I guess only John Lacny here has read the huge tome of Hanna Batatu. And Kanan Makiya.
> ...At that time, many Iraqi leftists regarded Saddam Hussein as obviously
> a ‘British agent’ (‘amil britani) and a ‘fascist’. I and those who
> thought like me, could not persuade our Iraqi comrades that this was
> perhaps not the case. We did not like Saddam, and unlike some on the
> British left never took his dinar or his theatrical forms of solidarity;
> but we felt that, given his control of a state with vast oil revenues, he
> was, in the language of the time, ‘relatively autonomous’ of Washington.
> Right from the start, the projection of Saddam as a stooge or agent
> disempowered those critics from dealing with their own realities.
For those in thrall to it, ‘agent’ talk was confirmed when the civil war broke out in Jordan in 1970 between King Hussein and the Palestinians. Iraq remained neutral, even though it had 12,000 troops in Jordan, posted there in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The Palestinians later claimed that Saddam had encouraged them to act against the King.
The complicity of Saddam with western imperialism was equally evident when, in 1975, he signed an agreement with the Shah of Iran ending the two countries’ six-year border war and closing down the exile operations and radios of their respective clients. Then, when he invaded Iran in 1980 and was supported by western allies like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, as well as by financial and intelligence backing from the United States, everything was beyond doubt.
For some, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was the final proof of his subservience to the CIA, since it provided the US with the cast-iron excuse to deploy its forces in the region and impose even stricter control on the local satraps, emirs, and sultans.
The travails of expertise
A striking quality of the post-1958 period was the vitality and, in the Arab world, the highly influential role of the Iraqi left intelligentsia and of the artistic, theatrical, literary, musical, and architectural people associated with it. Indeed, even in a predominantly Anglophonic political and academic context in the west, it was Iraqis themselves, or other Arabs influenced by them, or people involved in the politics of the country, who wrote much of the literature of modern Iraq. Majid Khadduri, Abbas Kelidar, Sami Zubaida, Faleh Abd al-Jabar, Isam al-Khafaji, are just some of the best known.
Hanna Batatu (1926-2000)
The most monumental social science book on any Arab country is that of the Lebanese academic, the late Hanna Batatu: The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, 1978; reprinted in 2004 by al- Saqi books). As lecturer at the American University of Beirut, Batatu influenced a generation of Arab political scientists and intellectuals.
A vivid memory from an Exeter University conference in 1981 is of Hanna Batatu, faced by a squad of menacing Ba’athist “academics” from Iraq, refusing to be silenced by their complaints and intimidating gestures, as he detailed the vicious nature of the Ba’athist state. As one Iraqi in the front row slowly and demonstratively drew his finger across his throat, Batatu declared: “I am a free man”. This was a principle Batatu held to throughout his productive and formative intellectual life.
Hanna Batatu’s dignity is not the only memorable thing about that conference. Equally so is the participation of some United Kingdom citizens who had (perhaps) taken money from Iraq for public relations and translation work, and of others who were, to judge by their fulsome praise of Iraq’s leaders, the core members of what one can only call the English branch of the Ba’ath party. They were mainly Conservatives, old “friends of the Arabs”, but in more recent times Saddam may have sought to recruit, and reimburse, at the opposite, left-wing end of the political spectrum -- Michael Pugliese