Samir al-Khalil > Quotes

“On the face of it, the Iraq-Iran war presents itself, both in its origins and in what has sustained it, as the titanic clash of two men locked in a fight to the finish. This does not go far enough only because the dominant political attribute of each man is his unprecedented concentration of authority deriving in the one case fear and in the other faith. Fear and faith are among the most elemental and primordial of all human drives; under certain circumstances they have the force to make men die in droves for no other reason than they cannot imagine doing otherwise. They have conferred onto the person will of these two men the deadly power unleashed by the decisions of this war. The final meaning of a war like this, one it shares with the Lebanese civil war but none of the Arab-Israeli wars, resides in the simple truth that its mere occurrence has taken away from all of us yet another chunk of an already battered humanity.”
― Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“In Bostan the human wave attack led to an Iraqi rout and the capture of large numbers of prisoners. Rumour has it that officers and soldiers refused to mow down masses of people deliriously careening towards them. Whatever the truth in that story, it must be admitted that if a large enough number of people are prepared to commit suicide, then even in modern warfare almost any fixed position can be overrun. The problem is one of applied mathematics: an equation made up of numbers of people, the speed at which they can run, and the distance they have to cover on one side, versus the firepower and rate of delivery of the other. Using such "tactics" in the Basra region in the summer of 1982, the Iranians lost in two attempts a hundred thousand men and boys.”
― Samir al-Khalil, The Republic of Fear

“The production that Saddam managed had all the hallmarks of his personal style. The first to "Confess" was RCC member Muhyi Abd al-Husain Rashid whose whole family was held hostage. The confession was filmed and then, as one version of the story has it, show to an all-party audience of several hundred leaders from the entire country. A grief-stricken Saddam addressed the meeting with tears running down his cheeks. He filled in the gaps in Rashid's testimony and dramatically fingered his former colleagues. Guards dragged people out of the proceedings and then Saddam called upon the country's top ministers and party leaders to themselves form the actual firing squad. Neither Stalin nor Hitler would have thought up a detail like that. What Eichmann-like refuge in "orders from above" could these men dig up in the future if they were ever to marshal the courage to try and depose their Leader?”
― Samir al-Khalil, The Republic of Fear

“The first act of self-defence is to conceal and calculate with respect to all thoughts and emotions, to pretend things are other than what they are. Appearances become even more important than in other "normal" backwards societies. More unhealthy is the compulsive Iraqi concern with being publicly inconspicuous in contrast with other ostentatious and yet less inhuman preoccupations with social standing and conspicuous consumption that afflicts societies in the Gulf. In the Iraqi setting it is essential that things not be called what they area; violence, for example, is thought by the average citizen to be at a "normal" level. To think otherwise is to let down one's defences in the face of its onslaught. The obsession with putting a mask on oneself in the workplace, in dealings with officials, in relations to neighbours and even within the family is so pervasive today in Iraq that inevitably the distinction implicit in the original act of deception gets blurred; the mask fits so completely, so tightly, that it can no longer be readily discarded. Like a snail sealed in its shell, personality and character shrivel up.”
― Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“The two perfect symbols that sum up the meaning of the Iraq-Iran war are the human wave strategy and poisonous gas, neither of which lend themselves to a strategy in warfare designed around expressly political ends. Both fixate on death as an obviously nonpolitical end in itself, whether it be purposeless slaughter of noncombatants or one's own soldiery. Ironically, poison gas and trench warfare (a different form of human wave strategy) were inventions indissolubly associated with World War I-a war that gave us such monuments to human folly as the killing fields of Verdun, quite possibly the densest collection of corpses on the planet.”
― Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq