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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
In Baghdad in June 2003, I asked an Iraqi friend about these apparent contradictions. Entifadh Qanbar, whom I met when he was still the Iraqi National Congress spokesman in Washington, had thought a great deal about the Iraqi character. He had lived in Iraq until he was imprisoned by Saddam in 1990, and after that in the U.S.
"Because of Saddam, Iraqis are a completely frustrated people," he said. "So if you ask them anything they will tell you it is bad. If you tell an Iraqi that you are giving him a Land Cruiser, he will complain that he cannot pay for the gas. Iraqis are cynical. You cannot ask them directly about something. You have to talk with them awhile and when they get to know you they will tell you how they feel. They will complain about the Americans, and then after a half hour, they will tell you that they love Bush."
This concluson is doubtless less true today than it was then, but Qanbar's insight still holds. It calls to mind a Jewish joke: A grandmother gives her grandson a red shirt and a blue shirt for his birthday. A week later, he comes to Sabbath dinner wearing the blue shirt. She greets the little boy by asking, "What, is there something wrong with the red one?"
My first day in Baghdad, I'd asked Tamara Chalabi, daughter of Ahmad Chalabi, what Iraqis had in common that would enable them to form one nation without force. "We have all suffered under Saddam," she quickly replied. I joked that this was a typically melancholic Shiite answer, but it was true. So was the consequence, that all Iraqi groups -- Sunni and Shiite, Kurd and Arab -- have a chip on their shoulder. They all see the glass as half empty. This may be the enduring legacy of Saddam.
Jon Lee Anderson first went to Iraq to understand Saddam, he tells us in his foreword. "I wanted to witness Saddam's tyranny and to understand what made it work," he continues. He is not an analytical thinker, so this understanding is anecdotal. Much of Anderson's book is about the Iraqis he got to know, and these were limited by the situation. Nearly all the other Iraqis he talks to are high officials of Saddam's government and Sunnis. Yet Anderson makes it clear exactly how dreadful a place Saddam's Iraq was, simply by letting these privileged Iraqis speak for themselves, or show how they are afraid to speak. And to his credit, Anderson comes down hard on Saddam apologists of all stripes, such as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and the other Western lefties who thronged to prewar Baghdad in an effort to prevent the conflict.
Perhaps the most interesting sections of "The Fall of Baghdad" recount Anderson's friendship with Ala Bashir. Bashir was one of Iraq's top plastic surgeons and also one of Saddam's favorite sculptors, with many public commissions in Baghdad. He was a close friend of Saddam who spent many hours alone with him. Unsurprisingly, Bashir was an admirer of Hitler and a vicious anti-Semite who blamed Iraq's problems on the familiar international Jewish conspiracy.
Yet in minor ways Bashir refused to surrender his independence. When Saddam requested a work he considered tasteless, he would delay it for years; he spoke his mind on aesthetic grounds on a few occasions. Nor was he blind to the effects of Saddam on Iraq, telling Anderson before the war, when such words were risky, "This repression has made everyone passive."
After the war, Anderson asks Bashir if he'd worried about what other Iraqis thought of his friendship with Saddam. Anderson is asking whether Bashir felt ashamed, and doubtless he feels he might get a truthful answer now that Saddam is gone. But Bashir has long since lost the necessary moral apparatus for remorse or shame. He can discuss Saddam with some appearance of objectivity ("His fatal mistake was to allow the supreme power he had to overcome all the other good things inside himself") but not his own actions.
That Anderson believes that Bashir will suddenly become ready to explain his feelings about Saddam shows a lack of understanding of what Saddam really did to Iraqis, and what they allowed him to do to them. It also shows a lack of interest in people's inner lives. Anderson never fails to give a brief description of what everyone he runs into looks like, but he rarely goes beneath the surface to show us how they feel, or how they make him feel.
