Faith, Shame, and Insurgency

Life in occupied Iraq

Steven Vincent from the March 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

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 cafés, 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."

Faith in Iron-Fisted Kings

In other ways, Iraqis' consciousness goes back even further -- to the iron-fisted kings of their Babylonian heritage. Many Iraqis told me that as much as they hated Saddam, they still needed a strongman like him to keep their "ungovernable nation" -- which really isn't a nation but a colonialist expediency created by the British in 1922 -- from fracturing into disparate parts. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the Kurds and Sunnis and Christians and Turkomans ever working together. Then there are the Shi'a Muslims, who comprise some 60 percent of the population and probably hold the future of Iraq in their Islamic hands. On top of all these differences is the terrorism, which, as I write this, seems on the verge of breaking out of control (although Saddam's capture may dampen the will of the insurgency).

The obstacles to democracy posed by these attitudes and social divisions were only heightened by errors the United States made in the immediate aftermath of the war, many Iraqis say. These included the failure to "shoot a few looters" to deter others, disbanding the Iraqi police and army, and stripping former Ba'athists of their jobs before securing order in the country (suddenly unemployed, many Ba'athists joined the fedayeen out of desperation, the theory goes). "It's been downhill since" is the gloomy assessment of Hassan Fattah, editor of the English-language newspaper Iraq Today. "Inevitably, the liberation became an occupation." An occupation, one should add, directed from a heavily defended compound in central Baghdad that is physically, politically, and psychically remote from the average Iraqi.

I don't mean to overstate the problems facing the U.S. in Iraq. Still, it bothers me to see supporters of the war assume that events are going better than the "biased," "liberal" media depict them. That may be true sometimes, but not always. Iraq is too complicated for such simple analysis -- a fact I admit I had not sufficiently considered when I stood up to endorse the war. Now, when I'm asked if the U.S. can succeed, I can only join others in answering: "We must. The prospect of failure in Iraq is too catastrophic to conceive." It's not a policy so much as a statement of faith: that the center will hold, that democracy and freedom will triumph, that tyrants cannot long escape accountability and justice. But if it seems foolish, as it does to increasing numbers of people, to risk American lives and treasure on such an abstract concept, there are others who are risking their lives on something even less substantial: American public opinion.

At the former Iraqi Officers Club, now a base for the Florida National Guard, I interviewed Pasha and a number of other Iraqi men who serve as translators for the U.S. Army. It is an extremely hazardous job: More than 25 translators have died, many by assassination at the hands of fedayeen who consider them traitors. These linguists know they are marked for death, yet they continue to do the job. "We want to help rebuild Iraq," they explained.

I asked them if they ever thought about South Vietnam. When I was there in 1993, I met several Vietnamese who had worked for the American military, including a few translators. Left behind by the U.S., these men spent 10 years in "re-education camps" and were now pulling rickshaws in Saigon. Did the Iraqis worry that a similar fate might befall them?

"Oh no," they told me. "We have faith in the United States." Or, as another translator put it to me, in words that still make me shiver, "Our fates lie with you now. We know Americans will never abandon us."