Nope, from Fred Halliday's piece,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-95-1673.jsp >...reprinted in
2004 by al-Saqi books)
> ...The mass expulsion of people with Persian antecedents or names from
> Iraq in the 1980s, no less than the making of an epic film celebrating
> the Arab victory over the Persians at Qadissiya in 637 CE, rested on this
> deep ideological morass: this is exemplified in the title of a book
> written by one of Saddam’s uncles, Khairallah Tulfah, and made compulsory
> reading in schools, Three Things Which God Should Never Have Created:
> Persians, Jews and Flies – note the order.
The Ba’ath party had not just borrowed rituals from Europe’s totalitarian regimes; it used their techniques of violence, fear, and the corruption of language. In April 1980, a filmed party meeting showed Saddam singling out inner-party rivals who were dragged from the room, ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/ )
then executed after show trials. He had learnt the most basic lesson of all dictatorships: that is one thing to kill the guilty, but what really works is to kill the innocent. Saddam and his cronies attended these executions; members of the Ba’ath party, including students in Britain, were summoned to the London embassy to view a video of the occasion.
I have visited some unsavoury regimes – from Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran (where I saw 100,000 people march by shouting “Death to Liberalism” and realised that, among others, they meant me) to Ethiopia’s Red Terror; but never have I sensed such fear as in Iraq. One could cut it with a knife. A professor said to me, resignedly: “When I open the paper in the morning I do not know if I have been appointed ambassador to the UN or condemned to death. In either case I would not know why”