Saddam and Rumsfeld

So Saddam and two of his filthy henchmen were sentenced to death on Sunday. It wasn't surprising, and I do believe that justice will be served by their hanging, but it wasn't entirely joyful either. Personally I would have liked to see a sentence of life in prison handed to them, as death, in my opinion, is an easy way out, but many Iraqis, including my parents, worry that a life sentence would only encourage Saddam's supporters to continue fighting, with the hope of eventually freeing their beloved leader.

It would have been much better for Iraq, for the entire world, if this trial had taken place in the 1990s. 'If Saddam Hussein had been sentenced to death 10 years ago, Zaki Alherz, an Iraqi-American engineer living in Fremont, would have been overjoyed. But when Alherz turned on his computer Sunday morning and read that his dream had finally come true, he just kept sipping his coffee, unable to even crack a smile. "It's kind of a sour triumph," said Alherz, a Shiite Muslim, who said his cousins were killed by Hussein's security forces. "Yes, it's great that Saddam Hussein is removed," he said. "On the other hand, though, the country isn't in any better shape than it was. It might even be worse." Other Iraqi bloggers have expressed similar feelings. Zeyad (Healing Iraq) wrote a good post (although I don't agree that Maliki should be tried) and also compiled opinions of other Iraqi bloggers. In his post Zeyad linked to a video of the courtroom verdict - Saddam yelled "Allah w'akbar" over and over as the judge read the sentence. It's ironic that Saddam, whose regime killed so many Muslims, would yell "Allah w'akbar" and clutch a Quran while being sentenced to death for murdering only God knows how many tens of thousands of Muslims. I hope that Zeyad doesn't mind that I mention that he is a Sunni Arab - many Iraqi Sunni Arabs agreed with the verdict, or at least agreed that Saddam was guilty of crimes against humanity. However, I am not surprised by the Sunni Arabs (most of them non-Iraqi) who glorify Saddam - many of them benefited from his rule. Although I expected many Sunni Arabs to defend Saddam, I am still shocked when I hear or read a seemingly educated westerner commending Saddam, and Alaa (the Mesopotamian) wrote a short post entitled 'In Praise of Tyranny' and linked to an embarrassing Guardian article that praises Saddam.

The Iraqi nation is still in bad shape, Iraqis say, and many Iraqis believe that life in Iraq was better for them before 2003. But who doubts that that the primary goal of the insurgency has been to make life for Iraqis much worse than life under Saddam's rule? The insurgency, also known by many people as the 'resistance' (they should resist the urge to murder innocents), does not want democracy in Iraq - they want to see the new Iraq fail. One of my cousins told me before the invasion that he was afraid that Saddam's regime would burn the country and poison the rivers before giving up power. It seems that he was right, even though the Baathists are no longer in power. They don't need to be in power to cause mayhem. I believe that if Saddam and his thugs have any influence over the insurgency, the Iraqi government should make them an offer: accept life in prison and encourage the insurgency to stop killing people. Perhaps this offer has already been made, as Saddam today called on Iraqis to reconcile. For the first time in my life, I agree with Saddam.

In other news, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned today. His resignation, like Saddam's verdict, was also overdue in my opinion. I was dismayed by Rumsfeld's decision to use cluster bombs over civilian areas and heavily bomb the people who hated Saddam and cause so much destruction and death there. Thousands of Shia have been maimed. I am no military expert, but I do not understand why cluster bombs are used in civilian areas. Furthermore, I can't help but wonder if Saddam would have been so powerful had he not received so much support from Reagan's administration, for which Rumsfeld worked as special envoy to the Mideast. Rumsfeld visited Iraq in 1983 and shook Saddam's hand, presumably to discuss the sale of US-made weapons to Iraq and how to use them effectively against America's nemesis at the time. Of course Saddam's regime did not use them only against Iran. This is what I love about America: I can write these things without fearing that the FBI or CIA will send somebody to apprehend me and my family in the middle of the night and take us to prison where they might torture me in front of my family.

Saddam was a monster the World helped create

A few days ago I found and posted an article about the western countries that sold weapons to Saddam.  I called it "Saddam was a monster the West helped create".  Today I thought more about who helped Saddam become powerful and I remembered that Russia also sold weapons to his regime, as did China.  I searched my blog for "Russia" and found some interesting posts, but none about Russian arms sales to Iraq. The discussion about Russian arms sales took place in the comments (haloscan) section, and RhusLancia of IBC wrote a post in January 2007 titled "Where did Saddam get his chemical weapons?"  That was a good post, and in it RhusLancia pointed out the following:

• All told, 52% of Iraq's international chemical weapon equipment was of German origin.
• Around 21% of Iraq’s international chemical weapon equipment was French.
• About 100 tons of mustard gas also came from Brazil.
• The United Kingdom paid for a chlorine factory that was intended to be used for manufacturing mustard gas
• An Austrian company gave Iraq calutrons for enriching uranium. The nation also provided heat exchangers, tanks, condensers, and columns for the Iraqi chemical weapons infrastructure, 16% of the international sales.
• Singapore gave 4,515 tons of precursors for VX, sarin, tabun, and mustard gasses to Iraq.
• The Dutch gave 4,261 tons of precursors for sarin, tabun, mustard, and tear gasses to Iraq.
• Egypt gave 2,400 tons of tabun and sarin precursors to Iraq and 28,500 tons of weapons designed for carrying chemical munitions.
• India gave 2,343 tons of precursors to VX, tabun, Sarin, and mustard gasses.
• Luxemburg gave Iraq 650 tons of mustard gas precursors.
• Spain gave Iraq 57,500 munitions designed for carrying chemical weapons. In addition, they provided reactors, condensers, columns and tanks for Iraq’s chemical warfare program, 4.4% of the international sales.
• China provided 45,000 munitions designed for chemical warfare.

I was surprised to see India and Singapore on the list.  One of the Wikipedia pages that RhusLancia linked to mentions that Saudi Arabia loaned or gave $20 billion to Iraq between 1980 and 1982.  Other Gulf countries also loaned Saddam money in the 80s, including Kuwait.  

Many countries and international companies did business with Saddam, but today the most controversial  support, the support that most people talk about, was the support the US gave Saddam.  In 2005 NPR diplomatic correspondent Mike Shuster answers answered an important question:

CHADWICK: Can you say--is there any sense that the US created Saddam Hussein, that the United States essentially was responsible for the rule of Saddam Hussein?


SHUSTER: Well, certainly not created Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein came to power in the late 1960s in Iraq. He created Iraq's secret police and intelligence, and he became the number one strongman of Iraq in 1979. But after that, the United States did play a key role in all of his actions, military and political, in the Middle East. In effect, the United States chose Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, to be its surrogate for policy in the Persian Gulf region and to counter the actions of Iran, which the United States, the Reagan administration, saw as the biggest threat. And the fact that it supported Saddam Hussein in all these clandestine ways, a man who had been the pariah to the United States in the decade earlier, it seems to me could not have helped encourage Saddam's grandiosity about his role in the Arab world. He was meeting with senior US diplomats. They were looking the other way when he was using chemical weapons and developing other unconventional weapons. He couldn't have helped but to think that the United States was behind him.

The US did not create Saddam, but in the 80s the world's powerful countries helped make him a powerful dictator.  After 8 years of senseless war and a decade of ethnic cleansing, torture, and murder, in 1990 Saddam finally violated the rules of the west by invading Kuwait and thus drew the condemnation of the American President, who drew a line in the sand.  In 1991 the West, along with a few key Arab allies, destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure and its military and forced Saddam to withdraw the Iraqi army from Kuwait.  

After the 1991 Gulf War the West, led by the US, sought to destroy the remainder of Saddam's WMD via UN sanctions and inspections, ensuring that Saddam would not be able to threaten his neighbors.  They did not, however, destroy Saddam's ability to mass murder and imprison innocent Iraqis.  Iraqis not only suffered through another 12 years of murder, torture, and imprisonment, but they endured through sanctions that crippled the country's economy.  As a result of the sanctions and government neglect, ordinary Iraqis struggled to survive as Saddam built 81 palaces in the 90s. I have said many times that Saddam should have been overthrown in 1991, but I was still happy when it happened in 2003. Kan'an Makiya summarized my feelings in a 2006 interview:

It is very sad for me that Europe, which is a bastion of so many of the highest ideals to which I aspire, sat back and was happy to let the Iraqi people live under that inhuman regime of sanctions, which were killing people in vast numbers. And [Europe] allowed this situation of abuse and tyranny of the regime to continue, and did not think it morally necessary -- forget practically, maybe it's not practical -- to get rid of that kind of institutionalized abuse on that kind of scale.

Now, the United States chose to act, for whatever reason. From my point of view as an Iraqi, that decision was a thousand times better, morally speaking, than the inaction of the Europeans. The complicity of so many people in the United Nations, for instance, with the former regime. We now know so much about that because of documents that were discovered inside Iraq after the fall of the regime.

It wasn't just the Europeans who wanted Iraqis to continue to suffer under Saddam.  So did the Arabs. The Arabs who continue to defend Saddam are simply stupid. 

Palestinians think Saddam was cool

Layla Anwar wrote a post in defense of Saddam, which is not surprising. But she made some good points, and of course some deceptive ones. She called it "Saddam Hussein's Iraq." As if Saddam owned the country. Well he certainly acted like he owned Iraq.

It's not surprising that Tony of the Palestinian Pundit (a Levantine Christian who moved to California in the 60s, like Sirhan Sirhan) has posted Layla Anwar's entire post. The Palestinians, along with most Sunni Arabs, seem to think Saddam was a cool cat. He safeguarded Iraqi Christians, who have been persecuted since the fall of Saddam. This is true.

Layla: "Did any of the Arab countries safeguard the rights of Arab Christians like Saddam's Iraq did ? The answer is a flat NO."

Here's where the deception begin: "Did any country in the Middle East/Arab world engage as many Shias in the political process as Saddam's Iraq did ? The answer is again a flat NO."

Engage the Shias in the political process? How? By imprisoning them and hanging them? By torturing them?

Layla wrote: "Over 60% of BOTH the Baath party as well as the leadership was Shia."

I've heard this repeated many times, and it's true. But no Shia ever reached Saddam's top brass, who were all Tikriti. There was never a Shia Vice President in "Saddam's Iraq". The current Vice President of Iraq is a SUNNI Arab.

Saddam mass murdered Iraqi Shia, Kurds, and killed any Sunni Arab who dare tell the truth about the criminality of Saddam's govt. And the Arabs kinda like the mass murderer. It is so embarrassing.

Vali Nasr summarizes the Iraqi Shia struggle under Saddam's rule:

"...Shias have never risen beyond the glass ceiling that separates them from the Sunni elite. A few, such as Saddam's last and highly colorful information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, rose to prominence. But they were tokens in a world where Shia feet never trod the real halls of power. Saddam Hussein liked to make much of the second part of his name before his Shia subjects - especially during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s - but he nevertheless characterized Shias as Iranian lackeys, and he periodically purged the Ba'th Party of its Shia members in order to make sure that the levers of state power and the banner of Arab nationalism remained firmly in Sunni hands. Shia privates filled the ragtag conscript ranks of Saddam's poorly equipped and ill-trained regular army, but the elite Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards were Sunnis almost to a man. "

I might add to this post later...

Saddam was a Stalinist

Very interesting reading.

"In 1968, Iraq had a weak president who was beholden to Nasser, a follower of Nasser. But the defeat of [the Arabs by Israel] in 1967 meant that whatever government was in power when that defeat took place had to go. So the Ba'ath saw an opportunity in this and they thought the time has come for them to take over the country again. The background was extremely interesting. There were two things happening within Iraq at that time. They were developing their own oil and very close to giving the concessions for huge new oil fields, to the USSR and France. And the price of sulpher had shot up so greatly that they were about to mine the sulpher mines in the north and sell it in the world market.

The United States didn't want either to happen. The United States wanted the oil for American oil companies; they wanted the sulpher for themselves. They thought that if Iraq went to the Soviet Union or France, Iraq would be lost to them. In this they were joined by the Ba'ath Party. The Party used the concessions for oil and sulpher as a bargaining point to endear itself once again to America. And they arrived once again at some kind of an agreement of collaboration between the two sides. On the American side negotiating for both the oil and sulpher was a well-known personality, Robert Anderson, the former secretary of treasury under Eisenhower. He met secretly with the Ba'ath and they agreed that if they took over power these concessions will be given to the United States.

And so once again the United States was in the business of supporting the Ba'ath office for the government of Iraq. The Ba'ath was successful. This time Saddam Hussein played a key role. He was one of the people who donned a military uniform -- though he's not a military man -- and attacked the presidential palace and occupied it. The president, being weak, surrendered immediately. Two weeks after they took over power on the 17th of July 1968, there was what they call "the correction movement." That meant getting rid of the non-Ba'ath elements in the coup, and Saddam was prominent in that. As a matter of fact he held a gun to the head of the prime minister and said, "You're going with me to the airport because you're leaving this country." And the guy pleaded with him, said, "I have family, I have a wife and kids." And Saddam said, "Well as long as you behave, they'll be fine." He took him to the airport, he put him in a plane, he deported him, and of course years after, he assassinated him in front of the Intercontinental Hotel in London. The man couldn't escape him in the long run.

However, the communists are hardly thrown out and not long after, they turn to Saddam, and he personally leads a delegation to Moscow, and there's a development of a relationship between the two. What game was he playing?

Well, alliances of convenience don't last very long. The Ba'ath Party was committed to certain things which American foreign policy could not tolerate. In this particular case it lasted a very short time, really a matter of two weeks. And Saddam got rid of all of the pro-American elements in the government and he asserted his authority on the country. He was not the president. He was the second man, after a relation of his from Tikrit, President Ahmed Bakr. But what happened immediately after that is the things they needed, they couldn't get from the United States anymore. They needed help economically. They needed arms. And the United States were not in the business of openly supplying arms to Arab countries to re-equip themselves for another round of fighting. That was the major issue between the two sides. Saddam knew he could get the arms from Russia and he journeyed to Russia -- this was his first trip outside Iraq, outside of exile of course -- and he got what he wanted. And the alliance of convenience disintegrated as they always do.

So, there was a new alliance, this time with the Soviets.

In 1972, Iraq and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation. They wanted to seal the cooperation taking place between them in a formal alliance. The reason Saddam signed that treaty of friendship and cooperation was because that obligated the local communist party, which was very strong, to cooperate with the Ba'ath Party, which was not so strong at that time.

Of course the Russians loved an opportunity to have a hold on Iraq and they signed the treaty and told the local communist party to join the Iraqi government. That alliance internally did not last very long. But the external one was on and off for a very long time. And the Soviet Union at one point thought Iraq was a more important ally than Egypt. Its army always acquitted itself better than the Egyptian army. It was a wealthy country that didn't need a lot of aid, like Egypt. And it was the gateway to the Gulf, to oil. It represented a more immediate threat to the West's lifeline than Egypt did.

So Saddam in the early '70s is Iraq's vice president. Could you describe how he's already setting up a Stalinist system with control of the government.

In the early '70s, Saddam started out controlling one small department called the Peasants Department; at that time the Ba'ath regime, for a very brief period of time, was committed to installing a democratic system in Iraq. It was a bit of a dream. Came the time for them to assign the job of head of the security system, and no one from the inner circle wanted the job. Everybody says, "This is a dirty job. I don't want it." Young Saddam Hussein raised his hand, and said, "I want the job. I'll take over the security system."

He took over the security system, called it the Department of General Relations and proceeded to expand it. This was his first step towards attaining power.

The president at the time, Ahmed Bakr had been a general, and a very nice man. Quite a religious man too. Saddam was a relation of his. He surrendered everything to Saddam, because Saddam worked an 18-hour day. In no time at all, Saddam was head of security, he was head of the Peasants Department, he was head of relations with the Kurds, he was head of the committee that controlled the oil. He was head of the committee that controlled relations with the Arab countries. He was head of the workers syndicate.

There was a conflict between all these departments that Saddam controlled so tightly and the armed forces -- because the armed forces is the one organization capable of overthrowing government. Saddam proceeded to emasculate the army and place his professional soldier relations from Tikrit in key positions. For example, his brother-in-law became chief of staff of the army. And of course soon enough, like all people who are dictators, who are jealous of the army, he appointed himself general and eventually like Stalin he became field marshal.

So much of what you just described certainly has Stalinist overtones.

Without any doubt everything Saddam did had Stalinist overtones. In particular, the reliance on the security system rather than the armed forces, the jealousy of the generals in the armed forces, the use of criminal elements within the country, and, incorporating them into the security system. And those people were sort of semi-literate thugs whose loyalty was to Saddam, without whom, they were nothing. And so he brought them in, he depended on them, and they did him service. Anybody he wanted to get rid of he got rid of. And the door was wide open.

He had two qualities that put him ahead of his colleagues. His ability to work an 18-hour day. Endlessly. And a sense of organization. You didn't see Saddam at three o'clock and miss that appointment by five minutes. Because Saddam would ask you why you are five minutes late, or five minutes early. If you had an appointment with Saddam at three, you showed up at three. That was that. He is that organized. He is that methodical. "

The "ideology is whatever Saddam says it is"

Sharp: By the early 1950s a teenaged Saddam was demonstrating against the government. Like countless other Iraqis, he was expressing a general sense of resentment against British colonial rule and Iraq's domination by rich landowners. Pan-Arabism was also on the rise---the movement to bring Arab states together into one big nation. In 1958 a revolution overthrew Iraq's British-backed monarchy. The change ushered in a chaotic and violent decade. By this time Saddam Hussein had joined the pan-Arabist Baath Party. In 1959 he and fellow Baathists tried to assassinate Iraq's new military leader General Abdel Karim Kassem. The attempt failed and Saddam Hussein was forced to flee the country. Four years later he came back, just after the Baathists did manage to kill Kassem.

They showed their ruthless side, parading the general's bullet-riddled body on television. But the Baathists were thrown out of power nine months later. The years after this, the mid-60's, were critical ones for Saddam Hussein. He linked up with his one of his uncle's cousins, now high up in the Baath Party. Historian Charles Tripp says Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and his young sidekick made quite a team.

Tripp: "Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr was very much an old style regimental officer. And Saddam Hussein was not an officer, was not in the army, but was an excellent "street organizer" I think is the phrase often used euphemistically which meant someone who could organize the beating up of opponents, demonstrations, street violence, who had his ear to the ground in ways that Ahmad Hasan al Bakr couldn't."

Sharp: The Baath Party returned to power for good in 1968. Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr became president. Saddam Hussein quickly emerged as his right hand man. And he turned out to be more than just a party thug. He was also methodical, and politically astute. He took over the state security apparatus. Then he and Bakr began to eliminate their rivals. Some were executed, some were shipped off to diplomatic posts, some were simply outmanoeuvered. Even as they consolidated their power, the Baathist leaders were intent on modernizing their country. And shaking off foreign influence.

Excerpt from President Bakr's Oil Speech 1972: "...Patriots and progressives, in the Arab homeland and in the entire world, in waging decisive battle against the oil monopolies our revolution is taking forward positions in face-to-face clashes with imperialism and its monopolies, to carry out an honorable patriotic and national duty..."

Sharp: President Bakr announced the nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry in 1972. His message was "Arab Oil for the Arabs." A year later fuel prices shot up. Iraq's oil revenues quadrupled. The Baathist regime poured its new money into the military, but also into education and infrastructure. Roads were built, villages electrified, literacy campaigns launched. Iraq became a modern, urban state with a substantial middle class. But if Iraq was modernizing on the surface, behind the scenes something far more primitive was unfolding. Saddam Hussein turned out to be merciless in his quest for power. In 1979 he made his move on his old patron, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr. Hussein forced his relative to resign and took over the presidency himself. No sooner had he done so than he purged the party's Revolutionary Command Council. Hussein announced the discovery of a plot against himself and the Baathist regime. Then he held a kind of show trial, which he videotaped. The footage shows party members gathered in a large auditorium. Saddam Hussein is on stage, smoking a cigar. The alleged plot leader confesses his crime. Then he reads out the names of his supposed co-conspirators. As their names are called out they are led from the hall to be arrested and shot. Members of the audience shout out their allegiance to Saddam Hussein...

Archival Audio of 1979 Meeting

Tripp: "You notice the mounting hysteria as nobody knows quite who's name is going to be called out next. And so of course this means that the survivors cheer even more frenziedly for Saddam Hussein. It's a very chilling documentary. But Saddam Hussein wanted that to be seen. This was an exercise of power which he would use to impress upon the surviving Baathists in Iraq that he had absolute control over their lives and deaths."

Kanan Makiya: " The whole thing is like theatre except it happens to be real."

Sharp: Kanan Makiya is a prominent Iraqi writer and dissident. He's also seen the footage---and researched what happened next.

Makiya: "And when the firing squad is assembled to execute these so-called traitors who does he use but the remaining members of the Revolutionary Command Council and his own ministers and so on to implicate them in a sense in his own rise to power. Because that is the event upon which he cements his own presidency."

Sharp: By this point any political ideology Saddam Hussein once adhered to seemed to have vanished. Fear became the key to his rule. Historian Phebe Marr says Pan-Arabism had given way to Saddamism.

Marr: "This is a one-man regime, it's more of a personal dictatorship in which we find the cult of Saddam. And yes it's in the name of the Baath Party and yes there's some kind of ideology but the ideology is whatever Saddam says it is."

Few cared as much about Iraqi deaths before 2003

Hayder Al-Khoei wrote an excellent response to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's article "A record worse than Saddam's":

"Her fundamental mistake is that she somehow looks at Iraq in an epochal vacuum void of any historical context. She ignores the fact that the sanctions were manipulated by Saddam to score political points (a past-time Ms Alibhai-Brown appreciates). During the last year of Saddam’s disastrous rule, he allocated just US$16m for the Ministry of Health to spend for the year, amounting to around 60 cents per Iraqi, meanwhile, in the last decade of his rule (a decade in which Iraq was heavily sanctioned), Saddam spent an estimated US$2.2b on constructing palaces for himself and the coterie of despots he surrounded himself with. Saddam lived a life of luxury while his people starved through the economic sanctions and he, more than anybody else, should be held responsible for the suffering of millions upon millions of people under his regime. What followed cannot be “a worse record than Saddam’s” because the butcher of Baghdad was a big part of it.

Many in the west are obsessed with WMDs and the lies that were told to secure support for the Iraq war, but to many Iraqis, the matter is inconsequential. Saddam was the weapon of mass destruction.

...To Iraqis like me, who have lost immediate family-members both pre and post 2003, the sudden burst of conscience from a public that was silent during three decades of the harshest, most despotic regime the Middle East has seen in the last few centuries is abhorrent in itself, and leads me to question the motivation behind the sudden faux-concern for the plight of the millions of suffering Iraqis. Here in London, Iraqis campaigned for years against Saddam, and tried desperately to convince people like Ms Alibhai-Brown to support their worthy cause. Very few heeded the calls; apparently stories of Iraqis dying are not all too interesting. Unless of course the West is somehow culpable in the killing.*

It is such a shame that commentary on Iraq has been reduced by many to an industry focused at selling news with little regard for history and context. Much of the suffering in Iraq today is a direct result of Saddam’s legacy. It is the failure to understand and appreciate historical context that has led to the crass, shallow, superficiality that has become a feature of much of the news coverage in Iraq.

It is cruel to count victims as statistics who perished in the recent war, but if we want to be soulless and academic, then the civilian victims that are identified in the latest documents make up only one-third of those who vanished during the Anfal campaign under Saddam. More to the point, Ms Alibhai-Brown seems to paper over the fact that tens of thousands of the post 2003 war victims were in fact targeted by a ruthless insurgency in Iraq, and insurgency that relies on remnants of Saddam’s regime for funding, logistics and indeed recruits. Saddam may have been arrested, tried, and executed, but his men are still in Iraq committing the same crimes they have always been committing. The legacy of Saddam is still claiming lives and it is still destroying the country."

--Hayder Al-Khoei

*Bolded for emphasis. Read the whole article here.

Iraq's neighbors a "lurking menace"

But Iraq must talk to them and try to be "neighborly" with them, and the US must help. David Ignatius writes:

The Baker-Hamilton recommendations are mostly forgotten, swept away by President George W. Bush's 2007 surge of U.S. troops. That certainly improved security, but the recent bombings in Iraq are a reminder that the surge didn't usher in a new era of peace and love. Political reconciliation is still more slogan than reality -- and the neighbors are more a lurking menace than Baghdad's partners.

He is certainly right. Let's review the list of Iraq's neighbors:

Turkey

Lying to the north of Iraq, Turkey has been the least menacing. Turkey has enjoyed good relations with Israel, Europe, and the US. Turkey has a robust tourism industry, and they've been able to contain extremists and provide relatively good security. But in Turkey, you may be arrested for teaching or studying Kurdish. Recently Turkey has bombed Kurdish militia inside Iraq, and most worrying, the Turks have dammed the Tigris and Euphrates at several places, squeezing Iraq's historically life-sustaining rivers and resulting in more severe droughts in Iraq. But in a country that has experienced at least 1,200 suicide bombings in the last 6 years, Turkey's offenses seem minor.

Iran (aka Persia)

Going clockwise on the map, we see Iran to the east, which shares 1,458 kilometers of border with Iraq. Persia occupied the land between two rivers for almost two centuries, and in 539 BC, Cyrus of Persia sacked Babylon and freed the Jews.

It can be argued that Iran has had the greatest influence on Iraq, especially since the rise of Khomeini and his Islamic Revolution. In 1965 Khomeini moved to Najaf, home of the Imam Ali shrine, and there he lectured and instilled in young Shia the notion of Islamic revolution and Islamic government. By the late 60s he became a marja taqlid or "model for imitation" for hundreds of thousands of Shia. By 1975 support for Khomeini the leader of the Islamic Revolution had grown in Iran and among the Iraqi Shia. The Ayatollah was forced out of Iraq by Iraqi VP Saddam Hussein in 1978, and in January 1979 the Shah left Iran. The following month Khomeini moved back to Iran and became the first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, changing the course of history in the region for decades to come.

In the 70s in Iraq the Islamic Da3wa Party had gained popularity, and they too wanted an Islamic government, which put them at odds with the ruling Ba3ath Party and Saddam Hussein, who pushed aside his President-cousin Ahmed Hassan al Bakr and took control of Baghdad in 1979. By the summer of 1980, Saddam and his security apparatuses had murdered and expelled tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia and pushed Da3wa out of Iraq. In September 1980 Saddam's Iraq invaded Iran, beginning a horrible war that cost a million lives by 1988 and ruined the economies of both countries. In the 80s Iraqi Shia who were able fled by the hundreds of thousands to the US, Europe, and of course to Iran.

Today the Iranian influence in Iraq is even greater, with Da3wa in charge of Baghdad, Hakim's Islamic Supreme Council party garnering about 10% support among Iraqis, and with Muqtada al Sadr studying quietly in Qum in an effort to become the next big Ayotallah. Iran was happy to see the end of Saddam's dictatorship, but they did not want to see the the Iraq become a colony of the US. Instead, some Iraqis fear that Iraq will eventually become a colony of Iran.

Kuwait

In July 1990 I became a citizen of the United States of America. Less than one month after I became naturalized, Saddam's Iraq invaded Kuwait. After Bush Sr. crossed his line in the sand and built a case for war against Iraq, my father became afraid. For a while there my dad really thought I might be drafted, if it ever became a real war, which it never did become. It was interesting to see my father go through the effort to find out if I could ever be drafted into such a war. The answer was no, I couldn't be drafted because I could be considered an "conscientious objector". It turns out my help would not be required anyway, as the US military, with the help of the British and many Arab states, bombed Iraq into the Stone Age, and making life very difficult for Iraqis for many years to come.

On the face of it poor little Kuwait looks to be the least menacing of Iraq's neighbors. There are unknown numbers of Shia in Kuwait, and many of them are Iraqis who fled Saddam's tyranny. But Kuwait is ruled by a Sunni Arab family, and in general they were friendly with Saddam and shared his fear of Iran. So what happened to the love? Saddam invaded Kuwait because, basically, Kuwait was being a punk ass bitch (please pardon the vernacular), giving money (the Kuwaitis say loaning) to Saddam to fight Iran, and then after the war, after Iraq's economy was devastated, Kuwait produced oil way beyond their OPEC quota, and thus resulting in lower oil prices, which hurt Iraq's bottom line. The Iraqis also claimed Kuwait was slant-drilling into Iraq's oil field.

In the end Saddam invaded Kuwait and stole many of its riches and refused to leave Kuwait. However he intentionally kept his Republican Guard out of Kuwait, which was a wise move for him, because he would need them to put down the Shia rebellion after the war and keep himself in power. The allied forces, led by the US, pounded Iraq's army, first by 40 days of air strikes, and then by a ground invasion, killing tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, and accidentally, of course, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians. The Iraqi army was expelled from Kuwait, and on their way out of Iraq, Saddam had his guys burned nearly 700 Kuwaiti oil wells, creating a huge environmental disaster. The US military, led by Colin Powell and Norman Swartzkoff, won a quick war in Iraq and could have easily overthrown the Iraqi dictator, but in the end Bush decided to allow Saddam to live, and ordered US troops not to intervene in the Shia rebellion. It is said Bush's decision was influenced by the Saudis, who did not want to see the Shia take control of Iraq.

Today Kuwait has good relations with Iraq, and the two countries have restored diplomatic ties. Kuwait was the only non-Iraqi Arab country to support the American overthrow of Saddam. They understood Saddam's tyranny very well. But Kuwait still wants its money back, even though Iraq's debt to Kuwait was racked up by Saddam's regime, and many Wahhabi-influenced Kuwaitis have entered Iraq and mass murdered Iraqis since 2003.

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Saudis, the founders of Wahhabism, have been a royal pain in Iraqis' asses for decades. An analysis in 2007 revealed that half of suicide bombers in Iraq came from Saudi Arabia. The majority of the hijackers on 9/11 (80%) were also Saudi. The two statistics, from two very different places, have one thing in common: Wahhabi terrorism.

KSA never wanted to see the Shia take control of Iraq, and they have ben the biggest funders of the insurgency in Iraq. The Saudis were also the biggest funders of the war between Iraq and Iran.



The Saudis did not want to see Saddam take control of Kuwait, but they did not want to see the Shia take control of Baghdad either. Thus the Saudi government, led by King Fahd, urged Bush Sr. to keep Saddam in power in 1991, and thus they funded the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq after 2003, their clerics preaching "resistance" against the "infidel" occupier and the "agents of Iran", this despite the presence of many Iranians, Arab Shia, and Americans in the Arabian peninsula. The US launched two wars on Iraq from CENTCOM in Doha, Qatar, but Qatar enjoys peace, even Starbucks, while Baghdad burns. Nevertheless the Wahhabis sent hundreds of brainwashed suicide bombers to Iraq, to murder mostly Iraqi Shia.

With full control of the oil that Saudi Shia live on and near, the Saudi royals are not interested in democracy, and they are not interested in restoring diplomatic ties with the new Iraq. “To isolate itself from Iraq, Saudi Arabia has signed a $1 billion contract with the European defense company EADS, for the construction of a 900-kilometer [562-mile] fence." Iraqis wait anxiously and hope the fence will protect them from the backward Wahhabi cultists.

Jordan

I've heard the weather in Amman is beautiful. In the summer of 1991 my mother and sister visited Amman to see my aunts and cousins who fled Iraq earlier that year. By 2000 approximately half of my relatives had fled the wars and tyranny of Saddam Hussein, starting new lives elsewhere, mostly in the UK. I don't understand why those refugees did not receive the same attention that our Arab brothers have paid to recent Iraqi refugees from the current war. Jordan deserves praise for accepting such a large number of refugees, and not just Iraqi. 60% of Jordan's population is of Palestinian descent. Twice there were large influxes of Palestinian refugees into Jordan - in 1948 and 1967. Also twice there were large influxes of Iraqi refugees - 1991-1992 and 2005-2007. Iraqi Baathists have fled to Amman in large numbers.

But there is a dark side to Jordan's relationship with Iraq. The person most responsible for inciting the sectarian violence in Iraq was a Jordanian terrorist named Abu Musab al Zarqawi. He was born and raised in Zarqa, not far from occupied Palestine. Even closer to occupied Palestine is the Jordanian town of Salt, whose deranged sons were compelled to join their mujahideen-brothers in Iraq, to attack the new Iraqi government and its security forces, and to participate in the most gruesome sectarian conflict the world has seen in decades.

The Jordanian government, to its credit, has fought extremists and has at times been at the receiving end of Salafi terrorists like Zarqawi, but in my opinion they have not done enough to fight extremist and backward ideology in their country. Honor killings are still common in Jordan, and when the killers are punished, they are in most cases not punished nearly severely enough.

Syria

Syria is an enigma. Its population is 80% Sunni Arab, but for decades it has been ruled by a Baathist Alawi family that has had cozy relations with Iran since the Islamic Revolution. Syria's alliance with Iran was the reason for the split between Saddam and Hafez al Assad. Recently I asked my cousin if Alawis are true Shia, and I asked him if they are true Shia, how could they allow so many "mujahideen" to enter Iraq via Damascus and cause so much death and destruction against their Shia brethren in Iraq? "NO" the Allawites are not true Shia, he said, and even if Assad wanted to prevent Baathists and Wahhabis from planning and coordinating in Damascus, he couldn't because most Syrians are Sunni Arab, and many of them have been influenced by Baathism or the Muslim Brotherhood and maybe Wahhabism. So it is even more ironic that Syria has been supported by Shia-dominated Iran.

Syria has been home to the largest number of Iraqi refugees since 2003, and although their existence in Syria has been relatively peaceful, many Iraqis in Damascus are worried about raised tensions between the two governments. Iraqi PM Maliki has blamed Damascus for the August 19 explosions in Baghdad. In the end, the Syrian regime may decide to normalize relations with Iraq at least for economic reasons.

This Ramadhan we have seen fewer violent deaths in Iraq than in previous years, but in general Iraqis continue to suffer as a result of sectarian conflicts than seem never to end. This year the average number of deaths per day from suicide attacks and vehicle bombs (7.8) is still higher than in 2004 (5.2), but the number of deaths per day from gunfire/executions is 4.6, the lowest since 2003. With continuing violence and an inept government in Baghdad that still cannot provide security or 24-hour a day electricity to all Iraqis, there's not much to cheer about in Iraq these days. Many Iraqis are looking forward to the crucial elections in January, and many are hoping for real change in Iraq.

The Thieves of Baghdad

I spent Saturday night with my parents and three of my father’s siblings, along with their children in a nice suburb of London. It was the biggest gathering of close relatives since last summer, when my cousin’s (mom’s side) wife declared that America brought Al Qaeda to Iraq, and warned me with great sternness that it is blasphemous to defend infidels. There are some religious people in my extended family. Some of them are religious and educated at the same time. My uncles – my father’s brothers - and my aunt’s children are religious, yet quite educated and successful. Many of them are doctors and dentists. For as long as I can remember, one of my cousins, Majeed, a pediatrician who is closer to my dad’s age than mine, possessed a great intensity and unique emotional flare, much like my father. They both have a great sense of humor. They even look alike. In my first post I wrote about Majeed’s brother, who was murdered by Saddam’s regime in 1980. Until last year I had not spent much time with Majeed, and I was surprised last summer to see him married with children – three of them, aged 16 to 19! Majeed is married to E, an engineer and niece of Jiddu, whom I wrote about in October 2007. It was good to spend more time with Majeed and his wonderful family this weekend. After a long night of eating delicious food and catching up, we had to spend the night there because it was so late.

The next morning, after E served us breakfast, she told us her story, which I will summarize here. E, like so many Iraqis, escaped Iraq long before 2003. The current conflict in Iraq may have eclipsed what happened to Iraqis during Saddam’s long reign of terror and intimidation, and certainly the media’s coverage of Iraq in the last five years has been much greater than all the media's coverage of Saddam’s atrocities. This is why I believe it is important to document these crimes, to remind people of what took place in Iraq before 2003.

Madrasat Rahibat

As a thirteen year old in the early 1970s, E attended Madrasat Rahibat (Nuns’ School), a private school for well-to-do Baghdadis. In her class E remembers a girl, a Faili (Shia) Kurd, who one day debated another girl, Ilham, the daughter of Khairallah Tulfah, the Governor of Baghdad and uncle of Saddam Hussein. The Kurdish girl argued during Religion class that the Kurds who were killed by the Baathi regime were martyrs. Ilham disagreed, and she believed that the Kurds who were killed by the state were in fact traitors, not martyrs. E recalls how casual the debate was, and how their teacher, a Najafi woman, allowed the debate to proceed. The next morning, after E boarded the school bus, she noticed that her Kurdish friend was missing. When E arrived at school, her teacher was not there. E never saw her teacher again. Her Kurdish friend and her family also disappeared.

To digress, Ilham was later married to Haythem, son of Ahmed Hassan al Bakr. When Saddam became President, he forced the couple to divorce and he forced Ilham to marry his half brother. Saddam’s older half brother, Barzan, was already married to Ilham’s sister Ahlam.

Mass Graves

E’s cousins and their children (most of them older than E, in University and the Army) lived in Kerbala. During Saddam’s campaign to expel Iraqis of Iranian ancestry, and despite the fact that E’s ancestors had lived in Iraq for 700 years, her relatives in Kerbala were targeted for deportation to Iran. One of her uncles in Kerbala had a 15 year old son, who was separated from his parents after they were arrested – the Baathi authorities were afraid the kid would join the Iranian Army. The kid’s parents were driven to the Iranian border and dropped off there, just like God knows how many Iraqis were. The family of this boy waited anxiously for 24 years hoping Saddam’s regime would fall so they could be reunited with their son, their brother. In 2003 the boy’s older brother traveled to Iraq, where he learned that his little brother had been murdered and buried in a mass grave. Upon hearing this news, his father fell ill and suffered from a stroke. He finally died last year, after being paralyzed by the stroke.

The Thief of Baghdad

Khairallah Tulfah was also known as “Harami Baghdad” (The Thief of Baghdad). Uncle of Saddam Hussein, father of Sajida (Saddam’s wife), Khairallah Tulfah was appointed Governor of Baghdad in the 1970s and by 1980 he amassed a great fortune by usurping financial and real assets of Iraqis. E’s family had the misfortune of living next to Tulfah in the 1970s. In early 1980, during Saddam’s campaign to expel Iraqis of Iranian descent, E’s entire family was arrested one day while they were eating lunch – Saddam’s secret police walked into the home and told E’s family to gather their essentials. While the family gathered their essentials, Saddam’s “emen” (security) sat down and ate the dolma that E’s mother had prepared. Before E’s family was taken away, her mother called E’s older sister, who was married and living in a different part of town, and told her what was happening. E’s sister immediately took a taxi to her parents’ house, where she saw none of her family at home, and she saw Khairallah Tulfah standing in the street. She became angry and asked Tulfah how he could allow the police to take away his innocent neighbors. He had no response, but after a few hours he called the detention center and told them to release E’s family. This good natured act was not free.

When this happened to E’s family, her father was naturally furious and saddened by what had become of his country. He decided that he would send his children out of the country one by one, but he died just a few weeks later. Soon after E’s father died, Khairallah Tulfah sent an aide to E’s family to inform them that he wanted to be a “partner” in the sports clothing factory that E’s father had built into a successful business. E’s family felt they had no choice in the matter – they still felt under threat. E’s brother continued to run the factory, but Tulfah diverted all the factory’s profits to himself. Khairallah Tulfah freed E’s family, and then he stole their livelihood. After six months, Tulfah’s assistant informed E’s family that he wanted the factory all for himself, but because they were his neighbors, he offered to “sell” the factory back to E’s family for 100,000 dinars (more than $300k at the time!). E’s family raised the money by selling their jewelry and borrowing from relatives. They bought the business that Tulfah stole from them. E’s family understood they were buying their safety, their immunity from prosecution for being of "Iranian descent". Soon after they got their factory back, E escaped Iraq for Abu Dhabi in August 1980. Because of the long war with Iran and its economic effects, E’s family were unable to import material or spare parts, and eventually the factory was closed. Today it sits in Abu Ghraib collecting dust.

This conversation with E was surrounded by other discussions, of course, and many of those discussions had to do with the current situation in Iraq and the Iraqis who participated in thievery and injustice after 2003.

The Burning of Mutanabbi Street

An excellent post by IraqPundit about the Burning of Mutanabbi Street:

'On Monday, a car bomb exploded on Baghdad's Mutanabbi Street, killing 26 people and injuring scores more. Wanton murders like this remain frequent in the capital, with "insurgent" ghouls intentionally blowing up young schoolgirls and women in outdoor markets. Still, there was an extra ache in the terrible news from Mutanabbi Street, an old byway dear to the memory of all Baghdadis for its booksellers, its bookbinders, its stationers, and its cafes. The poignant image of the wrecked street, with countless bits of burning paper floating down on the stunned residents, reflected an attack not only on Baghdad's people, but on the city's heart and memory as well.

Yet all sense of poignancy vanished for me when I saw The Washington Post's account of the bombing, which included the following breathtaking assertion: "When Saddam Hussein was in power, Mutanabi [sic] Street exuded a defiant spirit that reverberated through its bookstores and the famed Shabandar Cafe. Here, intellectuals, over cups of sweet tea, engaged in lively debates."

What an astonishing thing to claim. Suggesting that Saddam's regime tolerated a "defiant" café culture is, in its own way, another blow at Baghdad's heart and memory. It isn't merely that the statement is untrue, it's deeply unjust to the Baghdadis of intellect who had to live through Saddam's years of unrestrained brutality. Far from enjoying openly defiant cafe debates, such figures risked prison, exile, and even death because of their views. Furthermore, even if the Post's reporter is writing out of simple ignorance, the result is another sign of a revisionist "softening" of the memory of Saddam's rule, one that suggests that even he had his saving graces.

It's certainly true that Mutanabbi Street was once a gathering place for Baghdad's intellectuals. If Cairo is the great city of Arab writers, Baghdad was once the great city of Arab readers, and Mutanabbi Street was where they went to browse the new arrivals, Arab and foreign. The street goes back to Ottoman times; the bakeries that made the bread for the Turkish garrisons were nearby. Under the British-imposed monarchy that ruled the newly created Iraq, the city's journalists, poets, and thinkers would gather there to debate the changes that were sweeping across a modernizing and then-optimistic Middle East. By mid-century, the monarchy was gone, and Iraqi poets were advancing a "Free Verse" movement that was revolutionizing Arabic poetry. They too gathered in the street's cafes. But that was before Saddam tried to paralyze the Iraqi mind.

Saddam banned many books, and filled Mutanabbi Street with informers. Suggesting that a defiant café culture flourished there under his rule is not only absurd, it's cruel. Baghdad featured brave and defiant men and women, but they certainly weren't expressing their subversive ideas in public cafes, or requesting dangerous books along Mutanabbi Street. This was a world where Sartre was banned, Kafka was banned, Orwell was certainly banned, even Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was banned. The most interesting books one might find along the street appeared when Baghdadis who had been impoverished by the sanctions regime were forced to sell their beloved old volumes.

Iraqi intellectual life was a tragicomedy under Saddam. Don't forget that he fancied himself a great novelist, and that Baghdad's literati had to shower him with praise for his embarrassing junk, proclaiming him the flower of Iraqi letters. Do you suppose they made even carefully veiled jokes at his expense at the Shabandar Café?

After Saddam was overthrown, and before the "insurgency" began its almost daily massacres, there was a spate of stories about the revival of Iraqi intellectual life: a suddenly multiplying Iraqi press, revived university activity, newly free writers and playwrights, etc. Among the most frequent such stories, because it was easy to do, was the revival of Mutanabbi Street, where the booksellers quickly were enriching their stocks. A touching detail of those reports was that among the newly available books most in demand were up-to-date technical volumes. Saddam had made even those unavailable. Now it has become possible to assert that such a regime tolerated a defiant café world.

By revisionist increments, sometimes (as in this case) by apparent ignorance, the memory of Saddam's brutality may be giving way to a softer image of his rule. A major example of this process is the common claim that , after all, women could pursue relatively liberated professional lives under his regime. But women owe no more to Saddam than do intellectuals. Baghdad women began removing the veil and entering professions in the early 20th century, when women throughout the region were challenging traditional barriers. When Saddam came along, successful careers remained open primarily to those women who embraced Baathism. It was not liberation, it was a setback, just as the supposed tolerance of a defiant Mutanabbi Street is an illusion.

By the way, Mutanabbi Street is named for one of the greatest of Arab poets, a 10th century native of Kufa whose most famous line is, "I am known to night and horses and the desert, to sword and lance, to parchment and pen." His is an apt name for a street of poets and booksellers, his line an apt evocation of the poet as warrior, and the power and resilience of the word. The Iraqi word has had much to survive in its modern history. Those Baghdadis now clearing away the wreckage of Mutanabbi Street, and sweeping up its precious, charred pages, know that it will survive this too.'

Badr Shakir al Sayyab and surreal Arab fantasies

Today I learned about Badr Shakir al Sayyab, the Iraqi poet who wrote "The Informer", which was used by the Angry Arab to condemn Mohammad Dahlan in a post. Today a Jordanian American named Habis used the poem to condemn me as a traitor, apparently because I remind people of Saddam's horrors and I support democracy in Iraq. Habis has accused me of supporting the US invasion. I had nothing to do with the invasion, but I was always in favor of assisting the Iraqi people in overthrowing the tyrant, the mass murderer of Iraqis.

I had nothing to do with the 1991 invasion either, but I remember very well how differently the Arabs reacted to that war, during which the US and its allies bombed Iraq for 40 consecutive days and nights, with smart bombs and conventional bombs and definitely the most bombs dropped on an Arab nation in the history of the world. The Arab "resistance" did not respond by sending hundreds of suicide bombers to fight the American invaders in Iraq in 1991. The Arabs did not care how many bombs were dropped on Iraq, as long as Saddam stayed in charge, and stay in charge he did, mass murdering more Iraqis along the way and building dozens of palaces while ordinary Iraqis struggled to survive.

The Arabs were relatively happy throughout the 90s and many of them moved to America to take advantage of its great freedoms and opportunities. It was only after America toppled the hero of the Arab world, Saddam, and put him on trial for crimes against humanity, that the Arabs and "Ummah" unleashed their arsenal of suicide bombers, many of whom were convinced that killing "apostates" will be rewarded by Allah after the appropriate fatwas were issued.

Clearly the Arabs do not care about Iraqis as much as they care about Sunni domination in Iraq. Many Iraqis are shocked to see Arab poets praising Saddam, and I am shocked to see Arab Americans using an Iraqi poem to condemn Iraqis who only want peace and democracy in Iraq. It is bizarre.

To add to the surreal irony and hypocrisy, Badr Shakir al Sayyab was a Basrawi and a communist. The Ba3ath party killed communists!

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.

"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened," this official said.

But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding. This was serious business."

"According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite -- killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures."

So Saddam learned how to mass murder Iraqis as an employee of the CIA. It was the 60s! Badr Shakir al Sayyab surely knew of these events. He died of a degenerative nervous disorder at the end of 1964, almost two years after Saddam and his gang killed Abdul Karim Qasim. His poem "The Informer" could have been about Saddam and the Iraqis who were determined to imprison or kill Iraqi communists:

I am what you want: I am contemptible
The shoe shiner for the conquerors,
and the vendor of blood
and conscience for tyrants.
I am a crow
feeding off the corpses of chicken.
I am destruction,
I am ruination!
The lip of the harlot
is more chaste than my heart,
and the wings of flies
are purer and warmer than my hands.
As you wish...
I am contemptible!.."

The Arabs apparently do not understand that Saddam was an informer, that he became the tyrant, the conqueror wannabe. Saddam led Iraq to destruction, to ruination! Saddam and his gang of thieves and thugs were contemptible!

Update: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab "started his career as a Marxist, but reverted to mainstream nationalism without ever becoming fanatical."

Unfinished business from 1991

Geoffrey Wawro: 'Bush called for a "clean end." The main thing, Bush insisted, was to avoid "charges of brutalization," of piling on just to kill Iraqis in the war's last hours. Secretary of State Baker concurred: "We have done the job. We can stop. We have achieved our aims. We have gotten them out of Kuwait." But, like everyone else in the room, Baker worried about "unfinished business." What would become of the Saddam Hussein regime? Would the Americans give it a shove, or let it stand? In Riyadh, Schwarzkopf was declaring victory at the Hyatt Hotel -- "the gates are closed ... we almost completely destroyed the offensive capability of the Iraqi forces" -- and assuring the press that going to Baghdad was not in the cards. That ingenuous revelation prompted a startled protest from Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, who agreed that the allies probably weren't going to Baghdad, but considered it foolhardy to tell that to the Iraqis. Wolfowitz and the other "Washington hawks" -- the future neo-cons -- were still hoping for a coup, and wanted to keep pressure on Saddam.

In Riyadh, the deputy Centcom commander, General Calvin Waller, also expressed amazement at Washington's hasty, charitable concession of a cease-fire, when only about half of the Republican Guard's equipment had been destroyed, and before the last bridges over the Euphrates had been demolished, effectively bottling up the Iraqi army, most of which was still south of Basra, squarely in the sights of the U.S. forces. American planners had planned to disarm and dismount the Iraqis and then send them streaming back into Iraq on foot. That was the kind of image that would humiliate Saddam and rock his regime. "You have got to be shitting me. Why a cease-fire now?" Waller expostulated. "One hundred hours has a nice ring," Schwarzkopf chuckled. "That's bullshit," Waller said. "Then you go argue with them," Schwarzkopf said. "Them" was the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, and the Bush White House. Schwarzkopf had never squared off against Powell and was not about to begin now. Powell set the tone in the J.C.S., and talked the other chiefs into an early end to the war. Desert Storm had evicted Saddam from Kuwait and erased the stain of Vietnam, so why fight on?

Air Force Chief of Staff General Merrill McPeak privately protested the "merciful clemency" offered Saddam, but publicly supported Powell. President Bush too wanted to quit while he was ahead. In Washington, the analogy on everyone's mind was not Vietnam, but Korea, where a limited American war -- to evict the North Koreans from the south -- had slipped (under MacArthur's gung-ho influence) into an unlimited struggle to destroy the North Korean communists that had dragged on bloodily and inconclusively for three years and then left American troops as a permanent fixture in South Korea. Few wanted to risk this easy victory and expand American liabilities by rolling the dice and pushing north to Baghdad. Powell ridiculed the notion: it was not as if "a lot of little Jeffersonian democrats would have popped up to run for office" in Baghdad on America's coattails. Still, Bush felt tension and incompleteness everywhere. "Why do I not feel elated?" President Bush asked aloud. He knew why. The instigator of the war had survived to fight another day, and there was little that Bush could do to change that outcome. In his diary, Bush wrote of his anger at seeing Baghdad Radio broadcasting victory even as U.S. forces trounced the Iraqis. But the coalition would not support continued combat in Iraq or Kuwait merely to "destroy Iraqi forces," nor would many Americans. The war was not cheap either; 390 Americans had died in combat, and the bill for the war stood at about $620 billion. "We need to have an end. People want that. They are going to want to know that we won and that the kids can come home. We don't want to screw this up with a sloppy, muddled ending." Within a year, two-thirds of Americans would come to believe that President Bush had terminated the war too soon, and the unresolved issue would contribute to Bush's defeat in the elections of 1992.

The Hundred Hour War ground to an equivocal close, over Paul Wolfowitz's recondite objection that "100-hour war" would be a politically disastrous term since it would evoke memories of the 100-hour Franco-British-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. ("Would 99-hour war be better?" Cheney joked.) Bush had confidently predicted that the Iraqi "troops will straggle home with no armor, beaten up, 50,000," but they were more numerous than that, and they had extricated lots of armor. American surveillance photos of southern Iraq revealed the depressing news that Saddam had pulled one-quarter of his tanks and half of his APCs from Kuwait. Worse, the tanks that escaped were largely Republican Guard. Indeed the Republican Guard divisions in Kuwait had pulled off a desert Dunkirk, extricating 80,000 troops with large numbers of tanks, helicopters, and heavy guns.

"The end game: it was bad," McCaffrey recalled. "First of all, there was confusion. The objectives were unclear. And the sequence was wrong." Ordinary Iraqis expressed wonderment at Saddam's continued hold on power. Retreating troops fired their AK-47s into the portraits and murals of Saddam that lined their routes home. An Iraqi cement worker muttered: "Kuwait destroyed by Saddam. Iraq destroyed by combined forces. But Saddam is still in his chair." The Shiites of southern Iraq, who had begun to seethe even before the ground war, exploded into rebellion after the cease-fire. Saddam was weakened and discredited. The moment to rise up had arrived. In northern Iraq, the Kurds made the same calculation. They took President Bush's awkward March 1 declaration as a call to action: "In my own view, I've always said it would be - that the Iraqi people should put him aside and that would facilitate the resolution of all these problems that exist, and would certainly facilitate the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations."

But even as he incited the Iraqis to rebel, Bush rejected any push to Baghdad and conceded Saddam the use of armed helicopters on his side of the border. Saddam promptly exploited the American concession not to hop-scotch over shattered roads and bridges but to blast his rebellious subjects from the air. Bush 41 expressed again his mixed feelings about Desert Storm, this time to a (startled) White House press conference: "You know, to be very honest with you, I haven't yet felt this wonderfully euphoric feeling that many of the American people feel." The father's doubts would sow the son's resolve to, as Bush 41 concluded, "cross the last 't' and dot the last 'i.'" '

How the Arabs reacted to the end of Saddam

Below is a post I put together from two comments for this post and thought it summarizes well my feelings about how the Arabs in general reacted to the overthrow, trial, and hanging of Saddam. I think it's important to document their reaction.

FYI: 90% of Arabs are Sunni Muslim. The combined population of Arab nations is 325 million, about the same population as the US.

'Approximately half of my relatives fled Iraq before 2003. Most of them live in the UK now. None of my relatives worked for the US military except a relative who worked as an economic advisor to the CPA for two years, and he was never harmed. But he was in Kurdistan. A man who was married to my uncle's wife's sister worked as a translator for the Americans (not sure in what capacity) and in 2005 he was shot in the head in front of his family while shopping in Baghdad.

In 2006 on the Angry Arab blog many commenters labeled Iraqi translators and Iraqi police as traitors, which made me very angry. Many of those commenters, even though some of them were born and raised in America, attacked me for being a "traitor" to my country, because I was happy to see the end of Saddam and his murderous dictatorship and one day I called Bush's intentions in Iraq "noble" because I believed that he and many Americans were genuinely interested in helping the Iraqi people overcome years of war and sanctions and build a prosperous democracy. I still believe that this was America's intentions for Iraq. Bush may have had ulterior motives and may have hoped that western oil companies would benefit, and some companies like Halliburton and Blackwater did benefit from the war. But it was Operation Iraqi Freedom, despite the ulterior motives and despite the crimes of US soldiers, which were few in comparison to the crimes of Saddamists and Wahhabi terrorists. Some Shia militiamen also killed innocent Iraqis.

Some accused me of not condemning crimes committed by Americans in Iraq. I know that many innocent Iraqis were accidentally and intentionally killed by US forces, but the vast majority of violent deaths in Iraq since 2003 have been caused by the "resistance" and the jarab who blow up markets and restaurants. I know we're supposed to blame those murders on America too, and many Iraqis have, but I won't do that. Bush made mistakes for sure, but I will always blame the murders on the people who directly participated in the murders.

Saddam's henchmen were responsible for the wrongful imprisonment and murder of many of my relatives, and astoundingly some people expected me to tell the world to keep Saddam in power. It was as if they expected me to shut up about Saddam's crimes, so my writings wouldn't be used as justification to overthrow the mass murderer.

Most people in the Arab world and most leftists have never lived in a dictatorship like Saddam's, and therefore they really have no idea how most Iraqi Shia and Kurds felt about Saddam's regime. The only kind of Shia they seem to like are the ones who fight Americans, like Muntadhar al Zaidi and Muqtada al Sadr.

Since the overthrow of Saddam's regime my relatives have had difficult lives or sure, due to the security situation. I've blamed the Bush administration for not adequately planning for the overthrow of the dictatorship and other things, and I've blamed the new Iraqi govt for being incompetent and corrupt. But the reason there was so much sectarian violence, so much hatred towards the Shia, is because the Sunni extremists provoked the Iraqi Shia in the most horrific ways, and the Sunni Arabs did not protest very much. Many of them insisted that the US was behind the bombings of markets and other public places in Iraq. The extremists proved they would murder 34 Iraqi kids just to kill one American soldier. They did it and committed many more horrible crimes, and all the Arabs and leftists could do is blame Bush. The Sunni Arab "resistance" proved they could make life for Iraqis much worse than before the invasion, and they did, because the Sunni Arabs lost control of Iraq, and therefore they tried to destroy Iraq.

Angry Arab fans attacked me for being angry with the Arab terrorists instead of the Americans. They also attacked me for pointing out that life for Iraqi Shia and Kurds was quite miserable before 2003. The response from the Sunni Arabs, as the Sunni Arab "resistance" blew up Iraqi markets and universities, was "how do you like your freedom now??"' I will never forget the rage I felt after reading the responses of our Arab "brothers" from all over the globe. Some of them could not understand my rage and were merely condemning the perceived meddling in Iraq and the injustice that resulted from such meddling.

In the 60s and 80s, the Sunni Arabs and leftists did not protest US meddling in Iraq. In 1991 they did not scream as loudly about US intervention, even though the US-led coalition bombed Iraq for 40 consecutive days and nights in 1991, even though the US launched the war on Iraq from their HQ in Doha, Qatar.

They did not protest as strongly about US meddling until Saddam's murderous regime was overthrown in 2003, and when the murderers were put on trial for crimes against humanity and the piece of shit was belatedly hung in 2006, the Sunni Arabs got *really* pissed. They escalated their attacks and blew up even more markets, weddings, funerals, universities, restaurants, and just about anything related to the newly elected government in Baghdad. But no bombings of markets in Qatar, the country that hosts the US CENTCOM, from which the US military again launched the air campaign in 2003.

In 2006, after the Al Askari mosque was bombed, the Sunni Arabs discovered Shiite death squads had been murdering innocent Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Their protests and animosity towards Iraqi Shia grew. Prior to their discovery of Shiite death squads, they did not protest "Sunni death squads", which began their murderous rampages in 2003. The Sunni Arabs did not notice, or perhaps ignored, the 144 suicide bombings in 2004 or the 478 suicide bombings in 2005. Angry Arabs could not easily blame suicide bombings on Americans or Iraqi Shia, because even the idiots among the Sunni Arabs know that Americans and Iraqi Shia don't do suicide bombings in markets and restaurants.

During this time a historic trial, the first trial of an Arab dictator, was taking place. In the past, if an Arab tyrant was overthrown, he was immediately killed. No trial, no questions, no evidence or debate. That's how the Arabs do revolution, and they were pissed that one of their Lions was being humiliated by "infidels". Many Arabs and Arab Americans believed that Saddam was innocent, and that even if he is guilty, he should not be killed. So the war on the Iraqi Shia and US forces intensified.

In 2006 I became acquainted with a Palestinian American woman, born and raised in California, a frequent commenter on Angry Arab. When I first started commenting on the blog she attacked me and called me a traitor and did not believe I am Iraqi, but eventually we became friends and we talked a few times on the phone. The day after the convicted Saddam and his half brother were hung she called me and said "bad move Shia". That is how the Sunni Arabs, even the ones in America, reacted to the overthrow and trial and hanging of a mass murderer, a tyrant who imprisoned and killed millions of innocent Iraqis, a dictator who led Iraq to ruin. They treated him like a hero, they mass murdered Iraqis and blamed it on Americans, and then they asked the Iraqis if THIS is the freedom they wanted!

Certainly not all Sunni Arabs thought alike, and I know many Sunni Arabs, mostly Iraqis, who were happy to see the end of Saddam. But a few Iraqi Sunni Arabs were very angry about the hanging of Saddam and turned him into a hero-martyr:



I suppose I should not have wanted to see the end of Saddam's regime. I should not have ever sought support from the US, the country that helped put the tyrant in power in the 60s and helped him again in the 80s, to remove the tyrant from power in 2003 and help Iraqis set up a semblance of a democracy in Baghdad. I should have known, like many smart people apparently did, that Sunni Arab extremists would incite sectarian violence in Iraq, and that Shiite militias would react by killing innocent Sunni Arabs. Shoulda stuck with Saddam, shoulda kept quiet about his crimes like the Sunni Arabs did so well.

The "brave resistance" demanded an end to the occupation. Well it's been two years now since Shiite militias killed innocent Sunni Arabs, nine months since Bush has been out of office, and it's been three months since US troops withdrew from Iraqi cities. But the "resistance" is still blowing up innocent Iraqis, mostly Shia. Hundreds have been killed in the last few weeks. Is that not injustice? '

Could the Iraqi people have overthrown Saddam?

'The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings succeeded because the military forces of those countries refused to protect the regimes by cracking down on their own countrymen. The Egyptian military's self-image is that of a force that protects the nation and the people, not Hosni Mubarak. Yes, many top officers were his cronies, but when the push came to shove, their loyalty to the state was greater than their loyalty to the regime. The same was true in Tunisia.

Saddam, on the other hand, could always count on two armed groups whose ONLY reason for being was their loyalty to him: the Republican Guard, and the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam. As they showed while putting down the Shi'ite uprising after the Kuwait war, these forces were perfectly happy to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis on his orders.'

Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/02/23/could-the-arab-revolution-have-removed-saddam/#ixzz1ExhllkU2

Thanks RhusLancia for posting over at Zeyad's Healing Iraq.

Fedayeen Saddam were not formed until after 1991. Otherwise Bobby Ghosh is right. Fedayeen was just another tool Saddam & Sons used to control Iraqis. Saddam was stronger in 2003 than he was in 1991.

I asked my my mom a couple of weeks ago if she thought Saddam would have fallen as easily as Mubarak. She said maybe not as easily, but she thinks eventually he would have fallen. I didn't have time to talk about 1991, but I disagree with her. Saddam had already brutally put down a major uprising in 1991 and he had a firm grip on Iraq in 2003. Saddam might have been overthrown if Iraq's Sunni Arabs, including his Republican Guard and Fedayeen, had been united with the Shia and Kurds to overthrow Saddam.

Saddam's Palaces

"Saddam and his palaces. Another disturbing account of the sadism of Saddam Husayn can be found in Mazin Jazrawi's `Ashr Sanawat fi Qusur Saddam Husayn (10 years in Saddam Husayn's palaces). The author was a manager of Saddam's palaces, and provides a glimpse of the private life of Saddam. I never knew that extent to which Saddam was obsessed with designing and building palaces; by 1991 he had amassed 155 palaces.(p. 222) He reports that King Husayn was the most frequent visitor to Saddam. Once, while fishing with King Husayn, he yelled orders: two jet skis for `Ali (King Husayn's son), and $10 million gift to King Husayn. (p. 205) Husayn modestly accepted the gift from "brother Saddam." Also, you have to read the letter that Saddam wrote to his brothers in 1983 when they did not approve of Raghd's husband.(p. 268)" --As'ad Abu Khalil

House of Traitors

I just finished watching Parts 3 and 4 of House of Saddam. I watched Parts 1 and 2 last week, and since Part 2 ended with Saddam declaring victory after US forces withdrew to Kuwait in 1991, I expected Part 3 to start with the Shia and Kurdish uprisings and the subsequent crushing of the rebellions, the destruction of Najaf and Karbala, and the murder of at least 100,000 Iraqi Shia. I did not expect all of Saddam's atrocities to be included in the film because there were so many, but the uprisings and the mass murder that took place in 1991, one of the most important events in the history of modern Iraq, was not covered at all in the movie. Perhaps the producers did not want to explain how the US betrayed the Iraqi Shia, and how Saddam's Republican Guard slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis because Bush Sr. didn't have the balls to do the right thing. Bombing the country for 41 consecutive days and nights with 88,000 tons of bombs, destroying electrical and water treatment plants, and expelling Iraq from Kuwait was all the US and allies could do, or were willing to do.

It is action packed and dramatized to suit Hollywood, but it is a good miniseries that shows how Saddam killed many of his closest friends and relatives, suspecting them of being traitors. Saddam wondered if Adnan Tulfah, son of Khairallah Tulfah and brother of Sajida, would turn traitor, so he had him killed in a helicopter crash. Adnan Tulfah is portrayed as a good guy in the movie - I don't know if there's any truth to that. Even Saddam is depicted as having a soft side, much like Tony Soprano was.

I learned a few things from the movie. I did not know that tanks were into Dujail and nearly destroyed the city in 1982 to punish them for the assassination attempt. I thought the abductions and murders happened in secret. I did not know that Saddam decided to cooperate with weapons inspectors so that Hussein Kamil, who had defected to Jordan with his brother and their wives (Saddam's daughters), would have nothing to negotiate with when seeking an alliance with the Americans. I did not know that Ali Hassan al Majeed oversaw the killing of his own nephews to preserve the honor of the Majid tribe.

In the end it was Qusay and Uday's own cousin who told the US military that they were hiding in his home in Mosul. Most Iraqis hated Saddam and his sons. Even their relatives hated them. I guess that makes them (and most Iraqis) traitors in the eyes of those who loved Saddam.

Similarities between Saddam and Qaddafi

I have noticed some similarities between Saddam and Qaddafi. Like Qaddafi, Saddam believed he was the leader of some united Arab nation. They both believed they fought valiantly and defeated the US.

Saddam was also flamboyant, although Qaddafi is on a different scale, I admit. "The only real regional analogue in recent memory is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but even there the megalomania and cult of personality didn’t run as deep."

They both built a number of palaces for themselves. Angry Arab wrote today: 'The tyrant who claims to not hold any official title, and who claims that the "masses" run Libya, has collected a number of palaces in Libya.'

Both dictators made their respective tribes powerful and put their sons in high positions, but there was internal conflict. "Libyan dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi heads a fractious family obsessed with power, wealth and chart-topping R&B stars, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks."

Both tyrants became wealthy from oil that lies underneath land where the dictators' political foes live: "The rebellion began in Cyrenaica, a region endowed with oil that was home to Libya’s first and only monarch, King Idris..."

Both tyrants gave up their WMD, but they kept their guns and police states.

Perhaps the most striking similarity is their determinations to fight to the bitter end: "Iraq taught us that magnitude of destruction has to be immense. Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric suggests he understands this and is willing to follow through. This will depend on the willingness of the army to follow his directives. Saddam did not have the army, but he did have a series of concentric circles of supporters loyal to him because of the patronage he extended them (special-forces units and tribes). He had tied their interests to his survival so successfully that they could not risk defecting.

...Mr Qaddafi, like Saddam Hussein, probably cares less about external pressure because the damage has been done. He may feel he can go it alone, as he has in the past."

20 years ago in February 1991, while US & allied troops marched towards Baghdad, many Iraqis were looking forward to the end of Saddam's regime, and a rumor spread among Iraqis that suggested Saddam and family had their bags packed and were ready to go to Libya. It's too bad that didn't happen. Saddam and Qaddafi could be fighting together today.

PS: They both believed they were great authors and governors: "Colonel Qaddafi had presented himself as the inheritor of the legendary Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser. He had written, it was claimed, the three-volume Green Book, which by his lights held a solution for all the problems of governance, and servile Arab intellectuals indulged him, pretending that the collection of nonsensical dictums could be given serious reading."

PPS: Now that I think more about that rumor about Saddam going to Libya, I believe the rumor started before the US & allies began the aerial bombing campaign in 1991.