On Borrowed Time

Consulted on suitable bombing targets by an Air Force general just before the Persian Gulf War, former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins replied that he didn’t have many ideas on what to blow up but could offer some insights on Iraqi politics and Saddam Hussein, whom he had known for years. The general politely declined the offer, indicating that such analysis was considered irrelevant among the war planners. “You see,” he explained to the veteran diplomat, “this war has no political overtones.”

Fortified by willful ignorance, the United States and its allies went to war with one straightforward political objective for Iraq: Kill its president. The chosen instruments were laser-guided bombs rained on Saddam’s bunkers in the early weeks of the war and assassination plan cloaked in euphemisms about “targeting command and control centers” but confirmed by National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft after the war. The scheme failed, thanks to the Iraqi leader’s foresight in moving into an unremarkable house in a middle-class Baghdad suburb at the outbreak of hostilities, and the U.S. has been grappling with the consequences ever since.

In fact, little has changed since then-President George Bush issued his infamous cease-fire order on Feb. 28, 1991. There have been few alterations in the cast of characters, from Saddam himself and his more visible henchmen (except, of course, his favorite and son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, murdered after unwisely returning from exile in 1996), to the leading lights on the home team, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The same questions that echoed around high-security situation rooms 11 years ago are still being asked and left unanswered today: Who would rule Iraq after Saddam? Would the state dissolve, to the profit of the Iranians and other neighbors? What would our Arab allies make of a U.S. offensive? Is Iraq really a threat to us anyway?

Without apparent regard for these deafening political overtones, U.S. military preparations for Desert Storm: the Sequel are grinding forward (notwithstanding persistent foot dragging by the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Assuming for the sake of argument that the operation goes ahead some time next winter, those involved would do well to pack Sandra Mackey’s “The Reckoning,” an admirably lucid history of Iraq, in their knapsacks. Passing through the days of the ancient Babylonian and Assyrian empires, whose glorious legacy has been disinterred by recent Baghdad rulers, notably Saddam himself, whenever they find it useful, she devotes keen attention to the mosaic of peoples and cultures that the British hammered into a state for their own convenience in 1923. In particular, Mackey charts the evolution of Iraqi Shiism, which, she points out, became the dominant Muslim sect in what is now southern Iraq only in the 19th century, generating a center of resistance to the Sunni Ottoman Turkish empire, which in turn structured its local rule on the Sunni Arab minority.

The British infamously encouraged Arab nationalism as a weapon against the Ottomans in World War I, before welshing on the deal by dividing up Arab lands with the French as spoils of victory. Greedy for its abundant oil reserves, the British made sure to garner Mesopotamia, as the area was then known, which they then cobbled into a new country they called Iraq; to rule they selected a king, Faisal I, a veteran of the Arab revolt who happened to be conveniently unemployed. For Faisal’s coronation, his British sponsors hurriedly constructed a throne out of packing cases still carrying the imprint “Asahi Beer,” while a British military band played “God Save the King,” there being as yet no Iraqi national anthem.

Nor was there much of a country. The Kurds inhabiting the northern mountains objected to their inclusion in the new entity and had to be brought into line with poison gas dispensed on villages by the (British) Royal Air Force. The Shiite majority was hardly less disaffected, thanks to its exclusion from power, which was reserved for the Sunni elite together with a clique composed of the king’s old friends from the days of the revolt against the Turks. The mass of people in the countryside owed allegiance more to their tribal leaders than to the artificial administration in Baghdad. At the lower end of the social order, the peasantry, particularly the Shiites, lived in privation exacerbated by extreme social inequality: In 1947 two-thirds of the land was owned by just 2,500 people. Not long before he died, a weary King Faisal complained that “There is still ... no Iraqi people, but an unimaginable mass of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise up against any government whatsoever.”

Mackey is always sure-footed in charting these social tensions while keeping us engrossed in what is often a tale of murder, hatred, intrigue, massacre and occasional entertaining absurdity. The favorite sport of the playboy King Ghazi, Faisal’s successor, for example, was to wire up cigarette boxes, drink trays and other household items in the palace so as to give electric shocks to guests who touched them. The leader of the Kurdish Barzani tribe was killed in 1908 when his followers threw him out of an upstairs window “to test if he was the Mahdi and if, as such, he could fly.”

Ultimately the creaky edifice of the monarchy collapsed in the very bloody 1958 revolution, ushering in a decade of military rule with the once obscure Baath Party remorselessly extending its influence, thanks in large part to the ruthless proficiency in intelligence and torture of a professional assassin and a Sunni Muslim named Saddam Hussein. In 1968 the Baath Party stepped in to take power. Saddam was already the power behind the throne before formally seizing the presidency with a bloody purge in 1979.

It’s a dark and macabre story, and while Mackey brilliantly packages the complicated details, she does not lose sight of her underlying theme: Iraq’s lack of a national identity, as denoted by the continuing disaffection of the Kurds and Shiites with domination by the Sunnis, most notably Saddam’s henchmen from his hometown of Tikrit. Even so, Mackey perhaps makes a little much of divisions among the communities, leaving the impression that they have been at one another’s throats for centuries. In fact, their disputes have been with the central government, not with one another. The present state of Iraq may have been made up of three formerly separate Turkish vilayets but, even under Ottoman rule, they were closely connected by trade and by tribes and clans who had people in all three.

The contemporary history of Iraq that she relates will be a more familiar tale to many readers: the eight-year war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait and the sanctions that followed the Gulf War. As she points out, the embargo has killed a lot of Iraqis, especially children, while corrupting Iraqi society, creating a lost generation of young people who have known only war and deprivation and, ironically, teaching the Iraqi people that the U.S. may be as much their enemy as Saddam himself.

The ultimate cruelty of sanctions has been of course that, despite public protestations in Washington to the contrary, they were never intended to lead to the overthrow of Saddam. Rather the aim, as it was explained to me at the CIA in 1991, was to keep Iraq weak (with the bonus of keeping Iraqi oil off the market to the benefit of our Saudi and Kuwaiti allies.) With a demonized Saddam still in power in Baghdad, the policy was relatively easy to sell.

This approach was endorsed by at least one influential ally. As Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, then Israeli deputy chief of staff, explained in a Maariv interview in 1992, “ ... Iraq will always be the same, bent on defying the entire world. Therefore, if I have to choose between a boycotted Iraq with Saddam and an Iraq without Saddam again supported by the entire world, then I opt for Saddam, because Saddam will never be helped by anyone.”

With pronouncements like this floating around, it is little wonder that many Iraqis were able to reach the conclusion that the United States and Israel were not only happy to have Saddam stay in power but that there was actual collusion between the dictator and his alleged enemies. “I tell you, Mr. Andrew,” friends have whispered to me in Baghdad, “Saddam Hussein is an agent of your CIA, and he is guarded by agents of the Israeli secret service!” Given that the CIA was active in supporting the February 1963 coup that gave the Baath its first foothold to power (“We had all the Is dotted and Ts crossed on that one,” the former head of the agency’s Mideast division once told me with considerable satisfaction) and may have rendered further assistance thereafter, this apparently implausible notion does not sound so farfetched from an Iraqi perspective.

The United States did make some half-hearted attempts to sponsor a coup in Baghdad during the 1990s, all easily dealt with by Saddam’s vigilant agents. Only since the advent of the second Bush administration has rhetoric been supplemented by what appears to be serious planning for military action. As President George W. Bush has remarked with fatuous braggadocio: “We’re taking him out.”

There is, however, little sign that any serious thought has been given to the kind of Iraq that would emerge from the rubble, and Mackey has dark forebodings that the country may be torn apart in the process. Her critical observations on the evident link between a renewed war with Iraq and America’s unquestioning support for Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian subjects are sure to draw criticism in this country, though the Arab world will have no trouble in making the connection. She pleads for American policymakers “to understand the real Iraq” rather than proceeding on the basis “of some exaggerated expectations that the removal of the despot of Baghdad will solve all of Iraq’s problems and all the challenges to the United States in the Persian Gulf.”