Enduring Mesopotamia
La Société irakienne, communautés, pouvoirs et violences (Iraqi Society: Communities, Authority and Violence), Hosham Dawod and Hamit Bozarslan, eds., Paris: Karthala , 2003. pp166
Published in March 2003 a few weeks before the beginning of the US-led invasion of Iraq, this book contains papers on aspects of Iraqi society given by mostly French and European academics at a conference organised last December in Paris. Many of the papers are written in the future subjunctive: what would happen were the Anglo- American forces, in March still massed in the Gulf awaiting the outcome of diplomatic manoeuverings in New York, to go ahead with the threatened invasion of Iraq, whether that invasion were presented under the heading of the elimination of the chemical, biological or nuclear weapons allegedly held by the Saddam regime or of an American desire for "regime change"?
While certain essays in the present collection, such as that by Isam al-Khafaji, "On the Path to Democracy: Options for Transition in Iraq," explicitly weigh up the possibilities for a post- Saddam, post-US Iraq, almost all of them are written in the shadow of the impending conflict, making this book one of the most recent attempts to forecast possible Iraqi futures not only in the light of existing trends but also under the impact of external assault and subsequent all-out internal change. None of the authors contributing to this volume holds a writ for the Saddam regime or for the Iraqi Ba'ath, yet all of them stress the likely difficulty of finding a replacement for it, not only given that regime's longevity and what then seemed to be its firm grasp on power, but also in the light of the apparent absence of legitimate alternative political projects whether from inside or from outside Iraq.
Much of al-Khafaji's essay is given over to a consideration of the reasons for the Ba'ath regime's longevity and for its grasp on power. Pointing out that 60 per cent of Iraq's population is today under 18 years of age, and that a further significant proportion of it has no memory of any other regime besides that of the Ba'ath, which seized power in a 1968 coup, the author reviews what he calls the "roots of the tyranny". Thanks to the country's oil wealth, the fruits of which began to make themselves felt for the general population from 1973 on, the Iraqi regime was able to ensure that 40 per cent of Iraqi households depended directly on state employment, handed out for free to all university graduates. A classic rentiér economy, in which the creation of wealth was the affair of a tiny fraction of the population thanks to large foreign earnings, the Iraqi state during the 1970s was able to "hand out largesse to its subjects without giving them any rights," a state of affairs that continued well into the 1980s when the disastrous war with Iran began to swallow up the country's hard-currency reserves.
In the absence of a need to earn foreign currency, "there was little point in setting up any industry or production capacity," al- Khafaji writes, and a system of makruma (benefits) grew up in which the state would provide benefits to the population while fostering a class of well-connected nababs, or private contractors, whose wealth came from contracting services to the state. The problem with this system, as far as the growth of political participation and civic consciousness was concerned, was that makruma were always handed down, rather than out, as expressions of something like noblesse oblige, and the nababs had no incentive to bite the hand that fed them. While al-Khafaji does not make this comparison, the nabab class in Iraq seems to have operated in a manner akin to that of the "military-industrial complex" in the United States, being a powerful brake on change and a sure-fire supporter of the status quo.
Other papers in the collection amplify and add to al-Khafaji's analysis of the Saddam regime in Iraq. For Hosham Dawod and Hamit Bozarslan, the volume's editors and both academics in France, understanding of it comes by way of the analysis of how traditional and tribal structures were co- opted by the regime, an analysis continued by Sami Zubaida in his "The Growth and Decline of Iraqi Civil Society," which also traces the earlier, pre-Ba'athist development of civil society in Iraq through a pair of case studies. Zubaida suggests that in acting against its ideological competitors the Ba'ath regime undermined civil society in Iraq, effectively promoting local solidarities of family and clan instead and preventing the development of a neutral public space in which national debate could take place. Recent years, he notes, have seen the rise of religion as a force in Iraqi politics, not only as a result of the Saddam regime's instrumentalisation of religious sentiment, but also as a force in Iraqi life more generally.
"It seems that the disasters and tragedies that have affected the country have given rise to a wave of observing prayers and religious rituals, and an increase in popular religious practices, such as Sufism, or the visiting of shrines," he writes, and this rise in religious sentiment, when linked to the absence of civil society groups and the collapse of the former regime, will likely lead to "the appearance of forces" coming from what organisations still remain in the country, which are "principally communal, religious and tribal."
"There are no credible, independent organisations or associations in the country, even if there are many in exile, that can take charge of the transformation of the regime," Zubaida writes. "Any organisation associated with the change of regime will probably imagine that it will be possible to make agreements with local clan or tribal chiefs able to carry out their promises. However, this will tend precisely in the opposite direction to the development of a civil society and healthy public sphere," since such local groups aim to promote their own agendas more than to develop a national political framework. The challenge now is one of political and economic transition, and the need for what al-Khafaji calls a "modernisation and industrialisation strategy that will loosen the hold of the state while building the foundations of a diversified economy." How far deals with various communal, religious and tribal groups, in the absence of anything approximating to national political structures, will be able to do this is anybody's guess.
In an essay in the book's second part, "the Place of Iraq in the Arab-Muslim Imagination," French academic Elizabeth Picard examines the meaning of the Saddam regime's collapse in the face of US-led attack, both for Iraq and for the Arab world as a whole. Picard points out that for a period at least one effect of the US pressure on Saddam Hussein was to enhance the Iraqi dictator's popularity elsewhere in the Middle East, since the Iraqi regime, closely identified with Saddam as part of an on-going cult of personality, had always sought to legitimate itself by reference to "the Arab nationalist discourse of the second half of the 20th century, which emphasised cultural and political independence and a form of economic development that would not lead to a compromise of identity." The destruction of this regime in Iraq, in its ideology independent, Arab unionist, secular, aspiring to regional leadership and modernisation, cannot but not have had powerful effects on the aspirations of generations who had identified themselves with that ideology.
"What is important," Picard writes, "is the emblematic character of Iraq's destiny for the Arab world as a whole: the dramatic opposition between the possibility of independence, secularism and development, represented by the Iraq of the 1970s, and the material and symbolic disaster of Iraq under embargo [in the 1990s] and threatened by another war." The disastrous end of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq under Anglo-American bombardment, though it had for many years been a travesty, will have added to the disillusionment of generations of Arab nationalists, Picard thinks. In addition, the rejection of the "Abdullah Plan" adopted by the Arab Summit held in Beirut in March 2002, which would have guaranteed normalisation of relations between the Arab states and Israel in return for a return to the 1967 borders in Palestine, and the failure to advance with the roadmap presented in its stead, which "contains a list of conditions that are impossible for the Palestinian leadership to fulfil," will have led to suspicions among this current of opinion that the "defeat of Iraq was a kind of dress rehearsal for the defeat of Palestine."
On completing this book, with its sometimes less-than-heartening prognostications for the future, one is left with a powerful sense of the challenges facing Iraqis and the international community in building a legitimate political and economic order in Iraq, greater even than those produced by US military intervention in Afghanistan. Particular responsibility attaches to Britain and the US in overseeing the reconstruction process: it is to be hoped that having evicted the former regime and occupied Iraq in the face of worldwide opposition these countries will now take their responsibilities seriously.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
