Even by Arab standards, the cult of Saddam Hussein was obsessive. Until yesterday, it was difficult to turn a corner in Baghdad without coming upon a statue or poster of him.
One of the most grotesque — and high on the list for destruction, if it has not gone already — lies at the entrance to Saddam City, the deprived suburb where Iraqis yesterday took to the streets to rejoice at the dictator’s downfall.
At a roundabout entering Saddam City, a huge poster showed Saddam in robes astride a white charger, leading troops into battle against a backdrop of Scud missiles. It is how he views himself: the tough Arab leader who alone stands up to the west, the first since the Kurdish-born Arab hero Saladin took on the Crusaders.
According to those who have met him, his obsession is how history will view him. Every act of his in recent years has been aimed primarily at the Arab media and posterity.
But Arab historians, like those in the west, will find it difficult to find much that is positive to record about a leader who seized control in 1979 of one of the wealthiest and forward-looking countries in the Middle East and returned it to poverty. He fought three disastrous wars and leaves his country under US occupation.
What support Saddam still enjoys in the Arab world — mainly among some Palestinians for attacking Israel in 1991, and at the grassroots elsewhere for refusing to be cowed by the US — was seldom shared in his country. He ruled over a people whose living standards dropped drastically, who lost family in the wars, and who lived in fear of his security apparatus.
Neighbouring Syria has a reputation for having the most brutal mukhabarat, or secret police, in the Middle East. But the fear among the public in Syria is not remotely comparable to that in Iraq. At last autumn’s referendum, in which Saddam secured almost 100% support, an eight-year-old child, listening to a family discussion, chipped in that everyone had to vote for Saddam or else — and drew an imaginary knife across her throat. In the same household, a relative cautioned against criticising Saddam even within the family home, warning how remarks had a way of finding their way to the mukhabarat: ”In Iraq, we are afraid even of the wind.”
No wonder Iraqis delayed their celebrations until they were sure he was gone. Even yesterday, many in Baghdad chose to stay at home, waiting for evidence of his demise; or fearful of revenge attacks, looting or a stray bullet. Thousands did emerge in Saddam City, into which are crammed 2 million-3 million Shia Muslims who have long loathed him for discriminating against their sect, and smaller crowds celebrated elsewhere.
Saddam may be preparing for a last stand in a bunker in central Baghdad or fleeing north to his birthplace, Tikrit, or he may be dead, buried by a US bomb. Wherever he is, he has lost control of the Iraqi capital: the Saddam phenomenon is dead, even if he may not be.
When he first took power, it was not obvious what was in store for Iraq. The Ba’ath party at the time, though brutal, kept a vestige of the socialism and pan-Arabism that had inspired its creation, and Saddam continued the drive to eliminate illiteracy.
The welfare system was on a par with Europe. Many of the middle class were educated in Britain: doctors and scientists even today speak warmly of their time in British towns and cities. It was also one of the most secular countries in the Arab world: women in western dress and makeup coexisted with women in veils.
Within a year, Saddam had embarked on the first of his disastrous wars. Not content with Iraq as a regional power, he attacked Iran to try to seize its southern oilfields. His ambition was to build Iraq into a power comparable to Saudi Arabia.
The 1980-88 war cost hundreds of thousands of lives squandered in battles that secured little new territory – and was an economic disaster. Heavily in debt after the war, he sought a quick fix by taking over the Kuwaiti oilfields in 1990.
The US had supported him against Shia-dominated Iran, providing him with arms, intelligence and even inadvertently shooting down an Iranian passenger plane. Washington chose to ignore its ally’s use of chemical weapons against the Iranians and against his own people, the Kurds, at Halabja in 1988. But by Kuwait, his behaviour was unsettling Washington.
The decade after the Gulf war was the worst Iraq experienced under Saddam. The UN, driven by the US, imposed economic sanctions to try to force him to give up his weapons of mass destruction. Saddam – fearing he would be exposed without this arsenal – repeatedly lied between 1991 and 1998 about his nuclear, biological, chemical and missile programmes. The process dragged on, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, especially children, dying of malnutrition and preventable diseases.
Although he bears the overwhelming responsibility, the US too was culpable. American documents make clear that for Washington the removal of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction would not be enough: from 1991 onwards, it wanted to keep the sanctions until he was gone.
In the past few years, life had begun to improve for the average Iraqi as the sanctions regime began to fall apart. But Saddam’s security apparatus was intact. Like most dictators, he became more paranoid as the years went by – a fact not helped by failed plots and an assassination attempt on his son that left Uday disabled.
Saddam’s argument was that Iraq needed authoritarian rule, not just for his survival but the country’s. There was an unspoken warning of a risk of civil war between the majority Shia and the Sunni minority, to which he belonged, and the risk of the Kurds splitting off.
That rationale for dictatorship will be tested in the weeks and months ahead. The US and British forces could yet find themselves in the same situation as Belfast in the 1970s: initially welcomed, and then targets. But the sense of Iraqi nationalism is strong, and may hold the country together and prevent civil war.
It appears now that those who fought for Saddam in the south were primarily fighting in their own interest, as part of the Ba’ath party elite that fears revenge killings. Yesterday’s response appears to reflect the real mood in Iraq. By the weekend, Baghdad could be transformed, free of Saddam statues, posters and pictures. Within a year, Saddam memorabilia, especially the watches that carry his features, could be for tourists, as could the refurbished palaces.
And the Iraqi people, if they get the promised oil revenues and a democratic government, will remember him not as Saladin, but as the leader who presided over almost three decades of evil. – Guardian Unlimited Â