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My Book: Saddam, The Roots the Rise and the Fall |
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Saturday, 22 March 2008 15:30 |
This is the first part from the first section of my book, the story of Saddam Hussein and his regime. The previous three installments were about the history of Iraq from man’s first civilization to the twentieth century the events of which were like a prelude to Saddam. I am going during the next few weeks to insert pieces from the narrative not necessarily as they appear in the book like from example next week’s piece that is going to be from the last section of the book in which I talk about my friends the desert rogues. The story is about the first unit from the American military who entered Saddam’s palace that he abandoned following the collapse of his regime.
Saddam One: the Origins of a Tyranny
Part a: the Formative Years
DEVELOPMENTAL psychology stipulates that what you are now is to a great extent the result of the experiences you accumulated and the events you have been through during the formative years of your life, the first ten. To grow into a normal person stipulates that you were born carrying a normal set of genes, in a descent and loving family and at peace with your environment. The savagery of Saddam’s treatment at the hands of his stepfather and his feeling that everyone was against him had far reaching effects on his character, a predilection for compensatory violence, a sense that no one however close could be trusted and that he was a braver, more intelligent and more valuable than anyone around him.
SADDAM Hussein is a psychological and a cultural aberration, which became a monstrosity. Saddam is often called mad, but he is not mad in the sense that he is deranged and disorganized and out of gear. Saddam is also not a psychologically normal individual even within the wide range of what is psychologically normal. Saddam is a malignant narcissist (narcissism is derived from the Greek mythology, Narcissus is a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection in water). A narcissist is some one who is totally absorbed in his own self, with a paranoid reaction to those around him, a lack of interest in or awareness of the suffering of others, the absence of anything that might be called conscience in the pursuit of his own devices and impulsions. It very definitely a highly dangerous personality configuration but it does not necessarily include loss of control, on the contrary the sufferer will often show control and rationality in a high degree but in the pursuit of his own paranoid needs.
SADDAM was born at Al-Awja, a small village which is located at a bend of the river Tigris (awja in Arabic means a bend) 8 KM south of Tikrit on the 28th of April 1937, in a poor but a very prominent family in the religious and political history of the Arabs, and that he was a descendant of no less a personality than Imam Ali the prophet’s son in law and the 4th Caliph of Islam. The boy the official story goes on was not born with a golden spoon in his mouth, he was an orphan, his father has died few months before his birth and that his mother was already re-married to his uncle as custom in those areas dictate. During his early years he sojourned between his maternal uncle’s house in Ttikrit and his stepfather’s, his early years were not easy, his family was very poor. In spite of his difficulties and abject poverty he was very generous and chivalrous. This was the official story, it was concocted by his propaganda machine in its efforts to create a hero, but this official story is strongly disputed, the realities are different.
SADDAM Hussein was born in a family of crooks and petty criminals; his mother has already remarried to his uncle before his birth, his father’s history is shrouded in secrecy, no one is absolutely certain of the date of his death. Hussein was rarely mentioned and he was most probably killed during some kind of an illegitimate act. The stepfather was a rough ignorant peasant, he was known as Hassan the liar who was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet in the struggle of supporting a rapidly growing family which included three boys and two girls and was looking on the orphan as an unwelcome burden and used to call him the son of a dog. To make things even worse the child was showing at a very early age increasing signs of rebellion and antisocial behavior which did not endear him to those around him, he was unpleasant to all involved and invited very frequent beatings. For his part Saddam was a loner famous for carrying an iron bar wherever he went, he would collect wood and make a fire and heat the iron bar and when it is it red hot he would run and stab with it the dogs, cats or any other stray animal who was unfortunate enough to make the mistake of coming within his reach. Saddam never knew any kindness except a little from his mother to whose memory he erected a big mausoleum in Tikrit when she died in 1982, the alleged father was never honored like that, he was forgotten.
THE boy had a maternal uncle in Tikrit who was at that time a junior army officer; the uncle will appear frequently in the later parts of this story. The uncle will assume very important government positions become a millionaire and would very frequently regale the nation and the world with his philosophies and his publications, one of their most significant was a ten page pamphlet entitled ‘Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies. The uncle has spent the last few years of the Second World War in a British prison because of strong and undisguised Nazi sympathies and active involvement in a coup attempt against the British in 1941, which was backed by the fascist regime in Germany. Hitler was exploiting the strong anti British feelings in the Arab world including Iraq for their failure to honor their commitments to them during the first world war and for helping the Jews in their efforts to establish a home in Palestine, the Arabs were promised the moon by Hitler like what the British did to them before but of course all that came to naught with the defeat of Hitler. In 1945 the uncle was out of prison, jobless and extremely bitter and frustrated, but his frustrations and bitterness found a very good outlet in the young boy, a curious and a confused mind who was sojourning between his stepfather’s house and that of the uncle. The two made a truly amazing couple, an embittered and greatly frustrated uncle and a very interested and attentive listener to the old man’s fantasies of old triumphs and the greater victories that he promised the boy, which are coming soon.
BY age ten the boy has become totally alienated to his home, his stepfather, his half brothers, and his life in the constricted environment in the Al-Awja. During one dark night when everybody was asleep he fled the stepfather’s house towards his uncle’s in Tikrit, en route during this fateful journey he passed through the dwellings of some of relatives, nomads who were greatly impressed by his single mindedness and courage and gave him a pistol which was his second and more prized weapon and officially inaugurated his entry into the profession he later on so efficiently mastered, murder and death.
SADDAM grew up convinced that only his iron stick would protect him, he used it against the other village children who taunted him with their accusations of illegitimacy. During the last meeting between the Kuwaitis headed by their crown prince and a delegation representing Saddam which was supposed to solve the escalating crisis between the two neighbors on the first of August and during a heated debate the head of the Kuwaiti delegation shouted across the table, if you are so poor that you needed the revenue from the Kuwaiti oil wells why don’t you send your mothers and daughters to the streets to earn you the needed cash, this was meant as a personal and a direct insult to Saddam and when he heard it he said the emir of Kuwait is not going to sleep in his palace tonight, at that very moment he gave the orders for the invasion of the smaller southern neighbor once again his response to the insult was by using the instrument that he has mastered, the iron stick.
YOUNG children start formal education in what is called a primary school at age 6, the uncle had a son called Adnan who was then exactly six and was starting school. This fellow will reappear like his father in this story and very prominently but he will die in a helicopter crash engineered by our hero [this story is coming a bit later]. Adnan was able to convince his cousin to attend school with him, he was never greatly interested in formal education, he was a very mediocre student but he managed with difficulty to finish the first six years of schooling. The next phase is the secondary and because such level of schooling was not available in Tikrit the whole uncle’s family moved to Baghdad to allow their son to continue his studies and few months later their guest followed them there and settled in a part of the capital called al-Takarta at that time during the early 1950s. Al Takarta was the natural home for the small time Tikriti crooks and thugs who had broken away from the bands of dacoits operating around their town and aggregated there. At school in Baghdad Saddam’s need to compensate for the cruelty and shame he had suffered in Tikrit showed itself in a more violent behavior he was now carrying his pistol around with him every where a former school fellow says the headmaster wanted to expel his violent student, but when Saddam heard about that he went into the headmaster’s office and threatened him with death, the headmaster withdrew his order.
Al-TAKARTA was also in those days a hot bed of the newly organized and rapidly gaining power forces of Arab nationalism which were greatly stimulated and encouraged by the recent emergence of Gamal Abd Al Nasser in Egypt following his successful overthrow of the monarchy. In this atmosphere of brutality and lawlessness the young Saddam turned to political activism. One of the political forces, which were appearing now on the fringe of the Nasser movement, was Al- Ba’ath, western scholars and writers usually translate the word as renaissance, but the exact meaning of the word in Arabic is resurgence. The basic ideas of the Ba’ath originated during the late thirties of the last century in France by three young Syrians who were studying there in the Sorbonne, a Christian Michel Aflaq, a Sunni Muslim Salah Bitar and an Alawi called Zaki Arsuzi. Aflaq was the leader, Arsuzi disappeared very early and during the history of the Baath it was to be associated with the names of Aflaq and Bitar ever since. The mystery of the early disappearance Arsuzi is a very intriguing episode in what proved later on to be a story of continuing intrigue, conspiracies and bloody divisions
AS the second world war was impending Arab liberation movements were stirring as a reaction to the British and French domination and political control of most of the countries in the region but they lacked properly formulated ideas and only Nazism and Communism offered an ideological and organizational ideas but both were unacceptable in the Arab world. The Communist model was too international and against religion to appeal to the Arab’s mentality and Nazism was too extreme and its methods too harsh and inhumane to be acceptable even to the Arabs. Aflaq has tampered at one time or another with the two philosophies and was convinced of their unsuitability to the Arab world, so he started to talk about a marriage of the socialism of the Marxist philosophy which he called “The Body”. The Nazi’s nationalism which was in his views the soul and upon returning back to Syria in 1940 he began to preach his ideas to his students in Damascus and then shifted his base of activities to Beirut which was more open and tolerant to his ideas. Aflaq was soon spending many hours in a café near the American university there preaching to students from all over the Arab world who were studying there and who became in due course the elements of the international network of the Baath party. Aflaq a thin pale slight man was the theoretician and Bitar backed him up with reason and organizational ability, by 1974 the party has gathered enough support to encourage them to apply for an official recognition by the authorities which took place in Damascus on the 4th of April 1947 under an impressive slogan unity, freedom and Socialism. The party arrived in Iraq during the early fifties and by the middle of the fifties it become a very serious power in spite of the small number of its membership that was mainly located in Baghdad and which coincided with the arrival of Saddam in the city.
SADDAM’s secondary school “Al-Karkh” was a very active political center of the newly created Ba’ath, an activity into which he immersed himself at the expense of his studies in which he was again very disinterested and showed very clearly in his mediocre performance and his difficulties in getting through the years. He was not was not greatly impressed by Nasser’s brand of Arabism he thought it was naïve and excessively romantic, but he was greatly impressed by the Ba’ath with its strong emphasis on discipline, its organizational skills and the aura of secrecy surrounding it, all of which greatly appealed to him. Saddam joined the party in 1957.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Friday March 21, 2008
Berkley, Michigan
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