could no longer remember a time when there was enough food for obesity to even be a possibility. Despite his hatred of Saddam’s regime, it was the US he blamed for the UNimposed the sanctions on the Iraqi people and their prolonged misery.A few years later his health deserted him completely; he died in Baghdad. I often wondered if he would be alive today had there been no sanctions in place prohibiting the import of medical equipment.Again, why would the Iraqis welcome the US as liberators when the majority can remember the last decade of suffering under the sanctions?
So exactly who is responsible for the violence in Iraq? Is it primarily foreign fighters? My grandfather was a young Shia cleric in the Iraqi town of Najaf when the British invaded southern Iraq in 1920. The British, like the US decades later, declared that they were liberating it from centuries of ‘Ottoman oppression’ Later, the inhabitants came to realise that the British had interest only in liberating the oil that lay beneath their feet. The British cobbled together the three former Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra and formed today’s Iraq. My grandfather had had little contact with those who lived in the Mosul province,most of whom happened to be Kurds, or the Sunni Arabs who resided in the Baghdad province. He had little concept of what it meant to be an ‘Iraqi’, as he had always thought of himself as a Muslim from Najaf who happened to be a citizen of the Ottoman Empire. He had no love for the Ottomans, yet he was equally distrustful of the British. He was furious to see ‘foreign fighters’ enter his town and act as if they owned it.My grandfather joined the growing number of ‘Iraqis’ who were disenchanted with the occupation and willing to sacrifice their lives to expel the British. Ironically, it was out of hatred for the occupiers that he found common ground with those Kurds and Arab Sunnis with whom he had had no contact in the past. He proved to be an inexperienced rebel and soon fled to the East African island of Zanzibar.
My grandfather’s experience conveys a timely message: while many Iraqis chafed under Ottoman rule, they believed British ‘rule’ would be no different. Today, although many Iraqis suffered under the rule of Saddam they are equally distrustful of the US. Just as in my grandfather's time, some Iraqis now see violence as the only means to end an undesired occupation.Many of the US war planners in the Department of Defence did not plan on insurgency erupting – another example of the adage that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.
WHILST THOSE WHO planned the war are responsible for failing to understand these complexities, partial blame must be placed on the foreign policy elite in Washington for enforcing the notion that US troops would be welcomed as liberators. This elite produced many of the overnight experts who dominated the airwaves prior to March 2003, many of whom probably could not even point to towns like Fallujah on a map before the war. These armchair experts continue to portrayed themselves as experts on Iraq, despite never having set foot there.Although I had devoted my academic career to studying the country, it was not until I risked my life to visit the it after the war that I realised my knowledge of the nation in fact was very limited. I fear that many of the armchair experts are willing to dispense advice and commentaries without having seen the real state of affairs, thus contributing to a misinformation campaign about the country.
The misinformation campaign produced by this American foreign policy elite brings me to another question: will Iraq collapse into civil war, ushering in the break-up of the country into a Kurdish north, Sunni centre and Shia south? While I was travelling through the Shia south, where my family originates, I was not welcomed with open arms by my fellow Shia. Indeed,many were angry with me, declaring that my family had betrayed their countrymen by living comfortably in the US while the Shia in Iraq suffered under Saddam’s discriminatory policies. Ironically, the warmest reception I received was in Sunni towns such as Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. I recall talking to a young man, a Sunni Arab who asked where I was from. I informed him that I was an Iraqi Shia from Najaf raised in the US. I immediately expected a negative reaction from him, considering I was from the US as well as from the Shia sect. Instead he declared his happiness that one of Iraq’s lost sons had returned, and his fellow townspeople also expressed similar views. I realised he saw me first, not as a Shia or even as an American citizen, but as an Iraqi.
During my visit to the North of Iraq, I had met many Kurds.As I travelled through the area, I picked up some basic greetings and phrases in Kurdish. After using these phrases on one occasion, I remember a Kurdish youth who made a point of letting me know: “I wish more Iraqi Arabs would make an effort to learn Kurdish. I think there is nothing wrong with being an Iraqi and Kurd at the same time.As long as Iraqis like you try to learn and appreciate our culture, I don’t think we will ever go back to the times like under Saddam.” Prior to this visit to Iraq, I had read an opinion piece in the New York Times, by Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, where she proposed the break-up of Iraq so as to make it more controllable by the US. After this encounter with Iraqis who had lived under the old regime, I wondered if Gelb had ever visited Iraq before she suggested such a misguided solution. In the last 80 years as a nation, a common sense of belonging has formed between three disparate communities, including the Kurds. If Iraq was going to break up or to fall into civil war, it would have done so immediately following the collapse of the Saddam regime. The fact it has stayed together so far despite the violence indicates that if the US allowed Iraq to break up, it would only give into the goals of those factions in Iraq, such as the groups loyal to the Jordanian national Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that have been trying to instigate a civil war to destabilise Iraq.
So can Iraq, which has gone from a Republic of Fear to a Republic of Anarchy, simply emerge as a republic? I am pessimistic. I was in an internet café in Istanbul recently when some Turkish youths sitting next to me began downloading footage of a hostage in Iraq being beheaded by a group loyal to al- Zarqawi.As the execution was carried out the youths began to laugh. I wondered if these boys realised that the victim was their fellow countryman – a Turkish truck driver by the name of Ramazan Elbu. The image of the decapitation of that man now haunts me. I realise that if I were to return to Iraq I could become a hostage as well, beheaded by the same terrorists. If I fear these terrorists while I am safe in Istanbul, how does the average Iraqi deal with daily fears of being kidnapped or killed in car bomb, or even find work or put food on the table? The Republic of Fear has re-emerged in a new form.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi is a post-doctoral Fellow at in the Politics and Conflict Resolution Program at Sabanci University, Istanbul. Unknown to him, large sections of his PhD thesis were plagiarised by the British Government in February 2003, when the Government was seeking to present the case for war against Saddam
