Faith, shame, and insurgency: life in occupied Iraq

Reason, March, 2004 by Steven Vincent

This sense of impotence and humiliation, exacerbated by every Humvee that rumbles down a Baghdad street and every Bradley Fighting Vehicle that ties up traffic, is the flip side to the pro-liberation sentiment I heard so often in Iraq. It helps explain the "thanks, America--now go home" syndrome observers frequently note. It also colors U.S. plans to hand over civil and military affairs to Iraqi officials as quickly as possible--giving them, the theory goes, a stake in their own future. But Iraqi attitudes may be more complicated than that.

Unlike the German acknowledgement of guilt for Hitler, Iraqis, I found, do not blame themselves for Saddam. To them, he is like a gunman who burst into their home, seized their family, and terrorized the neighbors--until the police finally stormed in and drove him out. Now, standing amid the ruins caused by the police raid, they say: "We weren't responsible for the maniac. You took it upon yourself to remove him. Thanks, but how soon are you going to repair our house?" They overlook the fact that from 1968 to 1980 Iraq lived happily under the control of the nationalist-socialist Ba'ath Party, reaping the benefits of a booming oil economy. (I heard numerous times about how "wonderful" Baghdad was in the 1970s.) Not until Saddam took full control of the nation in 1979 and launched the war on Iran--and then on the Kurds, and then on Kuwait, and then on the Shi'ites--did the Iraqis realize they were in the hands of a madman. By then it was too late.

"I hate Saddam! I hate Americans! I hate Iraqis--and I hate myself! I need a Valium!" cried one woman at the Hewar Gallery. It was, I thought, an apt summation of the mentality shared by many Iraqis today.

Despite Iraq's former claim to be the most "modern" culture in the Middle East--despite the presence today of high-tech gadgetry, Internet cafes, and multichannel cable TV in a Babel of languages--the country is in many ways reminiscent of America in the 1950s. In the absence of a civil rights mentality, ethnic, racial, and religious differences are seen as legitimate and natural grounds for discrimination. Ecological consciousness is minimal: Baghdad is a polluted, sprawling city where garbage cans are few and littering a way of life. Women generally live terribly restricted lives, wrapped in black head-to-foot sheets no matter the temperature, excluded from public activities, and confined mostly to the kitchen and the bedroom. (Although Iraqi women once had more extensive rights than women in many other Middle Eastern countries, they lost ground in the 1990s as Saddam increasingly adopted Islamic law to placate his restive Shi'a population. Today they are among the most oppressed women in the region, with illiteracy rates climbing above 75 percent.) Gay rights are unknown.

So is postmodernism. The philosophical tone among the secular educated is a kind of Eastern Europe-style existentialism, dominated by ideas of repression and political cynicism, with a direct connection to the absurd. In 1995, for example, Saddam's son Uday shot his uncle in the leg over a business dispute. To teach his kid a lesson, Saddam had him stripped of power and imprisoned--but then oversaw the creation of "spontaneous" protests demanding that he free Uday and reinstate him to his former position. "We were hauled out of school, given signs and told to shout out our love for Uday, whom, of course, we all hated," Pasha remembered. (Father Saddam, of course, relented and freed his reckless scion.) Today, a suicide car bombing becomes the occasion for shockingly nihilistic jokes about body parts and explosives. "You have to laugh about the absurdity of these things," Hasan said, "or you will go mad."