Before Baghdad burns

It's very seldom that a leader can choose a successor and make that work in the kind of environment that Saddam Hussein has created in Iraq. It very seldom survives the person who built it. All these questions start coming up if he starts losing control or if he gets sick or if he dies. Then you just open Pandora's box. As far as the internal politics is concerned, once that starts unraveling, what's going to happen to the tribal alliances, what's going to happen to the security service, what's going to happen to the military?

And then there are these rumors about Saddam Hussein having lymphoma.

Which could be rumors he started to keep his foreign enemies from coming after him, but then that would weaken him internally. It's hard to know.

Saddam Hussein seems to really know how to manipulate all the communal and tribal divisions in Iraq to maintain his power.

Yes, particularly since the end of the Gulf War. Everyone thought that anyone who'd been defeated to the extent that he was in that war simply could not last politically. But he defied the odds by moving very rapidly, pitting group against group -- the Kurds were somewhat out of it up there in the North under the no-fly zone and had a certain amount of autonomy, but certainly as far as the Sunni and Shia were concerned.

Then he went in and revived the idea of tribes, that you were a member of a tribe more than a citizen of Iraq. Then he made all these tribal alliances with kinship groups and then added to that these contrived tribes -- what we might consider a trade association or a labor union. He's given those the aspect of a tribe, with a leader, common interests that Baghdad will meet in order to get the members to support Saddam Hussein. That's kept him in power and also added another level to the disunity of Iraq and the problem of keeping all these people together in a state once the dictatorship has ended.

Tribalism in one form or another is a problem in a lot of Arab nations.

Certainly on the Arabian peninsula, tribalism is still very strong because they really haven't had much of a history of nationhood. Saudi Arabia wasn't really put together in total until 1925. The House of Saud has ruled principly through its own tribal alliances and kinship groups. In the Fertile Crescent, in places like Syria and Jordan, that's a region where you've had one invading army after another running through there. There was Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, and then all the invasions from other places -- the Romans, Persians, Byzantines, and then here come the Mongols. It's just been an alley where all the invading armies from east and west have trampled over them. And the way people survived was to pull into kinship groups.

Can you explain how the difference between statehood and nationhood affects the region?

A state is geographic region that's under one government; a nation is composed of people who really feel a sense of affinity with each other: common culture, common language, common religion. Nations tend to develop naturally. What you've had in the Middle East is people who don't necessarily have any identification with each other, because their primary identity was with a tribe, put together within these artificial state boundaries created after the first World War by the Europeans. After World War I, Britain and France took the Ottoman territories of the Middle East and divided them up among themselves. The last of these states finally got their independence after the second World War, so they're really new states. And with this history of tribalism, they've had a really hard time becoming nations. Iraq is probably the worst of the group.

Tribalism seems to be a particular problem when the central government is weak, but Saddam Hussein's government has, historically at least, been fairly strong, hasn't it?

Yes and no. Every government of Iraq has had difficulty holding all the elements of the country to Baghdad. There's always been this force of people on the edge trying to pull away, and of course the major group that's done that in Iraq is the Kurds, who have been in constant rebellion against Baghdad. Probably Saddam Hussein's most successful period was during the oil boom of the '70s, and he wasn't even president then. He was the power behind the Baath party. As awful as the Baath party has been, there was this time when they recognized an opportunity to take all this oil money and invest it in education, infrastructure, healthcare, to really build a nation, and they had the resources to do it. And when you get a benefit from the state, that helps build a nation.

The main thing that happened then was the Islamic revolution in Iran (well, oil prices dipped, but the revolution was the main thing). Saddam Hussein just became paranoid that somehow the Iranian revolution was going to pull off the Shia of southern Iraq and fragment the state. So he declared war on Iran in 1980. It was a disaster, eight years of war. It finally ended in a cease-fire in which neither side won and both lost.

Saddam Hussein had so bankrupted the country at the end of the Iran-Iraq war that he had to have money in order to again give the Iraqi people something that would hold them to Baghdad. He demanded money from the oil states of the Arabian peninsula. Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and so forth were willing to go along with this, willing to buy a peace, but Kuwait balked. And so Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Then you have the defeat of the Gulf War and the sanctions, and so Saddam Hussein has had less ability to hold people to him and so the security forces continue to increase and increase in size.

The interesting question today is how much in control is Saddam Hussein really. It's generally accepted that the only region of the country he has firm control of is the center, Baghdad, Tikrit, that area. The rest of the country (again, I'm leaving out the Kurds), is being held together by these tribal arrangements. He gives the tribal leaders money and arms and they keep their people in check. If something happened that kept him from keeping those tribal alliances functioning, you have to ask are they going to spin off, which has always been the threat in Iraq.

If that happened, does Saddam Hussein have enough military power and security forces to really hold things together? Probably he does, but it's an interesting question.

There's been so much anxiety on the part of Saddam Hussein and others about whether the Shia of Iraq are drawn to Iran, because although it's a Persian state, it's a Shia state, but there hasn't been that much sign of them wanting to do so, has there? In the end, the Shia Arabs seem to feel more of an attachment to Iraq as an Arab nation.

That's right. The Iraq-Iran war proved that the Iraqi Shia were Arabs first and Shia second. The scenario that a lot of people worry about -- that if Iraq starts to fragment Iran might take southern Iraq -- they could, but I think that's the least likely scenario. Now, the Shia could maybe form their own state down there in southern Iraq, but there is this great cultural animosity between Arabs and Persians and I just can't see that the Iranians would particularly want to reach across the border to incorporate all of these Arabs into its territory, or that the Iraqi Shia would willingly join Iran.

How much of the tension between the Shia and the Sunni is about the differences in the actual religious doctrines and practices between the two groups and how much is the result of the history of how they've treated each other?

The conflict is principally political, economic and social, much more than it is theological. There's also this urban-rural conflict that's always been an element in that area going way back to the Mesopotamians and the Ottomans. If you could find a way to level out the economic and political opportunities in the system of Iraq, I don't think theology would make a lot of difference. That's not the root problem.

They might be able to live together as easily as Catholics and Protestants do in this country today?

Sure. In fact, the Shia are simply regarded as inferior by the Sunnis. Some Sunni tribesman out on the desert north of Baghdad regards himself as infinitely superior to some Shia tribesman out on the desert west of Basra.

Even though they might be indistinguishable to an outsider?

Yes! Both of these tribal groups originated on the Arabian peninsula and came up, and while the Sunni came a little bit earlier, they're all the same bunch.

There doesn't seem to be an effective resistance to Saddam Hussein -- no equivalent of the ANC or Nelson Mandela. Why is that?

Because Saddam Hussein has squashed every person who has challenged him. He's also made it very convenient for those people to emigrate, to leave the country, or he's killed them. The people who have left have lost their base in the country because of their absence. The big question for the Iraqis, for the U.S., for the whole region is, How do you rebuild civil society when Saddam is gone? If we continue on this path of talking about an invasion, we've also got to start articulating a vision for the Iraqis in the post-Saddam era.

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