The Banality of Fear
msnbc.com
Saddam’s power doesn’t rest only on his family, or even on his intelligence apparatus. He has a vast bureaucracy of helpers
March 10 issue — The 19-year-old German beauty queen hoped to see President Saddam Hussein last week, but had to settle for what she called “a very long meeting” with his elder son, Uday.
THE NEXT MORNING over breakfast she spoke in such beauty-pageant banalities about her “mission of peace” that NEWSWEEK’s Melinda Liu might have closed that page in her notebook forever. But then a member of Saddam’s security services showed up. The interview “wasn’t authorized,” he warned. “Give me your notes. Where is your notebook?”
The aggressiveness of the threat and the irrelevance of the material were such that reading a few passages seemed a harmless compromise: “My primary aim,” Miss Germany had said, “was to give people some hope for peace.” The security man beamed and shook the correspondent’s hand. “You are a great journalist,” he said. “Sorry for the trouble. You must understand I’m doing my job.”
Just doing his job. The security man is a minor functionary performing a minor duty. But what anyone in Iraq quickly understands is that his job is fear. He is part of that vast apparatus of suspicion, terror, intimidation and collaboration that is, in fact, the essence of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Without such people—hundreds of thousands who spy for Saddam, kill for Saddam, inform on their neighbors for Saddam—there would be no Saddam. And if the dictator leaves? Or, more likely, is ousted by an American invasion? What happens then to this bureaucracy of fear? Planners in Washington are working frantically right now to figure that out.
WAR CRIMES
The Bush administration is pulling together a computerized database with the names of hundreds of Iraq’s civilian and military officials. Both the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA have teams of “leadership analysts” who follow the careers of important figures. In consultation with the State Department and the Justice Department, the Pentagon is trying to determine which Iraqis might be put on trial for war crimes; which might be sympathetic to the American mission or even collaborate with an invasion, and which are, perhaps, not certifiable villains, but not trustworthy allies either. The last category certainly is the largest.
In fact, apart from the relatives who are Saddam’s key henchmen, it’s almost impossible to determine who’s naughty and who’s nice. Saddam’s Iraq is not just another dictatorship. It is one of the last truly totalitarian states, in the tradition of Germany under Adolf Hitler or the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, whom Saddam is said to admire greatly. (“Fear,” said Stalin, “is a question of the mechanics of administration.”) Throughout Iraq one is surrounded by what Hannah Arendt, writing of the Nazis, called “the banality of evil.” Even the language of the regime is riddled with Orwellian newspeak that’s utterly untroubled by irony: Saddam’s first power base was the ruthless secret-police apparatus; he re-named it “the public-relations office.”
Family members are encouraged to spy on each other. “Even in the Iraqis’ bedrooms, every single word or movement is watched,” says Ibrahim Al Janabi, a former director of Iraq’s National Security Council and now a Jordan-based opposition leader. A woman exile, who wished not to be named, explains that police question kids on the streets to see if their parents have satellite dishes, which are banned. “You have to teach your child from a young age the way to lie, how not to talk, who not to speak to,” she says.
The state’s infrastructure was relatively efficient even before Saddam came to power. But after 1968 Saddam turned the entire system into the tool of the Ba’ath Party, and then turned the party into the tool of his family. The machine could be used for all sorts of purposes, including positive ones: Saddam invested heavily in education and infrastructure projects. “Like Stalin, he had an insatiable thirst for power and he was determined to drag Iraq into the 20th century,” writes biographer Said K. Aburish, “even if half of its population had to be sacrificed in the process.”
EVERYTHING IS WRITTEN DOWN
After 1980 Saddam’s focus was on war, as if he could no longer keep the apparatus working without some external fears to justify the internal ones. “This is a regime that holds itself together with the threat of massive violence,” says Mustafa Hamarneh, a political analyst at the University of Jordan. Yet it’s also a regime that is obsessively meticulous—so much so in the eyes of U.N. weapons inspectors that much of their job revolves around a paper chase. The Iraqis have said that they destroyed all their chemical and biological weapons, but they’ve never presented what chief inspector Hans Blix referred to last week as “credible evidence showing the absence of such items.” In a more chaotic country, no one would expect that such slips of paper had to exist. But in Iraq, “everything is written down,” says Al Janabi.
How will the United States replace Saddam’s “mechanics of administration” when he’s gone? Zalmay Khalilzad, President George W. Bush’s special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, told anti-Saddam leaders in the Kurdish north of the country last week that “no one wants Saddamism without Saddam.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others at the Pentagon talk about getting lists of party members and weeding them out. But even the denazification of Germany after World War II, often cited as a precedent, was never so thorough or quick as it’s been made to seem. As Arendt pointed out, of 11,500 judges working in West Germany in 1963, “5,000 were active in the courts under the Hitler regime.” The Nazis, remember, were in power for 12 years. The Ba’ath has ruled Iraq for 35.
It’s also very possible that once the apparatus of fear begins to crack, the regime will disintegrate the way the Soviet Union did after 1989. That’s why the Pentagon’s planners expect U.S. troops to be greeted as liberators. But when whole countries are run like prisons, the population tends to act the way inmates do in an uprising: they’re less interested in liberation at first than in settling scores, slaughtering their guards and each other. When totalitarianism ended in Yugoslavia, the country crumbled into bloody pieces. The Soviet Union eventually fractured into a dozen states.
If, as the Bush administration insists, Washington really wants to preserve Iraq’s “territorial integrity,” then far from replacing the Iraqi Army, or even the Ba’ath Party and the secret police, the United States could find itself rushing to preserve them in some fashion. After a few war-crimes trials for Saddam and his relatives, and removal of the Ba’ath Party name from office doors and stationery, the bureaucrats from Iraq’s fearsome past may be deemed vital to its democratic future. Remember what the security man said, because you’ll likely hear it often: he was just doing his job. |
