Thirteen Thoughts on Saddam Hussein
Reflections at the intersection of psychology, culture, and geopolitics
I recently finished The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll, and did a running thread of commentary on the book for paid subscribers on X.
Out of the several books I’ve read on Saddam, this might be the best one, as it is based on documents and recordings from inside the regime captured after the US invasion. Much of the material that the American military acquired remains unavailable to the public, but Coll was able to get his hands on some of it, and it provides an overview of the US relationship with the Iraqi dictator from the time he came into power until he was overthrown.
It makes for captivating reading, as Saddam’s life story is the product of ancient Arab honor culture colliding with modern ideology and geopolitics. Major global crises were sparked by family conflicts, like when Saddam’s two sons-in-law fled to Jordan with his two daughters in the midst of a feud with his son Uday, and they then returned back to Iraq and were killed in an old fashioned tribal shootout. Imagine if Tony Soprano became president of the United States, and drama among his kids and cousins was determining who got to run the Department of Defense or control conquered foreign nations. Except Tony Soprano was actually sort of ideological and wanted to achieve national greatness instead of only out for personal success.
The book sparked thoughts in my head about the role of remarkable individuals in history, US foreign policy, the trajectory of the Middle East since WWII, and much else. Here are 13 of them.
Saddam was a remarkable human being. As evil as he was, this has to be acknowledged. He came from nothing and ended up ruling his nation with an iron fist, it seems because at every moment in his life he was smarter and harder working than those around him. After achieving power, he remained a micromanager. He was also physically brave, participating in an assassination attempt against the leader of Iraq as a young man, before fleeing to Syria, in addition to constantly provoking the United States later in life.
Saddam’s background predicted his future behavior. As a teenager, he shot and killed someone in an employment dispute involving their extended families. There was then a blood feud, in which his half-brother and future security official Barzan al-Tikriti claims to have killed 4 men. With that background, you may have expected Saddam to deal with entire nations the same way he dealt with those who insulted his honor on the streets of Tikrit. This is going to sound like a weird comparison, but when talking with my friend Rob Henderson I get the impression of someone who grew up in more of an honor culture and is disgusted by the degree to which many Western elites lack a sense of loyalty or code that they live by. I feel the same way, as an Arab and ex-prole.
The Middle East is an epistemological wasteland. When Saddam was coming of age, there were basically three paths for intellectually curious young Arabs: Communism, Islamism, and Baathism. The last of these was a weird ideology founded by a Christian that preached secular pan-Arabism and socialism. Saddam made the right ideological choice given what else was on the table. But although he was an intellectual in his context, like many third world intellectuals he got some of the worst of the Western tradition and missed its most important classical liberal elements. Saddam had no inherent appreciation for markets, spontaneous order, or the limits of planning. This was closely related to his conspiratorial worldview, in which everyone was plotting against him and Iraq. To be fair, he was actually vindicated by Iran-Contra, as it turned out that the Reagan administration was selling weapons to Iran while helping Saddam in the war. But most of his conspiracy theories were wrong, and they clouded his judgment. Saddam was smart and talented but competence without a proper framework of what government should be doing can be worse than useless.
Saddam was a romantic and legitimately crazy. Coll makes a lot of Saddam becoming a writer in his later years. In March 2003, as US troops were entering his country, he was finishing his last novel, and the government managed to get 40,000 copies printed! There’s a noticeable pattern of many of the most brutal dictators being intellectuals. Like Hitler, Stalin, and Castro, Saddam cared about and was inspired by ideas. This makes sense. To kill large numbers of people often requires an ideology. But Saddam’s killings didn’t seem particularly ideological — nothing in Baathism, which was on paper relatively liberal for the region, required it. For him, mass killing was instrumental, deployed when the regime was being threatened. Chemical and biological weapons were used against Kurds and Iranian troops in order to protect the government. Perhaps the clearest case of senseless violence in Saddam’s career was the looting and destruction of Kuwait, including the burning of oil fields. There was no ideological reason for this. In fact, pan-Arabism should have forbidden it. Nor even a self-interested one I could discern. But Saddam’s behavior makes sense when you remember that he grew up in an Arab honor culture with collectivist ideas about group responsibility.
Saddam couldn’t escape his past because of his large extended family, and this is a reason to empathize with him. His family was large and highly inbred, and this created constant drama and tensions. Saddam was unquestionably a mass murderer. But one has to understand the social and cultural circumstances in which he operated. His own family often behaved worse than he did. Uday, his son, was a serial rapist. Saddam’s half-brother Watban would get drunk and shoot out traffic lights, and eventually had his leg amputated after being shot by Uday. Wikipedia says he lost his genitals too, though I can’t find a source for that. When one of Saddam’s brothers-in-law broke the arm of a Baghdad University professor who had given him a bad grade, Saddam ordered his bodyguards to break the relative’s arm in the exact same place. This shows some level of decency. Uday in power would’ve probably committed genocide for fun, or more likely gotten himself and his family killed long before he had the chance to. How does one govern such a country? Especially while a member of this kind of family? I don’t think he could have disowned them all. He had no one else to trust in a society where everyone else was tribal, and not being tribal would have marked him as someone who violated important cultural norms. I think in foreign affairs in particular, Saddam’s personal shortcomings were the major issue and helped drive his country into the ground. But domestically, it’s at least easy to sympathize with many of the dilemmas he faced as a leader, even if the circumstances don’t excuse the choices Saddam ultimately made. His family reminds me of the maternal side of my own, whose members I remember throughout my childhood constantly forming complicated alliances against one another for reasons that could only appear opaque and bizarre to outsiders. Saddam had one foot in this kind of family drama, while being a major player on the global stage, and I find the places where these two worlds interact to be the most fascinating parts of his story.
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