As theology or history this may have been nonsense, but as a recipe for dictatorship Aflaq’s demand for unconditional love was bound to create a tyranny because Iraq was more diverse than any other Arab nation. If Iraq could function as a free society, it could do so only as a federal democracy. If the Baathists tried pan-Arab nationalism instead, they would have to answer the question, where are your Arabs? About one-fifth of Iraq’s population were not Arabs but Kurds and Turks. The majority of Iraq’s Arabs were Shia Muslims, estranged from the Sunni Arabs since the early days of Islam. Sunni Arabs were a mere 20 per cent of the population, so Sunni Arab nationalism would mean either an apartheid system, with the Sunnis as the ‘whites’, or a merciless dictatorship, which was what Iraq got for decades.
The contours of that dictatorship ought to have been familiar to European eyes. In his purges of the Baath Party Saddam modelled himself on Stalin. The Baath Party’s rhetoric was often a straight copy of communist propaganda, while the Soviet Union was Saddam’s largest supplier of arms. Yet Baathist ideology also took the complete conspiracy theory of the European counter-revolution. Like the clerical and aristocratic opponents of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco and the European fascists of the twentieth century, it held that democracy and human rights were a sham that hid the secret workings of sinister conspiracies, and not only those of the Freemasons. Makiya quoted Fadhil al-Barak, one of the regime’s apologists, who explained that because Jews had been living in what is now Israel since the seventh century BC, they had been in an anti-Arab conspiracy since then. The Persian Iranians weren’t far behind. They had been conspiring against Iraqi Arabs since 539 BC, which was a surprisingly early date to begin plotting given that the Arabs did not invade what is now Iraq until 637 AD, a thousand years or so later. Baathist historical works reeked of racism and included the charming Three Whom God Should Never Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies. Al-Barak naturally took the tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be a genuine exposé of a Jewish plot to control the world.
Despite all his good work in unmasking subversives, al-Barak was himself unmasked by his rivals in the Baath Party. Under torture, he confessed to being a spy for the Soviet Union and East Germany.
Later, they killed him.
His death in no way diminished the appetite for conspiracy theory. One of the first acts of the Baath Party after 1968 was to turn on Iraq’s Jews. They accused them of helping Israel defeat the Arabs in the Six Day War of 1967 – a conflict in which Iraqi soldiers distinguished themselves by their unwillingness to fight. To explain the humiliation and get popular prejudice on the side of the new dictatorship, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, the first Baathist president, revealed a Jewish conspiracy to a huge crowd in central Baghdad.
‘They aim to create malicious rumour and disturbances employing for this end killings, sabotage and undertaking operations behind the front line of our heroic army.
‘What do you want?’ he screamed.
‘Death to the spies!’ the mob screamed back.
The pogrom began. The Baath accused Iraq’s Jews of plotting with Israel, Britain, the Freemasons and the Iranians. The Kurds were Zionism’s bankers, who funnelled Israeli money to Iraqi Jews.
In 1968, seventeen Jewish ‘spies’ went on trial. The defendants got a taste of the Baath’s idea of due process when their own lawyer opened the case for the defence by apologizing to the prosecution. He wanted it on the record that he ‘would not like to see them go unpunished’. The press bench howled with laughter when the defendants pleaded ‘not guilty’. The protestations of innocence died when the authorities ‘persuaded’ them to confess.
Later, they killed them and strung up their corpses in Baghdad’s Liberation Square for the edification of hundreds of thousands of spectators who streamed in from across the country to see the sights of the big city.
Makiya despaired as he went through the records. In the Fifties, the optimistic artists and intellectuals of his parents’ generation had imagined a future Kurdish – Arab partnership in a common Iraqi homeland. The Baath had shown it was possible to blow away years of rubbing along in a few months. ‘Common sense was dying in Iraq,’ he wrote, ‘along with civil society.’ Although the early racist campaigns were undoubtedly popular, Iraq’s new masters were also teaching the population a lesson common to all varieties of totalitarianism: nothing is true and everything is permissible. Frenzy quickly turned to fear. People kept dying mysteriously and the Baath Party used their deaths to justify a police state. The newspapers reported that saboteurs were bombing Baghdad. Sometimes the state-controlled media were so on top of the story they reported the explosions before the bombs went off. The Baathists deployed the politics of race to persuade Iraqis to support them and the politics of fear to warn Iraqis of the dangers of defying them.
First they came for the Jews, then they came for the communists. The Soviet leadership wanted Iraq on its side in the Cold War. It ordered Iraqi communists to form an alliance with the Baath Party in the early Seventies, a manoeuvre Saddam made the Iraqi communists regret when he welcomed their support, embraced them as allies, waited for a while and then arrested the entire politburo of the Iraqi Communist Party along with an uncounted number of militants. They, too, were tortured. A few brave men and women stayed strong, but most broke and appeared on television to confess their crimes.
Show trials, televised confessions and plots by Freemasons and Jews stretching back across the millennia … these were the raging totalitarian frenzies of fascism and communism rolled into one and adapted to fit local conditions.
Makiya readily conceded that Saddam Hussein was an imitator of European totalitarianism, not an innovator. ‘Nevertheless, his legacy has already been assured by the consistency and determination with which he brought such trends to bear inside Iraq. Above all, his particular achievement was the placement of an inordinate emphasis on a revised conception of political crime, one that made it ever more loose and all-inclusive’ so that ‘police work logically became the substitute for politics’.
Or as Saddam pithily explained, ‘The revolution chooses its enemies.’
God and the devil dwell together in the detail of great crimes. The more you know about monstrosities the more likely you are to make a commitment to fight them. For it is one thing to hear the screaming paranoia in the speeches of a dictator and realize that life in his country must be grim, quite another to know the names of the camps and of the torturers and the details of what they do to the camps’ captives.
Totalitarian systems do not have freedom of information acts. At the time of writing, I guess that the worst place in the world is North Korea. There are reports of millions dying in slave camps, gas chambers, mass executions and famines. But it is impossible to be sure. The few who get out, escape to communist China. They have to keep their heads down and mouths shut for fear the Chinese will send them back. Journalists, diplomats and workers for human rights organizations cannot move freely and interview whom they please. North Korea hovers at the back of the public mind. People joke about the cult of the personality of Kim Jong-Il, ‘the dear leader’, and the 100 per cent turnout in uncontested elections; they worry about his drive to become a nuclear power; but they have few facts to detain them further.
‘For every nugget of truth some wretch lies dead on the scrapheap,’ said H. L. Mencken. In his extravagant way, he had it right. Getting uncomfortable facts on to the record is the toughest struggle for journalists in democracies. To prove that this minister took a bribe or that policeman beat a suspect requires time and money. Reporters can spend months trying to nail down what they know to be true only for secrecy, the law or the nervousness of their employers to defeat them.
Consider how much tougher it is to get to the truth in a dictatorship where the penalty for saying a word out of turn is death. Asymmetries in access to information have the paradoxical