A different voice on Iraq

Out at Open Democracy, another kind of veteran, not a singer but 'a respected scholar-activist' recounts 'some of his personal encounters... with the tentacles of the republic of fear'. Fred Halliday:

The Ba'ath party had not just borrowed rituals from Europe's totalitarian regimes; it used their techniques of violence, fear, and the corruption of language. In April 1980, a filmed party meeting showed Saddam singling out inner-party rivals who were dragged from the room, then executed after show trials. He had learnt the most basic lesson of all dictatorships: that [it] is one thing to kill the guilty, but what really works is to kill the innocent. Saddam and his cronies attended these executions; members of the Ba'ath party, including students in Britain, were summoned to the London embassy to view a video of the occasion.

I have visited some unsavoury regimes – from Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran (where I saw 100,000 people march by shouting "Death to Liberalism" and realised that, among others, they meant me) to Ethiopia's Red Terror; but never have I sensed such fear as in Iraq. One could cut it with a knife. A professor said to me, resignedly: "When I open the paper in the morning I do not know if I have been appointed ambassador to the UN or condemned to death. In either case I would not know why".
.....
In September 1980, Saddam launched the Iran-Iraq war by invading Iran. It lasted for eight years and cost an estimated one million lives. This was by far the most destructive war in the modern Middle East (in the five Arab-Israeli wars, plus Israeli incursions into Lebanon and two Palestinian intifada, the total deaths are estimated at 70-80,000); and the second longest inter-state war of the 20th century, only two months short of the 1937-1945 Sino-Japanese conflict.

Fred also has a more personal complaint:

Leaving Baghdad at the end of that 1980 visit presented a problem. At every meeting I attended, the Iraqi host would give me a two-volume set of Saddam's speeches. It was too risky to do what one normally does and chuck them into the waste-paper basket. So I carried six pairs, twelve books, in my suitcase – intending to find them a suitable home in London university libraries… Arriving in the early morning at Heathrow airport, somewhat befuddled by the flight, I foolishly lent far over the luggage carousel to grab my bag. The disc slipped, the pain of this encounter with Ba'athism ran up my spine, and for a month I was flat on my back.

This, too, must be counted among Saddam's crimes.

(Via Ivan's Weblog.)