THE RECKONING: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein

By Sandra Mackey

W.W. Norton & Company. 389 pages

Reviewed by Paul William Roberts

Imagine if England went to war with Russia over a long list of grievances, including Russian military assistance to the Irish Republican Army, and that the war lasted a decade, ending inconclusively, with millions dead and the economies of both nations in tatters. Then imagine if England invaded Ireland, the United States went to bat for the Irish, and, when British forces refused to withdraw, launched air attacks that reduced London to rubble and the rest of the country to the pre-industrial era. Imagine next that, through the United Nations, Washington insisted the British surrender all weapons of mass destruction, sending in a team of inspectors to explore every military base in the country. Unsurprisingly, the weapons inspectors meet with little cooperation. So, imagine finally that the Americans urge the UN to impose trade sanctions on England so severe that they effectively terminate the entire British economy for the next ten years, causing widespread malnutrition, disease, and the death of some 500,000 children under the age of five. Oh, and while all of this is happening, the rest of the world, if it thinks about England at all, does not seem to think that any great injustice has occurred.

If you can imagine this far-fetched scenario, you may be able to grasp something of the tragedy that is modern Iraq. With a few notable exceptions, the media have acted for over a decade, and continue to act, as little more than propagandists and apologists for the largely western-held --- and U.S. –led --- position that maintains Iraq merely got what was coming to it, and that Saddam Hussein is really to blame. Sandra Mackey, a superb journalist and author of several other books on the Middle East, has always been one of the most notable of exceptions to the rule of a dumbed-down media, and in The Reckoning she attempts to provide the kind of context without which no discussion of Iraq can usefully take place. As a history of Iraq it is an admirable condensation of the salient details from a trip through time that begins over four thousand years ago, and provides more than sufficient material for any reader to feel he is fairly well-informed about the background to a political drama-in-progress. However, as a political assessment on the lines of ‘Whither Iraq?’ it reads suspiciously like a Republican foreign policy primer.

Since the 1991 Gulf War, the big question has always been: why did the US-led alliance leave Saddam Hussein in power if he was really such a menace to world peace? The usual answer --- never given directly --- is that it was feared an Iraq without Saddam’s iron fist to bully it into submission would fragment into a Middle Eastern version of the Balkans. Feared by whom? Well, presumably Washington, for a start, perhaps prompted by the House of Saud and the al-Sabahs of Kuweit. If we include the House of Bush among the oil royalty troubled by the prospect of uncertainty over the ownership of the planet’s richest sources of fossil fuel, we at least have a rational economic reason for events of the past two decades. And if Ms. Mackey would have pursued this route to its end --- for she certainly strolls down it a mile --- she would not be open to the criticism that her book is mere propaganda for the White House. Because, like the various secretaries of state forced to answer for America’s brutal treatment of Iraq, she can never really say what there is to fear in a Balkanization that would probably create a Kurdish state to the north, a Sunni Muslim state in the central area around Baghdad, and Shi’ite Muslim state to the south. True, she can say what there is in such a political outcome for the Sunni minority to fear --- in short, bloody revenge for Saddam’s oppression of the Kurds and the Shia --- but this does not take into account new global realities that would undoubtedly step in to curb such a retribution, no matter how richly deserved.

Ms. Mackey does an excellent job of portraying the birth of modern Iraq from the ashes of Ottoman Mesopotamia, showing the historical unlikelihood of the three major ethnic or tribal groups ever being able to agree on anything unless forced to do so. There has never been, she explains, anything approaching an Iraqi sense of national identity --- and, by implication, there never will be. But she fails to take into account the very historical realities she presents so well, acting as if the future was all contained in the past, rather than shaped by the past.

The perfidiousness of British and French dealings with the Arabs during the early part of the twentieth century is a thing of wonder, and in fact set the stage for Israel’s current plight far more than any action of the Jewish State itself. Lied to, cheated, swindled, it’s amazing that any Arab state has goodwill towards the West ---- yet many do. Iraq is not one of them, however, and understandably so, at least as Mackey tells it. The central issue has always been oil, and it cannot be stressed enough that, besides Saudi Arabia, Iraq possesses the richest fields of Arab D-grade oil on earth. Not all oil is black gold, but Arab D-grade is --- and, no matter how much oil any other country may have, the oil most in demand to run the machines of an industrial economy is D-grade, the Champagne of oils. Even when Britain limped away from its colonies to nurse a war-shattered economy back to health, in Iraq it left in place legislation that would be laughed out of the World Court these days: no matter what happened, the independent Iraqis were not to do anything against British interests, for example. Those interests, of course, were just oil. At the other end of the century, when the US, in George Bush’s repulsive phrase, “returned Iraq to the pre-industrial era” by relentlessly bombing its cities’ vital essentials --- the sewage treatment plants, the bridges, the power stations --- the real purpose was, again, to preserve the West’s supplies of D-grade oil. If nothing else has unified the Iraqi people throughout history, in my experience, this did --- and Sandra Mackey makes no mention of it.

Indeed, The Reckoning is most at fault for what it omits. Having told us precisely why Saddam Hussein went to war with Iran ---- the newly created Islamic state was supporting Kurdish terrorist factions intent on separatism --- Ms Mackey still acts as if the war were a mystifying and irrational event that in itself justified American retaliation. In reality, any western country would have done the same thing ---- and, in its own context, Britain is doing it in northern Ireland, as is the United States in Afghanistan. The most notable and egregious omission, though, is any discussion of the last meeting that took place between Saddam Hussein and the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, in the days before Iraq invaded Kuweit and all dialogue between Washington and Baghdad ceased, yet to resume. It is quite clear from the typescript of that meeting that Saddam asked permission from the US to invade Kuweit, and it is equally clear that Ambassador Glaspie, relaying Secretary of State James Baker’s words, gave him that permission. Defending herself in the New York Times against charges that she misunderstood Saddam, Glaspie stated that no analyst, whether in Riyadh or in Washington, thought Saddam would take all of Kuweit (they thought he would merely occupy the area that has long been a matter of contention between the two countries). By implication --- as I said in my own book on Iraq --- it seems that no one would have minded if Saddam took a bit of Kuweit. These questions have never been satisfyingly addressed by any administration since the war , and I was dismayed to find the entire subject absent from this book. It smacks of a political bias that utterly undermines the otherwise laudable intentions Mackey so clearly displays elsewhere.

Particularly good, for example, is her study in tyranny of Saddam himself. We see the stages through which he progresses from rebel to political insider, to man of the people, to Babylonian warlord, and to reclusive deity, for instance, each of them fully fleshed out with its own historical and political context. Nor is Mackey afraid to applaud Saddam’s considerable achievements, prior to the war with Iran, in turning Iraq into the most modern, successful and democratic of all the Arab countries, with advances in education and health-care that shamed many western countries and far surpassed anything in the Middle East outside of Israel. What we don’t see, unfortunately, is much of Saddam-the-good-friend-of-America. For good friend he once was, and indeed he viewed his war with Iran partly as a big favor to Washington, not the least in its protection of that great US ally, Kuweit, from the Islamic menace of Iran. In fact, the Kuweitis owed Saddam billions of dollars for this protection, and the debt, not to mention ancient territorial disputes, or the fact that Kuweit was drilling into Iraqi oil fields, played no small part in what led up to Iraq’s ill-fated invasion. Yet none of this modern history makes it into Mackey’s book, and one cannot help but assume it is because the book’s objective is to justify foreign policy decisions that are bungled and criminally inhumane enough as it is without throwing in further reasons to despise them.

The constant jockeying for position between Kurds, Shi’ites and Sunnis that is the history of Iraq over the last century becomes somewhat bewildering and wearying in Mackey’s hands, too; and one is tempted to speculate that this is also how it seems to those attempting to formulate an ‘Iraq Policy’ in Washington. For, to the best of my knowledge, there is no clear position beyond the protection of the oilfields at all costs. Even the notion that Saddam has been deemed essential to stability does not stand up to scrutiny. I know for a fact that there have been several attempts by the British to assassinate Saddam --- I dined not long ago with one of the SAS officers in charge of three such attempts --- and there is no reason to doubt that the US knew of and approved this technically illegal action.

Curiously, though, like the SAS officer, and like April Glaspie, James Baker, and now Sandra Mackey, one finally cannot help but admire Saddam Hussein, if only for the sheer gutsiness and true grit of his stance against the West ---- if not most of the world. After the disastrous war with Iran he erected in Baghdad a colossal triumphal arch modeled on his own arm holding a scimitar. After the Gulf War he also returned a hero, claiming victory ---- the only Arab to stand up against the might of America and walk away alive. It was not such an exaggeration, either. When the war started, Iraqis were jubilant, certain that this meant the end of Saddam and his brutal regime. They looked in childlike innocence to the West to rid them of the monkey on their backs. By the time the war was over, however, they were confused: why had their homes and their cities been bombed to smithereens, yet Saddam was still in power? When I visited the country two years ago, though, the mood had changed yet again. This time it was a weary hatred and suspicion of all things western that predominated.

We have turned their prosperous, modern state into a backward wilderness with no future and no hope ---- except Islam. If the policy was to undermine Islamist hegemony in oil country, it sure failed abysmally. To the southern Shi’ites, whose numbers comprised most of the army that lost a million or more dead in the war against Iran, the non-Arab Islamic state has probably never looked more attractive. But at the end of the day they are Arabs first and foremost, and the Iranians don’t like Arabs. To the Kurds, a Kurdish state without a share of the oil may be romantically desirable but it just doesn’t make geographic sense, and that doesn’t make economic sense. If the Kurds have tasted Saddam’s fury in chemical attacks that wiped out entire communities, they have also tasted more of the west’s scorn and perfidy. Just as the southern Shi’ites’ most recent bad experience is not the war with Iran but the betrayal of the US. Sandra Mackey mentions that President George Bush encouraged them to revolt against Saddam, then failed to deliver the promised back-up, resulting in the slaughter of many thousands at the hands of the Republican Guard. But she doesn’t mention the bitterness with which this and countless other betrayals back through the centuries live on in the Arab heart. For someone so obviously endeared to the Middle East and so impressively erudite on the subject of its history, this is simply puzzling. Yet it may well be that her book’s most useful addition to our knowledge of this history is its reflection of the puzzlement that ultimately reigns over Washington’s policy makers when they turn their attention to this part of the world, and particularly to Iraq.

It is hard to see ourselves as living in what will one day be history, but it is vital that we do so, and it is the job of journalists and writers to see that we can do so. If Sandra Mackey could bring to bear on the present the clarity she has about the past she would surely see that, with regard to Iraq, if not many other places, we are continuing to act like imperialists or colonizers in a post-colonial age. The more we attempt to remake the world in our own image, the deeper the resentment against us will grow. Iraqis view themselves, rightly, as an ancient people with a history that is as long as history itself. They realize that their star waned at least a millennium ago. We are the ones who need to realize that, as ascendant as it may be now, our star too will one day wane --- yet life will go on. Just as we will then appreciate the consideration of more powerful nations in leaving us to sort out our own problems, so we should understand that this is all the rest of the world wants from us now. Ironically, though, the forces of history are such that we are probably even now making the bed our great-grandchildren will have to lie in --- and curse us all their lives for its unbearable hardness. Far from the presumably intended indictment of Saddam Hussein, The Reckoning is ultimately a savage indictment of Euro-American exploitation of the Middle East, and the indefensible meddling in its affairs that continues and has no clear objective beyond self-interest. If for no other reason than this, the book is indispensable reading for anyone with an opinion on world affairs.

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Paul William Roberts is the author of The Demonic Comedy: Some Detours in the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and several other books on Middle Eastern history, as well as a novel and four screenplays. He lives in Canada.

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