Shame and Honor, Terribly Twisted: A central truth of Arab culture is on full display in Iraq

National Review, April 21, 2003 by David Pryce-Jones

Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party loyalists are fighting for their lives. The conventions of war mean nothing to these masters of brutality and ruse. They employ death squads to massacre their own people in order to prevent them from accepting food and water from coalition forces. Dressed as civilians, they hide behind women and children, and open fire in the certain knowledge that any return of fire must claim innocent victims. They place anti-aircraft weapons in or near schools and hospitals and markets, and use ambulances to convey arms. Then they blame coalition forces for casualties that they have made sure will occur. Young Iraqis, presumed to be defectors, have been found shot dead with a bullet in the back of the head. As Saddam himself said in a perfect summary of the perverted logic of mass intimidation and terror, "We will see how many Iraqis the Americans are prepared to kill."

Ruling a population of some 22 million, he himself is already responsible for the death of between 1 and 2 million of them, almost literally decimation, with another 4 million driven into exile. Among other refinements of torture, his Ba'ath party loyalists have stuffed living victims feet first into shredders. Accusing one unfortunate man of wishing to flee the country a few days ago, Ba'athists tied him to a lamppost, cut his tongue out, and obliged the local residents to watch him die slowly. Saddam and his henchmen will commit every conceivable crime in order to survive in power. Should he see advantage in using weapons of mass destruction, he will. Superior power alone is able to constrain him.

Yet people still seem taken by surprise. Lt.-Gen. William Wallace, commanding V Corps, reacts to the cruelties before his eyes by saying, "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against." Deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz comments, "We probably did underestimate the willingness of this regime to commit war crimes." Those accustomed to democratic procedure habitually show complete lack of comprehension of the mechanics of tyranny. Arab regimes are all tyrannies, some hard, some soft, depending on the personality of the ruler and the demands he makes on his police and security apparatus. It is not terror as such that singles out Saddam among other Arab rulers, but the exceptional scale on which he deploys it. The late President Hafiz Assad of Syria ordered artillery to raze the Syrian city of Hama, killing an unknown number of thousands and cementing over their corpses. In the Algerian civil war, between 100,000 and 120,000 people have been killed, many of them villagers whose throats are slit by their attackers. Yasser Arafat's Palestinians fire on their own people, dispatch mobs to lynch supposed collaborators with Israel, and organize suicide bombers to kill innocent bystanders. On one occasion in the current intifada, two Israelis lost their way in the West Bank town of Ramallah, and were captured and beaten to death in the local police station. Smiling, one of the Palestinian murderers then held up his blood-stained hands before a joyful crowd. Whooping Iraqis are to be seen on television dancing round the corpses of American and British soldiers who may well have been executed.

Arabs do not have some special bad character conditioning such behavior, needless to say. Generally speaking, they are hospitable and eager for friendship. Every country has its share of sadistic criminals, and they have to be restrained by the law. A tyranny, on the contrary, licenses sadistic criminals, empowering and of course rewarding them. "Law," said Saddam Hussein in a memorable utterance, "is two lines above my signature." Crime becomes the order of the day. The strong enrich and enjoy themselves, the weak endure or go to the wall. With undoubted cunning, Saddam has contrived to steal Iraq's oil wealth, make the country his private fiefdom, and enroll the Ba'ath party into a mass criminal enterprise. Would-be tyrants can learn from his example, as he learned from Stalin and Hitler.

Nothing like a nation-state, Iraq is a conglomeration of conflicting ethnicities and religious faiths, comprising Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds and Turcomen and Assyrians who are not Arabs, the Christian Chaldeans, and other minorities. These are laboratory conditions for the cultivation of a strongman who can hold together the different identities, and not for some benign philosopher-king, let alone a democrat. Iraqis have furthermore been indoctrinated to believe that they won their independence militarily from Britain, the colonial power between the world wars. Independence unfortunately did not mean freedom. But some of them do indeed see American and British forces as invaders of their land out to reimpose colonialism, and therefore to be fought. The phenomenon of nationalism without a nation-state to embody it is rather hallucinatory, but it may be a good augury that it is possible in the end to build a nation-state out of apparently incompatible religious and ethnic elements.