ABSTRACT
When we think of Iraq under the Ba‘th regime, we immediately think of Saddam Husayn. The centrality of the former president in Iraqi politics until spring 2003 and the tyranny of his regime were evident. The personality cult surrounding the dictator, his erratic and belligerent foreign policy, the chronic weakness of organised political opposition during years of oppressive reign as well as the scarcity of available sources concerning developments inside Iraq during that period, go some way to explain the almost exclusive focus in much of Western scholarship on the dictator and his narrow inner circle as the ‘sole movers’ in Ba‘thist Iraq. Kanan Makiya, then publishing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, has epitomised the tyranny Iraqis endured during the three and a half decades of Ba‘thist rule in his seminal study Republic of Fear, which has become the single most influential work written on Iraq under the rule of Saddam Husayn 1 The gist of Makiya’s argument is that Ba‘thist Iraq should not be considered an ordinary authoritarian system like many others in the contemporary Middle East, but rather be taken as a full fledged totalitarian system akin to 20th century dictatorships like Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. This study is in part an attempt to evaluate the usefulness of the totalitarianism paradigm for understanding the history of Ba‘thist Iraq, based on a comparative reading of methods and questions guiding the historiography of other regimes commonly perceived as totalitarian dictatorships, particularly Nazi Germany. The study creates a conceptual frame and methodologies for understanding the inner dynamics of a dictatorship that draw on a variety of disciplines, like comparative historiography, political science, literary and art criticism, and gender studies. It aims to look beyond the spheres of state politics, economy and jurisdiction to also include the so-called ‘soft issues’ of social norms and cultural production. By interpreting recent Iraqi history along such lines, the study intends to show how cross-regional comparative perspectives and an interdisciplinary approach can contribute to the study of Iraq. It offers a reading of Ba‘thist Iraq that transcends the seemingly flat surface of a totalitarian dictatorship and adds the neglected dimension of state-society relations to the historiography of Iraq under the Ba‘th regime. This introductory chapter explores the various threads that informed the questions explored in the study and lays out the manuals followed lateron.
