The
Ba'thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein's Totalitarianism
by Aaron M. Faust
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. 296 pp. $55.
Reviewed by Amatzia Baram
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Saddam's
Baathist Ruse
When Baghdad fell to U.S. and allied forces in April 2003, a treasure
trove of Iraqi Baath documents fell into coalition hands. Renamed the Baath
Regional Command Center (BRCC) archive by its stewards, the Iraq Memory
Foundation, it represents the most complete record currently available of
the process of intimidation and indoctrination to which Iraqi society as
well as the party members were subjected by the Baathist leadership.
Faust's book is an excellent analysis of the material he studied, which is
archived at the Hoover Institution on Stanford University's campus in Palo
Alto. This archive holds some thirteen million pages of documents—eleven
million of which are in Arabic. This gargantuan quantity means that one
needs many lifetimes to review all the relevant documents. What Faust has
uncovered, however, provides us with much food for thought.
Faust observes that when a reader opens a BRCC file, he steps "into
a self-contained universe where 'normal' common sense does not apply; an
environment governed by its own language, rituals, logic and ethics."
Unlike some other young researchers, Faust was well-versed on Baathist Iraq
before he began working with the archival material as evidenced from the
way he places his study results in the context of Iraqi history studies.
Rather than drowning in a flood of often-deliberately deceptive documents,
he has read the archive documents critically and is knowledgeable about
real life in Baathist Iraq. He recognizes that if the documents fail to
mention some regime action, this does not mean that it did not happen.
Likewise, he understands that even if the internal documents repeat the
same claim hundreds of times—for example, that the regime remained against
Islamism to the very end, this is no proof that the claim is true. Rather,
what it proves is that the regime desperately wanted party members to
believe the claim.
The files present a highly-controlled and imaginary world, designed to
convince comrades that the party was always true to its secular founding
vision and had not changed course over time. The reality though was quite
the opposite. Faust understands that at least from 1990, Saddam's Baathism
(what the author calls "Husseini Baathism") was substantially
different from the party and ideology of its founding father Michel Aflaq
(1910-89) and his generation. At the same time, Faust notes that even when
Saddam deviated from the party line, he needed to retain some of Aflaq's
ideological structure in order to provide his regime with basic legitimacy.
Thus, in its internal discourse, the party continued to preach the old
ideas while lowering the profile of its new tribal and Islamist policies.
Saddam's regime failed at its two
central goals: pan-Arabism and secularism.
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In fact, these new Islamist policies essentially emptied the Baath
"faith" of much of its early content. Faust demonstrates the
"discontinuity between the Ba'thisms of [Ahmed Hassan] Al-Bakr
and Aflaq and the Ba'thism of Saddam Hussein." He argues
convincingly that Saddam defined his Baath as a "new stage" of
the movement, one which necessitated new political directions for the good
of the nation and, above all, for that of Saddam and his henchmen at the
helm. In this circular reasoning, the survival of the regime became
indispensable because only through this path could the great vision of the
party, Arab unity, be achieved.
However, by the end of the 1990s, it had become impossible to tell what
Baathism stood for. All the violence, economic disasters, wars, and
suppressions were justified by the hope of achieving secular, pan-Arab
unity, a vision not even remotely achieved. Saddam rejected unity between
equals with Syria when it seemed possible in 1978-79. By 1980, his
watered-down Baathist interpretation of socialism, to be financed by huge
oil revenues, had failed completely, leaving in its wake a
barely-functioning welfare state. The vision of an Iraqi-centered,
hegemonic, pan-Arabism never materialized. The only "Arab unity"
he created was through the forcible annexation of Kuwait.
Faust should have been more careful, however, in some of his statements.
For instance, he contradicts himself on the success of the regime's efforts
to mobilize and reeducate society in its image. He states that Iraq's
rulers failed at their primary objective "to convert Iraqis from their
traditional faiths and normative belief systems into genuine Ba'thists."
This is most certainly correct, but elsewhere he writes that "the BRCC
documents show that by 2003, Ba'thification had destroyed or
emasculated most of the Iraqi pre-1968 governmental, civil, social, and
familial institutions and value systems and had transformed or replaced
them with Husseini Ba'thist versions." This may be true about
most (though not all) state institutions, but with social mores,
identities, and primordial affiliations, the regime failed miserably.
The regime failed at its two central goals: pan-Arabism and secularism.
By legitimizing the tribes and their sheikhs, Saddam jettisoned the party's
ideal of creating a seamless, national Arab society. It is true that after
he recruited the tribes, Saddam used them to support his regime in a
difficult era. However, he paid dearly for that cooperation. The tribes
became much stronger than under the previous regimes. Both Sunni and Shiite
sheikhs acquired wealth and total power over their people coupled with a
very high profile ideological surrender of the regime to tribalism. Rather
than disappearing, many social identities were, in fact, enhanced.
The larger sectarian and ethnic identities of Shiite Arabs and Sunni
Kurds also received a boost, mainly in reaction to Saddam's coercive
policies. Faust seems to believe, for example, that collaboration of some
Kurdish tribes with the regime against their Kurdish brethren demonstrates
the weakening of traditional identities. However, the Kurdish Bardost
tribe, for one, fought against Barzani's Kurds as a result of an old tribal
feud, not out of love for Saddam or acquiescence in Baathism. Saddam turned
a primordial identity—tribalism—against a newer one—Kurdish ethnic
nationalism. When it comes to the Shiites, the party lured many into its
ranks with favors, but the vast majority remained estranged. Following the
bloody suppression of the 1991 revolt, most Shiites lived in fear and
bitterness. Most of all, Saddam's turn to Islam in the 1990s implied that
Iraq's Muslim identity had defeated Baathist secularism. And yet, as seen
in the Hoover archive, within the insulated bubble of party indoctrination,
almost everything remained as before: There was little mention of the
Shari'a, and there was no Shiite-Sunni problem.
Faust is not telling us anything new when he recounts the totalitarian
techniques by which the Baath tried to shape society in their image,
including culturalization, enticement, and terror. And yet, he does create
a detailed world out of seemingly banal documents that, when put together
and analyzed properly, reconstruct the Baathist system and mentality. As
such, his is a magisterial study of Planet Baath: critical, sensitive, and
sensible. By combining archival material with a deep awareness of Iraqi
history, Faust succeeds in creating a complete and convincing whole.
Amatzia Baram is professor emeritus
at the department of Middle East history and founder and director of the
Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa.
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