The Republic of Fear: 20 Years After

gatestoneinstitute.org – Well, [Iraq] may not be a better place, but is certainly less bad than it was 20 years ago.

Neighboring Iran is facing a bigger outflow of refugees, especially highly educated people, than Iraq.

In 2021, Iraq was no longer among the countries regarded as “vulnerable” in terms of food shortages and famine.

In terms of political and social freedoms, Iraq is also doing better than such neighbors as the Islamic Republic of Iran and the parts of Syria controlled by the Assad regime.

Facing such deadly challenges as the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS/Da’esh) and the attempted Kurdish secession, post-Saddam Iraq has manifested a higher degree of resilience than many might have expected.

It has also succeeded in frustrating attempts by the Islamic Republic of Iran to stall the emergence of an Iraqi national army and the imposition of a militia state.

The war didn’t turn Iraq into a model of democracy. But, as an Iraqi friend put it the other day, it ended what Kanan Makiya had called “The Republic of Fear.”

In his picaresque novel Twenty Years After, a sequel to The Three Musketeers, French novelist Alexandre Dumas muses on the theme of “the benevolent despot” as a rampart against unbridled change that could lead to savage turbulences.

In Arabic folklore, 20 years represents a generation, a marking point for reviewing the past in the hope of drawing lessons for the future.

The first day of the next spring, 20 March, the 20^th anniversary of the Iraq War provides an opportunity for the kind of flashback that Athos, one of Dumas’ characters in the novel, uses for judging past events.

Well, without beating around the bush, no pun intended, let’s see if today we see the war that toppled Saddam Hussein the same way we did two decades ago.

I must remind you that in 2003, I firmly believed that without removing Saddam from power, Iraq would remain stuck in the cul-de-sac created by almost half a century of rule by small elite of security-military figures, of which Saddam was the most prominent and the last avatar.

I first met and interviewed Saddam in 1975, when he invited me to lunch at his residence in Baghdad. The residence was a modest villa and nothing like the sumptuous palaces that he later built for himself. But Saddam himself was anything but modest.

He talked of the “great things” that Iraq was supposed to do just as “our glorious Babylonian and Arab ancestors” had done. Mesopotamia had been the birthplace of civilization and the first chunk of the earth to develop urban life. In the 7^th century, Arabs counted for under a million souls and yet succeeded in defeating the two great empires of the time.

What was remarkable in his narrative was that while he spoke of “ancestors who did great things,” he seemed to have a low opinion of the here-and-now Iraqis and Arabs in general.

The subtext was that it was he and he alone who would have to do all those great things that he talked about. In subsequent meetings with him, including time spent with him and his entourage in Tehran and the Iranian “holy” city of Mash’had, I learned that he held his closest aides with utter contempt. He and he alone was the providential man, the knight in shining armor riding his white horse beyond glorious horizons.

At the time, I saw him as something of a romantic struck by acute narcissism. It was after his demise that I learned he had been a failed novelist, just as Stalin had been a failed priest, Hitler a failed painter, Mao Zedong a failed poet and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a failed theologian.

On the eve of the US-led invasion in 2003, there was much talk of imposing democracy on Iraq by force. At the time, in several articles, I questioned that assertion.

However, I believed that force could be used to remove hurdles to democracy. After all, use of force had opened the path to democracy for Germany and Italy. Vietnam’s military intervention had saved Cambodia from further atrocities by Khmer Rouge, while the Tanzanian army had ended Idi Amin’s reign terror in Uganda.

By the time the US-led invasion had come, Saddam had already invaded Kuwait in a massacre-and-loot style never known in the Middle East since medieval times. He had also gassed thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the martyred town of Halabja and used chemical weapons against raw recruits dispatched to war by his partner in crime, Ayatollah Khomeini.

But, enough of this litany of woes against the dead despot. Twenty years later, is Iraq a better place than it was under Saddam Hussein?

Well, it may not be a better place but is certainly less bad than it was 20 years ago. Over the past 20 years, some four million Iraqis who had fled the country as refugees have returned home. Today it ranks number 140 in the list of countries producing migrants and refugees. Under Saddam Hussein, it ranked among the top 10. Even then, most of those leaving Iraq today are from the Kurdish autonomous area, often young men seeking a better economic future in Europe. At the same time, Iraq shelters many Syrian refugees.

Neighboring Iran is facing a bigger outflow of refugees, especially highly educated people, than Iraq.

Life expectancy in Iraq has risen from 67 years in 2002 to over 75 in 2021. Iraq has also done better, or less badly, in economic terms, with gross domestic production per capita rising to $10,000 from a paltry $2,100 in 2002.

The national currency, the dinar, has increased fourfold in value compared to a basket of major currencies. In neighboring Iran however, the rial has fallen to 500,000 to the US dollar, compared to 70 to the dollar in 1978.

Despite an increasing shortage of water due to massive dams built in Turkey, Iraqi agriculture, which had almost died under the fallen despot, has made a timid comeback. In 2021, Iraq was no longer among the countries regarded as “vulnerable” in terms of food shortages and famine.

In terms of political and social freedoms, Iraq is also doing better than such neighbors as the Islamic Republic of Iran and the parts of Syria controlled by the Assad regime.

Facing such deadly challenges as the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS/Da’esh) and the attempted Kurdish secession, post-Saddam Iraq has manifested a higher degree of resilience than many might have expected.

It has also succeeded in frustrating attempts by the Islamic Republic of Iran to stall the emergence of an Iraqi national army and the imposition of a militia state.

The US made many mistakes in Iraq, including the disbanding of the army, the banning of all Ba’ath Party members and childish attempts at imposing a market economy in a highly centralized system.

The pumping of massive quantities of US dollars into Iraq also led to corruption on a gargantuan scale. Many individual Americans and companies won tickets on that gravy train while branding Iraqis as genetically prone to corruption.

Today, Iraq is among the top countries where corruption has become a way life rather than an exception to the rules of probity. But even then things were worse under Saddam, when corruption benefited small segments of society.

Today, however, corruption is used as a tool of patronage, offering a meal ticket to larger segments of society clustered around individual politicians or ethnic and religious groups.

The war didn’t turn Iraq into a model of democracy. But, as an Iraqi friend put it the other day, it ended what Kanan Makiya had called “The Republic of Fear.”

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.

This article originally appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.