SINCE THE March 7 national elections in Iraq, we have watched the high drama and low comedy of the government-formation process: candidates disqualified and reinstated, fraud alleged, recounts ordered and results upheld, coalitions forming and shifting in bewildering variations. And when all of this is finally concluded and a new government is formed, it will face a huge agenda of unresolved issues: Kurdish-Arab tensions; disputed internal boundaries; corruption; challenges from neighbors; institutional development; friction among federal, regional and local governments—the list is virtually endless. The truth is that more than seven years after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq is still at the very beginning of this chapter in its long history.
IRAQ IS hard. It has always been hard, and it will go on being hard. In Islam’s first century, a rebellion of the Khawarij in Iraq (whose fundamentalist theology and inclination to violence resemble that of al-Qaeda) necessitated the dispatch of the Umayyad Empire’s most successful and ruthless general, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. He began a famous speech at the Kufa mosque with these words: “Ya ahl al-Iraq, ahl al-shiqaq wa al-nifaq” (“Oh people of Iraq, people of disunity and hypocrisy”). Iraqis quote him today with perverse pride—they are the toughest guys on the Middle Eastern block.
Some argue that whether it be Hajjaj at the turn of the eighth century or Saddam Hussein in the twenty-first, both were uniquely successful as rulers in the land of the two rivers because there were no limits to their use of terror and violence to maintain order. I was in Iraq early in my career, from 1978 to 1980. I was there when Saddam assassinated the founder of the Dawa Party (of which politician Nuri al-Maliki is a member), Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr. His supporters risked torture and death to plaster the walls of Baghdad with posters commemorating his death. I still have one. I was there when Saddam ordered the arrest and execution of his minister of planning and protégé, Adnan Hussein, for daring to contradict him at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council, then the supreme executive and legislative body in Iraq. Our driver was taken in the middle of the night and imprisoned for years for the crime of working for the Americans—and for being Kurdish. My neighbors were afraid to talk to me. It was, as Iraqi scholar and former exile Kanan Makiya so accurately described it, the “Republic of Fear.” From the highest officials to the everyman in the street, Saddam inspired a culture of terror. I served in police states before and after, but neither the Shah’s Iran nor the Syria of Hafez al-Assad remotely approached Saddam’s Iraq.
I returned to Baghdad in 1998 as the U.S. representative to UNSCOM’s special team charged with inspecting Saddam’s palaces for weapons of mass destruction—the first American diplomat in Iraq since 1990. I met Abd Hamoud al-Tikriti, Saddam’s personal secretary and one of the most feared men in the regime. He took delight in showing me the palaces of his boss’s two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan in 1995 and were brutally murdered following their return. I knew I was in the presence of the man who had arranged those murders—and countless others. I saw the physical fear on the faces of every Iraqi he encountered. I was back in Iraq in June 2003 when he was arrested. It was a satisfying moment.
Americans forget this heritage of fear. Iraqis do not. Virtually all of the current leadership is scarred by Saddam, in some cases literally. Ayad Allawi, whose coalition emerged from March’s election with the most seats in Iraq’s parliament, survived an ax attack by Saddam’s agents. He walks with a limp. Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani spent more than a decade in solitary confinement for refusing to assist Saddam’s nuclear program. Prime Minister al-Maliki got out just ahead of regime assassins. Other members of Dawa and his own family were not so fortunate. Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani survived Saddam’s notorious Anfal campaign against their people. Vice Presidents Tariq al-Hashemi and Adel Abdul Mahdi were hunted. Al-Hashemi lost two of his siblings to regime death squads. Such experiences make men tough. But they also make compromises difficult. There is a phrase in Pakistan—“two men, one grave.” It’s you or me. Losing an election can be far more serious than being forced out of office. It is a legacy that haunts Iraq.
