Why Saddam will fight to the death.
Posted: 2003-03-16 07:49am
I wrote this back in late January, early February, as an interpetive and elaborative commentary on an article by Mark Bowden in The Atlantic Online. The article is called "Tales of the Tyrant" and is about Saddam Hussein the individual. Considering Col. Olrik's comments on how it would be best for Iraq if Saddam were to surrender and go into exile, I'm posting it now - as it (both my commentary and the article) explains why, to Saddam at least, that is precisely the worst possible thing he could do to Iraq.
Alexander the Great met a King in India, and defeated him in battle; we call him Porus. On the defeat of King Porus, that storied individual was asked how he ought be treated by Alexander, and made this reply:
``In the same way as a king treats another king.''
So, to, would Saddam likely say.
The man who's stature is either excessively glorified, or excessively demeaned by the title of President will not flee from his duty; he will not accept asylum, he will not try to abandon his realm, and he will not try to slink away to enjoy his wealth.
It has never been about wealth for him; to imagine it is would be to fundamentally misconceive, to completely misunderstand, a man who's influence on history, at least, shall be quite disproportionate when it is said and done.
Neither has it been about the things wealth can buy, surely not the things that fill his palaces. Wealth is not Saddam's motivator, and to imagine it as such, fundamentally, is to again misjudge him.
Saddam, in a way that we justly think quite horrific, lives for his nation.
This article from May of '02 comes close:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/05/bowden.htm
But I think that Bowden perhaps misses something that he reveals; or more likely he does perceive it but then does not elaborate on it by avoiding psychoanalyzing the dictator.
It can simply be said that Saddam is a King. An Oriental Despot, a Great King, a King of the Land between the Two Rivers, a King in the style of Nebuchadnezzar and Xerxes. He lives in a different age and a different world than we do, quite literally. To Saddam, his imagination of that age is reality, and that is what dictates his actions.
He is a good Despot. He worked to modernize his country and provide for his people. But ultimately he is a Despot and that has charted his course. None restrain him, and his whim and his desires - for power, for aggrandizement, for the fame of history - are unrestrained and unslowable by his advisors, nor by any other structure of his government, a government that ultimately serves to transmit his Will to his people, appearences aside.
It is ironic that he modernized Iraq so well, for a time, when it was contrary to maintaining the sort of society that had created him. But it was necessary to maintain his holding - Iraq - as well as he should, and to be Just to his people. In the same fashoin his pointlessly mad aggrandizement was also the necessity of his attributes, the drive of the nature of that sort of ruler; a successful man from his culture could only do thus in his place. The tribal villages around Tikrit, a man without schooling in his childhood? The Caliph Omar, or King Nebuchadnezzar, these would be his exemplars, and never a Turk of the sort as Mustafa Kemal, besides.
The culture of the region is such that even such a man as Saddam, though, might be thought a good Despot: for random acts of mercy, and for the good which is swept away; even when it was built on misery and misery only remains.
He imagines himself as a man who has protected and cared for his people, who in his position as ruler of his nation, cannot do them wrong. How can he? Indeed, only he knows what is best for them. He is the only man in the whole nation of Iraq who can guide them. Saddam will not bow out of the show; to do that would be to destroy the illusion that he is a good ruler, and that illusion is important for him, even if it is irrelevant elsewhere. Indeed, it is what his existance is, now.
Saddam Hussein, whatever else might be said of him, I suspect will deserve the epitath falsely bestowed on another: "He died fighting at the head of his troops." For him to do anything else would be impossible. The man is fixed on his course, locked in with as much surety as the courses of the heavens.
His nation is His personal possession, and the one personal possession which matters to him. He thinks he has done a good job in maintaining it, and part of continuing to do so will be to, if necessary, die defending it.
There is a single free man in an Eastern Monarchy and that is the Despot. The whole realm is his plantation. And just as stubbornly as a plantation owner Saddam will fight for what he regards as his.
Perhaps he'll die in his bunker, anonymously, or perhaps he'll die quite personally - in relative terms - by rifle shot, as he fires his own back at our troops with the careful precision of his aged marksmanship, in the closest thing to the sort of warfare he no doubt wishes for, of duelists, or of great nobles upon gilded chariots, in their purple robes and with bows at ready. In the sense of his culture, he is hardly a coward. He has risked physical danger before, and once attaining the prize he sought, protected himself so he could keep it. If the protection avails him not, the courage of a lone man will surely be less, as it always has against a disciplined army, but it will still be displayed. What else could he do but draw upon the last resource?
But though we can ignore the talk of him slinking off like a coward, we also know that he lives in a different age. He has no real idea of the strength of what he faces, or the determination. He thinks this is a duel between two families; when he is proven wrong he will die. Perhaps with more honour than many recent dictators, precisely because he is not a recent dictator but rather a throwback, the last of the Mesopotamian Kings of Kings, the defender of an old and outdated order which must die.
Saddam, the unquestionably bloodthirsty tyrant, and Saddam, the "Great Uncle" and steadfast defender of his country, mingle insensibly into a single image given substance and form and made comprehendable only when turned into a bas-relief alongside those of his Assyrian forebearers. Their nature is the same, and almost nearly, hauntingly so, is the culture that brought them up. It has resisted the incursion of our ideals a long time, but the brutality and atrocity of that organization must put paid to it now, as other offerings spread into its own sphere: we are their vanguard, and when we compare ourselves to what remains there and what Saddam represents, we should not presume distress for such a thing.
Let us hope we stay our course and press on, so that all throughout the Muslim world this old order shall die. Then, just as at Ulundi, where the marker the British raised salutes the Zulu warriors who died defending their "Old Order", perhaps that can also be the ironic salute to Saddam, the illiterate peasant who raised himself up by his own ferocity and determination to command his nation in the fashion of Rustam. He was a mere five hundred years to late.
Even in ironic respect for his achievements the facts still overwhelm, and the brutality of the man demands action. He thrust himself upon the world stage - ultimately, a ruler of his sort could hardly do less - And thus subject his ancient method to the critique of the far different mores of the globe, and he has been found wanting. Even as the Greeks and the Romans condemned as barbarian tyrants men praised as Just and fair rulers in the Persian Empire, so, too, Saddam has put himself in a position to be judged, and must now suffer the consequence.
As for the concerns of regional security, or even the economic desires for what sits in the ground of his nation? One would hardly suspect Saddam to be unaware of either, nor unapproving of acting on either one; he's acted for less... Quite the contrary to disapproval, indeed.
Ultimately, he will stay his ground and die, knowing a hint of what is coming for him, but unable to comprehend the full measure of the resiliency or nature of our western method of warfare, or the culture that drives it in this modern world.
Pathetically, that's more than a fair number of people who live inside of fully modern western countries understand, these days. After all, the concepts he lives with are the forbearers, not the lunatic spinoffs.
And that, precisely, may be why there's some hope for the region yet. For all they are mired in the most ancient of conceptualizations, enforced by the Quran in some cases, the societies of Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Egypt are still those of realism, aided either by forced development, or colonial rule, or both, and, with their statist and mercantile worldviews, do not seem impossible to bring to democracy.
This is why the fall of Saddam, impending as it is, creates so much fear and opposition: For it will, indeed, be the beginning of the fall of the Old Order. The President began to shatter the idea - already fanciful at best - that we are fighting for purely economic reasons during the State of the Union address; I have more and more hope, that our full plan will be revealed in due time, against the necessary countries, as to reconstruct that region as it is needed for the security of the whole world.
And so it can be done, if we are clever enough, and concentrate against each nation seperately, as we have begun to do. Firstly Saddam, who knows his fate, and prepares as an Oriental Despot ought, haunted by the fatal reality of the future's inevitability, grasping for hope in God and in the sheer power of his own absolute Will. But surrounding Saddam, the world has changed; the fantasy into which he was born slips away. The defectors know it, the army knows it, the people know it. They are ready for change, and it will be provided.
The Mesopotamian Kings die with Saddam; then we must look South.