The doctor’s name is Mowaffaq al-Rubaie (or just plain “Mow” to his friends), and he’s been fighting against Saddam for most of his life, both in Iraq and from exile in England. Mow’s a former member of the Daawa Party, an underground Shiite group with a reputation for using any and every means, including terrorism, to attack Saddam and Saddam supporters–including Americans in the 1980s, when they fit in that category.
These days Mow is working with the Pentagon to pull together a new Iraqi government, and he called me this morning from London where he was stopping off for a brief visit with family en route from Washington to An Nasiriya. We talked about the elation of watching those enormous Saddam statues toppling all over Iraq. And then there was a pause on the line. “It doesn’t sound nice if I say people got addicted to being terrorized and persecuted,” said Mow. “But I can’t see how we’ll live without Saddam.” After all, the Butcher of Baghdad is all that exiles ever talked about. “What’s going to fill this vacuum? Are we going to look each other in the eye and say … what? We need to forget about the mentality of opposition.We are Iraq now. We need to fill our chat with the ways and means of reconstruction.”
Yet the phantom feeling lingers. And among many ordinary Iraqis there’s also an almost mystical sense of horror. Saddam’s Iraq was more than a totalitarian state, it was a kind of cult run by an evil genius, and more than half the population was born during his 35-year-reign of fear. As they grew up he was the ghoul, the ghost, the thing that went bump in the night. If they’re going to build a positive future, like members of any cult, ways must be found to deprogram the Iraqi people.
Just how deep the horror goes came home to me yesterday afternoon as I watched a video Saddam distributed of his performance at the 1979 congress of his Baath Party. A secret putsch had just elevated him from deputy president to president. Sitting behind a huge desk on stage and smoking Havana cigars, he nonchalantly ordered one alleged traitor after another to stand up and leave the hall to be executed. After the first 10 or so had filed out, those who thought they’d survived began shouting and, finally, sobbing Saddam’s praises. Then Saddam pulled out another list and read more than 20 new names. Saddam was younger then, and trimmer, and not un-handsome; smiling and smoking and joking with a glint in his eye as cold as a vampire’s as he sent his comrades to their ends.
To destroy this guy’s mystique requires more than the destruction of statues, or even of a regime. Unless Saddam is found either identifiably dead, or, better, alive and in chains, many Iraqis say his spirit will continue to haunt them. In confident moments, some of Saddam’s Westernized subjects even suggest that the Tyrant of the Tigris will become the Elvis of the Middle East, sighted at odd hours in weird places, inspiring a supernatural shock and awe. But in moments of grim foreboding, and only half in jest, Iraqis talk about Saddam as the Mahdi, the messiah who will return near the end of creation. “If he survives this,” says an Iraqi woman working with the interim regime, “I tell you everyone will believe it.”
I asked Mow about this, and at first he sounded just like his friends at the Pentagon: “We don’t care about Saddam now. He can’t operate.” But then Mow started to speculate. “He’s either killed or hiding or in Syria. I have the feeling he’s in Syria going to Russia.” Suspicions were raised when the Russian ambassador, having narrowly survived an American attack on his convoy on the way out of Iraq a few days ago, decided to go back to Baghdad. “Was he brokering a deal?” Mow wondered. Or maybe Saddam really was dead, reduced to a carbonized puddle at the bottom of the rubble of that restaurant bombed at the beginning of the week. Mow said Iraqis have discerned the face of a guard in the videotape that shows a bulldozer digging through the rubble who looks just like a guard showed in an earlier tape of Saddam walking around in a crowd. “What was that guard doing looking at the rubble?” Mow asks. “You see, this is the way Iraqis examine these things.” Is Saddam alive? Or dead? Or soon to be resurrected?
The gigantic statues may have toppled, but the shadow of the tyrant is still there.
