Republic of Fear; The Inside Story of Saddam's Iraq

New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. Pantheon Paperback Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Trade Paperback. Good [has some damp signs at bottom of some pages.]. Format is approximately 5.25 inches by 8 inches. xxii, 310, [2]. Footnotes. Index. Ink notes at back. Note to the Reader; Chronology, Introduction, and Index. Chapter 1: Institutions of Violence; Chapter 2 : A World of Fear; Chapter 3: Ba'thism and the Masses; Chapter 4: Authority; Chapter 5: Pan-Arabism and Iraq; Chapter 6: Formation of the Ba'th; Chapter 7: The Legitimation of Iraqi Ba'thism. Also contains Conclusion: The Final Catastrophe, and an Appendix on purges of High-ranking Officers, Ba'thists, and Politicians since July 17,1968. The author's assumptions about political behavior are relevant to the styles of reasoning employed and the kinds of evidence used. First, what leaders, parties, and citizens think and expressly say about politics matters. The words that people use are not a "reflection" of some hidden reality; they are themselves part of that reality. The problem always resides in how words and actions correspond. Important, somewhat information on the Ba'th can be found in speeches, party political programs, and the whole body of ideological artifacts. Second, despite the proclivity of those in public office to propaganda, rhetoric, chicanery, and lies, on the whole even they usually end up saying what they mean and meaning what they say. Third, the author eschews all variations of the conspiratorial view of history. The author singles out for consideration the demonstrably inverted relation between the common Iraqi perception of the pervasiveness of a hateful Western influence and the factually diminishing ability of the West to influence local events in the modern period. Kanan Makiya (born 1949) is an Iraqi-American academic and a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention writing the 1989 book Republic of Fear, which became a best-seller after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and Cruelty and Silence (1991), a critique of the Arab intelligentsia. Makiya would later lobby the U.S. government to invade Iraq in 2003 in order to oust Hussein's regime. Makiya was born in Baghdad and left Iraq to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later working for his father's architectural firm, Makiya & Associates which had branch offices in London and across the Middle East. As a former exile, he was a prominent member of the Iraqi opposition, a "close friend" of Ahmed Chalabi, and an influential proponent of the post-2003 Iraq War effort. He wrote under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil to avoid endangering his family. In Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-seller after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he argues that Iraq had become a full-fledged totalitarian state, worse than despotic states such as Jordan or Saudi Arabia. Derived from a New York Times review by Adrienne Edgar. Iraq's Saddam Hussein has become the world's most notorious bully, but when ''Republic of Fear'' was published, few people were aware of the extremely repressive nature of his regime. And few cared, evidently; the book met with a resounding silence. The invasion of Kuwait has predictably focused attention on Iraq, and Pantheon Books has bought the paperback rights to ''Republic of Fear.'' Samir al-Khalil's study of Iraqi politics is definitely required reading for anyone with a serious interest in Iraq or in the political dynamics of dictatorship. Mr. Khalil analyzes Iraqi politics through what he sees as its defining feature: the extraordinarily high level of state-sponsored violence. (An expatriate Iraqi scholar, the author has firsthand knowledge of the state's capacity for violence; he wrote under a pseudonym to evade the long reach of Iraqi Government assassins.) The question he poses is this: Why has there been so much extra violence in Iraq - violence, in other words, that far exceeds what would be necessary to contain any potential opposition? In Mr. Khalil's view, the legitimacy of the current regime in Iraq was rooted in violence from the start. When the Arab Baath Socialist Party came to power in a coup after the Arab defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, it won the enthusiastic support of the population by orchestrating show trials and public executions of ''Zionist'' and ''imperialist'' spies. But the Iraqi masses, who had initially applauded the terror, soon were swallowed up by it. Iraqis came to live in a world of fear, as the Baath regime gradually recruited one-fifth of the labor force into agencies of violence and expanded the use of intimidation, deportation, torture and execution against real or imagined opponents. Mr. Khalil's argument that fear is at the heart of the Iraqi body politic is very convincing. In a concluding chapter on the Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Khalil explains the war as a logical result of the escalating internal repression that had culminated in Mr. Hussein's emergence as Iraq's absolute ruler in 1979. Watching the hitherto indifferent world struggle to respond to Iraq's aggression in Kuwait, Mr. Khalil must feel a certain grim satisfaction in being able to say, ''I told you so.''.