would have read him. The Marxist tradition has created many mass murderers, but it is hopeless at explaining them. It is not that Marxists have bad consciences about the mounds of corpses – in my experience they rarely do; rather, Marxism assumes that rational economic interests and class conflicts move the world and cannot cope with the lusts for power, murder and martyrdom. A typical left-wing analysis of Iraq from the Eighties argued that ‘a bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ which depended on ‘the depletion of the state’s resources, whether by legal, quasi-legal or illegal means’ ruled the country. It was a parasitic class which increased its wealth by fostering ‘dependence on the multi-nationals’ and ‘the militarization of the economy’. The forgotten writer was not all wrong, Saddam Hussein, like all other totalitarian dictators, needed loot to reward his followers and equip his armies. Without it, he would never have survived. Yet you can only get so far in explaining Saddam Hussein or any of the other great criminals of the twentieth century by looking at the economies of their countries, their distribution of favours to clients and the national traumas and humiliations that allowed them to seize power. Once you have exhausted all comprehensible reasons for a great crime there remains a gap. The ‘root causes’ take you to its edge, but then wave goodbye and leave you peering into an unfathomable abyss. The famines Stalin, Mao and the Ethiopian colonels unleashed, Pol Pot’s extermination of anyone who could read or write, Hitler’s annihilation of the Jews, gypsies, gays and Slavs, Saddam’s regime of torture and genocide and the Islamist cult of death aren’t rationally explicable. You can cross over to the other side of the abyss only if you shrug off your reasonable liberal belief that every consequence has an understandable cause and accept that enthusiasm for the ideologies of absolute power isn’t always rationally explicable.
It took Makiya several years to realize he was looking through the wrong end of the telescope. He decided to call his exposure of Baathist Iraq Republic of Fear, and its first chapter was going to be on Iraq’s economy. As a good Marxist he believed that the ‘root causes’ of Saddam Hussein lay in the arrangement of classes and patterns of economic exploitation. The longer he researched, the lower down the book’s running order the chapter on economics fell. In the end, he binned it. His preconceptions were getting in the way.
Makiya also abandoned the pseudo-sophisticated journalist’s question, ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ He worked on the sensible assumption that despite ‘the proclivity of those in public office to propaganda, rhetoric, chicanery and lies, on the whole even they usually end up saying what they mean and meaning what they say’. He not only interviewed exiles, but also dug out the speeches of Saddam Hussein and the pamphlets of his supporters from obscure archives in London and New York and read them not as propaganda but as evidence of what his fellow Iraqis had to believe on pain of death.
He took on the Baath Party by paying it the compliment of taking what it said seriously.
A group of Arab nationalists founded the Baath (‘Renaissance’) Party in Damascus on 24 July 1943. Like the tightly organized totalitarian parties of inter-war Europe, it had a military structure which allowed it to operate as an underground army. It seized power in Syria in 1963, and remains in sole charge of the one-party state to this day. What happened to Syria was grim, but Makiya faced an organizational problem in describing the greater horror of what the Baath did to Iraq. To print all the available evidence of murder and bestiality would have turned Republic of Fear into an unmanageably large book that ran the risk of descending into the pornography of violence. With admirable restraint, he confined the snuff-movie side of Baathism to one relatively dry account of one small bout of extermination by Baathist forces written by a historian working from official sources. It read:
The Nationalist Guard’s Bureau of Special Investigation had alone killed 104 persons, the bodies of 42 of whom were found in 1963–64 buried in al Jazirah and al-Hawash districts. In the cellars of al-Nihayyah Palace, which the bureau used as its headquarters, were found all sorts of loathsome instruments of torture, including electric wires with pincers, pointed iron stakes on which prisoners were made to sit, and a machine which still bore traces of chopped-off fingers. Small heaps of bloodied clothes were scattered about, and there were pools on the floor and stains over the walls.
Those killings were in 1963, the year the Iraqi Baathists joined the Syrian Baathists in seizing power. The Iraqi army threw them out, but they returned in the successful putsch of 1968. By 1980, when Kanan’s father flew back to Iraq, Saddam Hussein had become the undisputed master of both party and state. By the time Americans and their allies overthrew him in 2003, the Baathists had murdered around 400,000 Iraqis in internal persecutions, while Saddam’s unprovoked wars against Iran and Kuwait led to the killing of a further one million or so. Baathists then joined with Islamists from al-Qaeda to form what delicate euphemists called the ‘insurgency’, and carried on murdering tens of thousands of Iraqis. The history of modern Iraq is of a systematic depredation and destruction of the human spirit that has lasted four decades. Future historians who decide to chart it are going to need strong stomachs.
The resemblances to European fascism and communism did not stop with the state-sponsored sadism of the all-powerful ruling party. The all-powerful party also had an all-encompassing totalitarian ideology. Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din, the Baath’s chief ideologues, were pan-Arabists who wanted a single state for all the Arabs of the Middle East. Theirs seemed a benign ambition at first glance, but nationalists always have the seeds of tyranny in them. They are just as likely to want to tyrannize their own people as their people’s enemies because their own people can let them down badly. The theory holds that the Arabs or the Germans or the Serbs are strong and brave, and ready by biological inheritance or cultural superiority to rule themselves and others. In practice, the people can be lazy and less than thrilled by the prospect of dying for the greater good of the nation. In these circumstances, their manifest destiny can be realized only if they obey orders.
Baathism allowed no room for malcontents who would contradict the party line. In a speech in 1977, Saddam Hussein told history teachers what the Baath expected of them:
Those researchers and historians who call themselves objective might very well be presenting different viewpoints and possibilities to explain one event … leaving it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions … The Baathist must never deal with history and all other intellectual and social questions in this way … They must take on the same specificity as our Baathist way; in other words, the writing of Arab history should be from our point of view with an emphasis on analysis and not realistic story telling.
The truth was what the Baathists said it was. Adults would have memories of different truths from before the Baathists took power, but the Baathists would be able to control their children and mould them into a new type of Arab, conditioned from infancy to obey. In Iraq’s case, indoctrination began at primary school where textbooks presented Saddam Hussein as Baba – ‘father’ – Saddam, an alternative object of love and loyalty to their parents. Spies watched to see if pupils participated in Baathist rallies and kept files on the political reliability of their mothers, fathers, grandparents and so on to cousins of the third degree.
The regime’s aim was to dissolve family bonds so children would be ready to turn against their parents. The wise Iraqi learned not to talk politics in front of the little ones. After the fall of Baghdad, the argument that Hind Aziz had with her 9-year-old daughter, Dalia, was typical of arguments all over the country. The child wanted to know why she was only now learning that Saddam was a killer.
‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’
‘I had to explain to her that if I did, she might have told her friends, and then Mummy would have been executed, Daddy would have been executed, and Grandpa would have been executed, too,’ the mother explained.
Her father showed an Australian journalist how deep the indoctrination had gone.
‘Who is your father, Dalia?’ he asked.
‘Baba Saddam,’ she replied, robotically.
Saddam’s punishment of parents wasn’t a corruption of power,