Empires forged by the sword need their heroes. One of Islam’s most enduring figures is an eighth-century general, Tariq ibn-Ziyad. It was he who brought the religion of the Prophet into Christian Europe for the first time. In 711, Tariq crossed from North Africa to Gibraltar. He set his ships afire. Then he shouted to his men: “The sea is behind you, and the enemy is in front of you. By God, there is no escape for you save in valor and determination.”
If Saddam Hussein is a new Hitler in George Bush’s eyes and a reincarnation of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar in his own, a more evocative model might be Tariq ibn-Ziyad. Saddam, too, is turning a regional conflict into a confrontation with the West. Arrayed against him are troops from three of the postwar Big Four, including about half of the U.S. Army forces trained to take on the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Like Tariq, he appears willing to cut off his lines of retreat. And in the process he is gambling his own life and the lives of his people. Whatever is said against the Iraqi dictator, it cannot be argued that he lacks valor, or determination.
The absence of either trait would be fatal in a man of Saddam’s towering ambition. Born in 1937 into an illiterate peasant family from a hardscrabble village near the northern Iraqi town of Tikrit, he knew deprivation from infancy. From an abusive stepfather he learned to nurse a grudge. An admired uncle with a pro-Nazi past taught him to hate the country’s British overlords. As an overaged secondary-school student in Baghdad in the mid-1950s, Saddam found himself drawn to the Arab nationalism sweeping the region, and developed a taste for political intrigue. At the age of 20 he joined the secular and vaguely socialist Baath Party. Two years later he took part in a failed attempt on the life of military strongman Abdul Karim Kassem, himself installed by a coup just 15 months earlier. The official account today claims Saddam suffered a leg wound, but dug the bullet out with a penknife and escaped by riding a donkey across the desert. Other witnesses say co-plotters shot him by accident.
Saddam’s essential style was already clear. He took risks. He was remorseless: in 1958, he reportedly murdered a Kassem supporter, a man who happened to be his own brother-in-law. He had political instincts well suited to his conspiratorial environment. In 1963, after a period of exile in Cairo, he began his rise in his party. He did propaganda work and organized secret police. When the Baathists came to power in a 1968 coup, Saddam became deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council under President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. From the outset, he seems to have been the real ruler–a position ratified in 1979, when Bakr handed him the presidency. He was 42. Saddam–a name translatable as “he who confronts”–staged a vicious purge.
In a public “confession” videotaped and later sent to leaders in other Arab countries, a member of the command council implicated himself and four colleagues in a plot against the leadership. Saddam, theatrical tears welling from his eyes, had guards drag them from the room. Then he told other party leaders to form up the firing squads themselves. In all, says the 1989 book “Republic of Fear” by the pseudonymous Samir al-Khalil, perhaps 500 top Baathists were executed in the summer of 1979. Some tales about him–such as one that has him personally murdering a Health minister who questioned his conduct of the Iran-Iraq War–may be apocryphal. But they doubtless have their uses, and Saddam appears to do nothing to discourage them. His use of internal terror has consolidated his personal power to an extent rivaled only by his closest neighbor and bitterest enemy, Syria’s Hafez Assad.
Saddam’s ambitions go beyond personal aggrandizement. “Our nation has a message,” he once proclaimed. “That is why it can never be an average nation. Throughout history our nation has either soared to the heights or fallen into the abyss through the envy, conspiracy and enmity of others.” It is clear which alternative Saddam envisions for his own regime, Iraq’s copious oil revenues have allowed him to assemble the Arab world’s largest military machine, and at the same time to achieve a surprising degree of modernization. Housing standards are improved beyond comparison with the mud hut Saddam himself grew up in. The country has a network of new roads. There is less hunger: the daily per capita calorie supply increased by 59 percent between 1965 and 1985. Illiteracy is down from more than half when he came to power to 11 percent now, according to official estimates. These gains are being eroded by the combination of sanctions and earlier inflation caused by the Iran-Iraq War. But for a while at least, Saddam should be able to place the blame elsewhere.
For all his brutality in the political realm, Saddam has relaxed some traditional Muslim strictures. Iraqi artists hang nudes in state-owned galleries. In contrast to Saudi Arabia, where women are forbidden even to drive cars, Iraqi women are guaranteed equal pay for equal work and enjoy paid maternity leave. There is limited religious freedom. Some progressive Iraqis see even the bloody eight-year stalemate with Iran as a success because it held back the forces of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Islamic fundamentalism. “Without us, the whole Middle East would be wrapped in a chador,” says ceramic artist Nuha al-Radi in Baghdad. “I am against the repression,” she adds, “but we would never have come up in the world if we didn’t have a stiff, strong leader.”
Strong leadership means fulfillment of destiny, according to Saddam. History, he thinks, decrees it: as the modern embodiment of ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, Iraq is naturally the dominant power in the region stretching from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea. It is a region that sits atop 65 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, and contains the Suez Canal. Western interests here are so vital that it has been Western policy since World War I to make sure no one nation ever gained a stranglehold. This meant striking a balance between the two regional powers, Iraq and Iran. In 1980, Saddam decided to upset the balance, and attacked Iran.
In purely military terms, it was a bad gamble. Not until 1988 did the Gulf War end, more from exhaustion than anything else. The casualties were appalling: by some reports, 120,000 Iraqi soldiers died, and 300,000 lay wounded. But in political terms, it was a bonanza. Accepting a ceasefire, Khomeini said, was “more lethal to me than poison.” The war crippled Iran. Iraqi air power devastated Iranian oil facilities. The Iranian Army has yet to recover. Meanwhile, Iraq emerged with the largest, most experienced military in the region. And it held off the ancient Persian enemy. Saddam paid a heavy price, but the war’s end left his country preeminent in the gulf region. As a result, Saddam is respected (if not always loved) in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world. And respect is perhaps this gambler’s greatest winning so far. When he said last spring, “By God, the fire will eat up half of Israel if it tries anything against Iraq,” a groundswell of pride followed. “[He] awakened the desire in every Arab soul for a glorious Arab stand,” said the progovernment Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustour. “His combative tone awakened every Arab’s longing to respond to his nation’s enemies with language not used for a long time.” Saddam’s brutal invasion of Kuwait in August dispelled much of this admiration, especially after refugees reached other Arab capitals with tales of murder and pillage. But his stark approach to the new threat from the West still carries appeal. “Since Camp David, we’ve had too much wisdom, too many calculated steps and too much cowardice,” says Jordanian novelist Moness Razzaz. “A hero always presents two choices: to win or to lose.”
Either way, if war breaks out, the tremors will shake the entire Arab world. Saddam is doubtless counting on this. A principal theme of his post-invasion speeches has been the implacable opposition of the West to the Arab and Muslim “masses.” In one speech attacking the gulf states for participating in a West-led division of oil wealth that retards the growth of Arab power, he said: “The colonialists … to ensure their petroleum interests … set up those disfigured petroleum states. Through this they kept the wealth away from the masses of this [Arab] nation.” It was an open invitation for revolt if bombs start raining on Arab homes. War could increase Saddam’s stature even in death. “If you have America, and that’s who we are really talking about, destroying Saddam just to get Kuwait back,” says Lutfi Kholy of the quasi-official Al-Ahram newspaper in Cairo, “he will become a martyr, stronger dead than alive.”
In fact, many Middle East veterans think that no matter what the outcome, the landscape is forever altered. “The old game is over; 70 years of Arab history is finished,” says Hans-Heino Kopietz, a Middle East specialist based in London. “Saddam Hussein has opened a massive can of worms that no one can control.” Says Boutros Boutros Ghali, minister of State at Egypt’s Foreign Office: “The real problem for the Middle East is not the gulf crisis per se, but the problems we will face after this crisis is ‘solved’.”
Every society takes occasional refuge in myth, and for many Arabs that myth was “Pan-Arabism,” or “Arab unity.” It is a natural outgrowth of a common language–one popular definition holds that an Arab is “one whose mother tongue is Arabic”–and a shared religion with strong universalist claims. But Arab unity was always honored more in rhetoric than reality. Saddam weakened it further by mounting modern history’s first invasion of one Arab state by another. “Pan-Arabism is dead, and so are its adherents,” says one angry Saudi Arabian diplomat. “In future we are not even going to pay lip service to Arab solidarity or to former ‘friends’.” At the very least, says Taher Masri, a Palestinian who has served as Jordan’s Foreign minister, “whatever Saddam did, right or wrong, has brought to the surface many of the hidden feelings and hidden conflicts within Arab societies.”
In the short term, Saddam seems to have overestimated the Arab support he could command. He split the Arab world broadly into two. Some countries took sides against him outright, Egypt and the gulf states in particular. Others are uncomfortable with the takeover of Kuwait but are even more opposed to the presence of Western forces on Arab ground. Jordan, equivocal as always, is a special case. Trapped between Iraq and Israel, King Hussein has little choice but to vacillate if he wants his minority Hashemite regime to survive. Syria is special, too: Hafez Assad, with territorial designs of his own, has fallen in with the West and its Arab allies, even while denouncing the United States as a stalking horse for Israel.
The long-term prospect is for destabilization in a region well known for instability. Saddam does enjoy support among the disillusioned and disenfranchised of the Arab world: many Palestinians, fundamentalists and urban poor. How would they react if Saddam went down to decisive, humiliating defeat? In the years following the trauma of the Six Day War in 1967, popular discontent led to radical changes of government not only in Iraq but in Syria and Libya as well. Jordan spun briefly but bloodily into civil war beginning in “Black September” of 1970. Frustration stemming from the loss of Jerusalem fed the growth of fundamentalism.
In the current crisis, says political-scientist Saad Eddin Ibrahim of the American University in Cairo, “both types of traditional Arab regime–the conservatives such as Saudi Arabia and the modern despots such as Saddam and Hafez Assad-are going to be weakened … A political vacuum is being created.” At greatest risk is Hussein of Jordan. He faces a population that, even before refugees began arriving from Kuwait, was 60 percent Palestinian. Many are suffused with a fatalism that breeds recklessness–already evidenced by popular support in Jordan for Saddam’s do-or-die confrontation with the West. “It’s like a sick man, he wants an answer from the doctor,” says novelist Razzaz in Amman. “Knowing he has no chance is easier than not to know at all.” Jordan’s economy is collapsing, thanks to both sanctions and a withdrawal of Saudi support. Some Saudis even talk privately of selling Hussein out to a plan long cherished by right-wing Israelis: an independent Palestinian state on the East Bank of the Jordan River. “It would be much simpler,” says one Saudi official in Riyadh, “to negotiate a readjustment of boundaries on the West Bank between Israel and whoever is in power in Amman than to negotiate into existence an entirely new country called Palestine.” Such a sentiment would have been unutterable before the crisis.
The future of the remaining gulf monarchies seems more secure. But the Saudis especially may have to tolerate a degree of modernization in their rigidly traditional society. In part, it is already underway. Since the invasion, the government has eased press restrictions. Political debate, at least in private, is energetic. “We have to hear the voice of the people more clearly,” says Prince Nawwaf bin Abdul Aziz, a brother of King Fahd. The new system, he adds, will “definitely not be one man, one vote. In Saudi Arabia we do not want to elect people who just want to hear their own voices.” In short, enough is enough: in November an attempt by some Saudi women to assert rights simply by driving their cars met with a firm government rebuff.
Some Arab optimists foresee a democratizing trend like the one that transformed Eastern Europe in 1989. “I think this crisis could be like a storm in the desert,” says Salah Bassouni, an Egyptian diplomat turned entrepreneur. “The sand rises very quickly, but also settles very quickly. When Saddam is gone, who will there be left to support extremism?” A few encouraging signs do exist. Kuwait’s royal family now acknowledges that greater openness will be the price of restoration. The Kuwaiti resistance will insist on reviving the Parliament the emir shut down in 1986. “Life is going to change completely when we get back,” says Barah al-Sabah, the daughter of Kuwait’s last Interior minister. “The pampering we once knew will disappear.”
Still, the Middle East is a region with virtually no experience of democracy. Not one sitting Arab ruler reached office through genuine election. Few countries enjoy any of the economic and social preconditions of democracy–regular economic growth, a large and stable middle class. Political and religious intolerance may also prove a problem, as it has in Eastern Europe. “Democracy cannot be constructed in 24 hours,” agrees Mahmoud Riad, a former Egyptian Foreign minister and top bureaucrat in the Arab League. “[But] I believe Arab leaders have learned a lesson from what has been going on in the gulf. "
Freedom is not freedom for moderates alone. “You would be wrong to assume democracy would be the only alternative if the old regimes fell,” says Muhammad Heikal, the highly respected Egyptian journalist. “There is a much better-organized alternative already waiting, and that is … fundamentalism.” Even before the gulf crisis began, the forces of fundamentalism were gaining ground throughout the Arab world. In the occupied territories, the Islamic movement Hamas was challenging the Palestine Liberation Organization to the point of actually claiming leadership of the uprising, or intifada. In Jordan in late 1989, the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies won 34 of the 80 seats in the lower house–a show of strength that took the king by surprise. Last week that Parliament approved a law preventing women from inheriting as much land as their brothers, sweeping away property rights in effect since the land now called Jordan was under Ottoman Empire control.
The movement is spreading through North Africa, too. Last summer the Muslim fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front won unexpected victories in Algeria’s local elections and emerged as the main opposition to President Chadli Benjedid’s National Liberation Front. Already, the fundamentalists are enforcing Islamic dress codes in towns they control and banning the sale of alcohol. Informal gangs of Islamic enforcers disrupt parties and have tried to tear down satellite dishes that receive broadcasts of striptease shows on Italian television. Ali Belhadj, a leading preacher in Algiers, says that “Our goal is not … the provinces, but the restoration of the caliphate and the rule of the Book of God throughout the Islamic nation.” Next door in Tunisia last week, the government charged 102 fundamentalists with plotting sabotage and assassination.
Any surge of fundamentalism would imperil moderate Arab hopes for what Egyptian officials call “a new Arab order” in a post-Saddam world. Already, in discreet talks involving the United States along with Egypt and the gulf states, Arab leaders have voiced tentative proposals for an all-Arab collective security structure along the lines of NATO. Several have argued for a gulf “Marshall Plan,” in which the oil states undertake guaranteed transfers of wealth to poor Arab countries. Countries like Saudi Arabia “must win the battle of the masses and prevent demagogues like Saddam from exploiting the rich-poor divide,” says former Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir. A new security arrangement would not, however, entail the breakup of Iraq. No Arab nation welcomes a revival of Iranian ambitions to dominate the gulf. Few would want the Shiite Muslim majority in Iraq to overthrow the current Sunni ruling elite. Unleashing Kurdish separatism in Iraq would be troublesome to three other countries with Kurdish minorities–Turkey, Iran and Syria.
Crucial to the success of such an arrangement is minimal American participation. Some U.S. help will be necessary if the Palestinian question is to be solved. The United States has long maintained an offshore military presence, which can serve as a tripwire. Kuwait has said it would accept ground forces, but other Arabs warn that would only elicit more demagoguery. “People [already] fear the Americans are not going to go away,” says Ibrahim in Cairo. “You have to remember you’re in a region where people talk about the Crusades as if they were yesterday.”
If it ends quickly, though, the deployment to the gulf could make the opposite point. The willingness for the first time to sacrifice Western lives might suggest to Arabs how important they are now, and how powerful they might become with the will to act in concert. Saddam Hussein would then in a sense have won his gamble–for his kindred if not for himself.
