Oliver Craner

Review of Melvyn P. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Saddam Hussein did not fully grasp what 9/11 meant for Iraq or how vulnerable it made him until it was too late. At the end of the 1990s, he remained confident that his strategy had successfully achieved its objectives and, given the nature of his regime, there was nobody to tell him otherwise. What Saddam could not see was that the events unleashed by al-Qaeda would lead directly to his own destruction. In this, he was not alone: as Melvyn Leffler shows in his new book Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq, even Bush and his closest advisers did not totally understand the direction in which their own decisions were taking them. Like Samuel Helfont, Leffler draws on new sources to construct his narrative: in this case, fresh interviews with key members of the Bush administration and Blair government and recently declassified American and British documents (including the Chilcot archive). A large part of the value of Leffler’s method here is that he does not select material simply to prove an argument (like, say, Robert Draper), but uses the accounts of those involved to try to understand how, from their point of view, the Iraq War actually happened. In fact, given the vast range of sources cited, his book is a masterpiece of concision.

In Leffler’s account, the key factor is fear. Given the mythology that has been created around the Bush administration and Iraq this might not seem credible, but the archives reveal a fraught mix of emotions felt by the key players after 9/11 that decisively affected the judgements they made on Iraq. There was no plan and no certainty; in fact, uncertainty played a more important role in leading the Americans to war with Saddam. Shock, trauma, self-recrimination, anxiety, dread, and, eventually, paranoia: all of these responses were real and played a critical role in reshaping the perception of threat felt by the President and his key advisers. The administration was “haunted by 9/11” and shaken by the scale of the surprise and their own culpability for it. Many assumed that another devastating attack was not just possible, but likely. The unresolved mystery of the October 2001 anthrax attack — now nearly as forgotten as the Amiriyah shelter bombing — simply reinforced that anxiety. This particular event seems to have had a deep impact on Dick Cheney, who had been worried about WMD before 9/11 and now found his own family at risk. “For Cheney,” Stephen Hayes wrote in his biography of the Vice President:

the national mood literally came home, in several frightening moments involving his children and grandchildren. Liz Cheney, the vice president’s elder daughter, who had taken a job at the State Department, received a call from the Secret Service at her home: there had been a positive anthrax test taken at her home. Her three children were still in the house with their nanny, unaware there was anything wrong.

The Secret Service told her that they would evacuate the children to a nearby facility and test them for exposure. Liz wanted to accompany them, but she was told not to come to the house. She called the nanny and, without explaining what was happening for fear of upsetting her, strongly suggested that the kids might like to take a trip to the mall.

Cheney’s immediate family would be subject to emergency drop-everything-and-leave-now evacuations several times in the two months after September 11. (1)

It was no secret that anthrax had been Saddam’s most important and terrifying biological weapon. As late as 1997, UN inspectors were still trying to locate 150 bombs filled with the bacteria and to account for another nine hundred pounds of it that had gone missing. There was no evidence to link Iraq to the mystery of October, but, as General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it, “in the angst of the moment” and “with the United States still reeling from the shock of earlier attacks, Iraq was a threat no one could ignore” (2). This affected everything. Leffler records that Bush called Pakistan’s President Musharraf twice asking him to personally count his nuclear warheads to make sure none were missing. Cheney’s embrace of “the dark side” — a turn that terminated in waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, black sites and ghost prisoners — was rooted in his profound and brooding sense that “time is not on our side” (3). The general feeling was summed up by Bush himself: “For me, the lesson of 9/11 was simple: don’t take chances” (4).   

The misuse of intelligence did not help matters. The CIA, spooked by its own failures, now flooded the Oval Office with masses of raw, barely filtered, largely unvetted intelligence, a lot of it implicating Iraq, which only served to magnify Bush and Cheney’s alarm. Following 9/11, the intelligence reaching the President was “both murky and ominous” (5) and things did not improve when the administration zeroed in on Iraq. Encouraged by the civilian wing of the Department of Defense, Rumsfeld and Cheney interrogated “rattled” and “paranoid” CIA and DIA officers, questioning gaps and omissions in their conclusions and emphasizing suggestive overlaps and hidden links. Driven by the sense that their complacency had led to disaster, they now went in the other direction: as Leffler writes, “administration hawks thought they were using their imagination — exactly what they had been accused of not doing prior to 9/11 — to envision worst-case scenarios” (6). The unknown and the unknowable became more important to those who felt responsible for missing what they should have known before 9/11. Rumsfeld made himself famous as the philosopher manqué of this disposition, discoursing on the “known unknowns and unknown unknowns” to global mockery, but there was, in reality, and given the track record of the Ba’ath regime, some validity to this approach. The intelligence agencies were paralysed by their own sense of failure and incapable of fighting back: they had “doubts, not certainties” about their own information, but no longer felt confident enough to dismiss or even contextualise it. (They had good reason to feel this way: the conceit of previous years had proved fatal.)

Saddam’s own behaviour contributed to paranoia in Washington. “What is politics?” he asked a room full of senior Ba’athists after seizing power in 1979: “politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said or what you intended.” In 1991, he had no intention of disarming. Once he understood that the UNSCOM teams could not be easily bribed and were, for the most part, not idiots, he tried different tactics: espionage, evasion and concealment. This would have worked had Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel not defected to Jordan in 1995 and promptly revealed the full extent of the regime’s hidden WMD programmes to incredulous CIA debriefers. Saddam himself did not want the world to know that he was disarmed because the possession of these weapons — or the illusion of it — was key to his own security. Chemical weapons had saved his regime at its most vulnerable moments during the Iran-Iraq war and they may have even “won” it for him. The more brittle his regime, the more Saddam needed his local and regional enemies to think he had WMD. As Andrew and Patrick Cockburn wrote, “the primary effectiveness of these weapons was psychological”:

In 1991, the Kurds had thought they were under chemical attack and had fled in panic when Saddam’s troops dropped flour on them from helicopters. “I lie awake at night worrying about those terrible biological weapons,” a tremulous King Fahd of Saudi Arabia once told a visiting Kuwaiti diplomat. (7)

In March 2003, with an American invasion force amassing in the Gulf, the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had a similar conversation with Tommy Franks: “General, I tell you the truth. Saddam, he has the WMD. He told me he will use it on you” (8). Saddam’s subversion and evasion, the ambiguity about his own weapons programmes, the games he played with weapons inspectors, all collided with a completely new reality. The Americans could no longer live with this kind of uncertainty or tolerate this kind of deception. “Weigh the risks of doing something,” Rumsfeld advised Bush a year before the invasion, “and then think carefully of the risks of not doing anything” (9). 

Saddam’s miscalculation was epic. It was, in fact, the third epic miscalculation of his presidency and it was the final one. But the Bush administration, fed by its own fears and also boosted by the rapid collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan, now made its own miscalculations. Trying to resolve the problem of Saddam, Bush put a strategic bet on “coercive diplomacy” which amounted to a massive, high-stakes, global influencing operation that relied more upon hope than expectation. A credible threat of war was itself a form of deception that could only be maintained by actually preparing for war. The pressure, it was argued, would pay off — either Saddam would comply, or Saddam’s internal enemies would be emboldened to overthrow him, thus saving the Americans the trouble of invading. But there were two problems here. The first was to do with power: once the American military machine had been assembled in the Gulf, there was no way to back down. The credibility of deterrence was on the line. The second problem was political: any serious prospect of war prompted an equally serious response from Iraq’s de facto allies. The further down this road Bush went, the more Chirac and Putin pushed back — and they were not alone. Iraq’s own influencing operations during the 1990s had paid off: as the tensions and divisions intensified in Europe and the Security Council, Saddam felt increasingly secure in his judgment that there would be no invasion. He had friends and therefore no reason to comply with the demands of his enemies. 

Neither Saddam or the Bush administration truly understood what had been set in motion. The Americans had set a trap for the Iraqis and for themselves: failure of the strategic goal guaranteed invasion, but the strategy almost guaranteed failure. This was the perverse logic of the enterprise. In fact, it was simply another version of the kind of paradox that always lay at the heart of the stand-off between Saddam and America. As Douglas Feith observed in his own memoir: 

By violating the sixteen Security Council resolutions adopted to contain him, Saddam was exposing a paradox: Any means short of war would be worthless unless Security Council members were willing to enforce them — through war if necessary. (10)

By 2003, the Security Council was no longer willing to follow this position through to its logical conclusion, but the Americans were. It was a collision course that seemed to be determined by fate rather than diplomacy. If, as Leffler writes, there was an “air of unreality” to the way everything proceeded in Washington, this was partly because the President had always been confused about his own objectives: “the question was whether Bush would be satisfied with anything less than regime change. The answer seemed uncertain because Bush himself probably did not know” (11). This was frustrating for Rumsfeld, whose own commitment to the war was more ambiguous than is generally understood, but whose determination to meet Bush’s objectives was absolute. In the end, his personal (if not professional) detachment itself contributed to the “air of unreality” and this had serious practical consequences. The postwar planning that was done was partial and theoretical. The State Department, for its own reasons, undermined much of the planning that did happen (as Feith suggests, Powell and Armitage deserve a much larger share of the blame for postwar dysfunction than they ever had to account for). But the most serious problem of all was that Rumsfeld, who had responsibility for the whole thing, didn’t see any point in it. This led directly to a strategic failure that, in turn, redefined American reality. “Unreality” is a good description of that short but intense period, but it was shattered by the chaos that overwhelmed Baghdad after the regime collapsed. American troops stood and watched the final disintegration of an already fragile society and were given no orders to stop it. Rumsfeld dismissed the carnage with the immortal words “stuff happens” and, at that precise moment, the whole world saw the illusion of American power evaporate. 

Twenty years on, the archives are being opened up to reveal lost details and put decisions and actions in their correct context. As new accounts of how the Gulf War led to the Iraq War — of how we got from there to here — both Leffler’s Confronting Saddam Hussein and Samuel Heflont’s Iraq Against the World (see: Saddam and his Enemies I) are essential and complementary additions to the record. And when I say “here”, I mean right here, because the events that these books describe have helped to create the world we live in today. What, then, actually happened? There is what Helfont describes as a “bitter irony” in the fact that the Iraq War was a result of the final unraveling of an international system that Saddam spent a decade trying to destroy: 

the breakdown in global order that he worked so hard to accomplish also untethered the American power that ultimately overthrew his regime. Saddam’s highly politcized view of international politics biased him to see mass public opinion and diplomacy as the drivers of international relations. This view blinded him to the raw power of military force when backed by a determined leader. (12)

Saddam and his closest officials simply did not believe that the Americans would take the action they did. Even the more pessimistic forecasts inside the regime did not predict the full invasion and occupation of Baghdad; given the violence and paranoia of Saddam’s inner circles, maybe it was impossible to clearly see the direction of events or to speak honestly about it. But, as Leffler shows, the uncertainty and fear inside the Bush administration proved to be an equally volatile and unstable mix. The final, fatal, paradox of the enterprise was this: by short-circuiting the UN process, Bush actually believed he was defending the system that the UN had designed. Saddam had been violating Security Council resolutions since 1991 and the inability to effectively enforce these resolutions threatened the credibility of the entire institution. To a certain extent, Bush believed that he had to risk destroying the system in order to save it. He did not save the system. It’s possible, as certain people in the administration did believe, that the system itself was beyond salvation, but the Iraq War at the very least accelerated its disintegration. Everything that has followed was given space and oxygen by this collapse, from the regional rise of Iran to the Russian wars of restitution and the return of ethnonationalism. 

In the end, Saddam did not win. But then, with the ironic exception of Iran, neither did his enemies. 

1. Stephen F. Hayes, Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins, 2007), p.358
2. Quoted in Melvyn P. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2023), p.87
3. Ibid, p.71
4. Ibid, p.76
5. Ibid., p.149
6. Ibid., p.157
7. Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (Verso, 2002), p.25
8. Quoted in Leffler, p.168
9. Ibid., p.159
10. Douglas Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terror (Harpercollins, 2008), p.200
11. Leffler, p.145
12. Samuel Helfont, Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), p.184

Review of Samuel Helfont, Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023)

The Amiriyah shelter bombing has largely faded from memory outside Iraq, but during the Gulf War it was something of a cause célèbre for those who opposed military action against Saddam Hussein. Originally built as a civil defence facility for a wealthy neighbourhood in West Baghdad, ‘Public Shelter No. 25’ was demolished by two American laser-guided bunker-buster smart bombs in the early hours of February 13, 1991. The U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, General Merrill McPeak, claimed that the shelter was being used by the Iraqi military as a command and control base, but most of the 408 Iraqis killed in the strikes turned out to be women and children. Within a matter of hours, graphic footage of their charred and mangled bodies was being transmitted on Iraqi state TV and broadcast around the world. This was more than simply a controversial targeting decision or a tragic mistake — it was a strategic PR disaster for the U.S. and a major propaganda coup for the Ba’ath regime.

In his new book Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America and the Post-Cold War Order, Samuel Helfont identifies this as a turning point in the war. The massacre sparked global outrage, a response that taught Saddam something new about the “power of weakness”. “Prior to al-Amiriyah,” writes Helfont,

the Iraqi regime tried to hide civilian casualties in an attempt to project strength. After the bombing, the regime went to great pains to highlight Iraqi casualties. Saddam realized that the narrative of a weak and helpless Iraq being bullied by a neo-imperialist superpower was much more effective than a narrative of a strong Iraq standing up to the United States. (1)

Along with SCUD missiles fired at Tel Aviv and the Iraqi assault on the Saudi town of Khobi, this became a key component in the way that Saddam chose to conduct the fight: aware that he could not compete with U.S. firepower, he tried to wage a war of symbolism instead. The target here was public opinion abroad and the aim was to redefine the international media narrative. Saddam “quickly recognized the political power that existed in the gap between the justification for the war and the conduct of the war” (2) and was determined to prise this gap open. It was the only real advantage he had in the emerging post-Cold War system of international relations that was being rigged against him. 

One of the things you realise reading Helfont’s study is that, as far as it went, this was a very effective strategy. Unlike his enemies, Saddam had the benefit of three clear objectives: to undermine the weapons inspection regime, remove UN sanctions and destroy America’s ‘New World Order’. By the end of the 1990s, he was close to achieving all of these aims. UNSCOM inspectors had been kicked out of Iraq in 1999. The UN Oil-for-Food programme, established in 1995, had degenerated into a corruption racket that Saddam used to finance his own ambitions. Most important of all, the fragile comity of nations had been shattered: America (and the UK) was now at odds with France, Russia, China and most of the developing world over the issue of Iraq. To show how the Ba’ath regime played an active role in creating these conditions, Helfont makes forensic use of Iraqi state records captured by the U.S. military and Iraqi dissidents after 2003, including Iraqi intelligence and military documents, transcripts of closed-meetings between Saddam and his senior advisers and the archive of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party secretariat. (The big missing prize here is the collection of Foreign Ministry files that mysteriously disappeared during the mass looting that consumed Baghdad in March 2003.) These documents have allowed Helfont to fill in significant gaps in the narrative, detailing methods used by the Ba’ath regime to manipulate peace activists, humanitarian NGOs, foreign journalists, politicians and UN member states to meet its own objectives. The Amiriyah shelter bombing is where this all began — the inspiration and blueprint for a new strategy. 

Maybe it is significant here that the Iraqi Ba’athists had always found a political use for images of violence, pain, torture and gore. In Republic of Fear, Kanan Makiya described a scene from the aftermath of the 1963 coup, when a faction of the briefly victorious Ba’ath party broadcast films of Prime Minister Qassem’s bullet-ridden body on Iraqi state TV:

Night after night, they made their gruesome point. The body was propped up on a chair in the studio. A soldier sauntered around, handling its parts. The camera would cut to scenes of devastation at the Ministry of Defence where Qassem made his last stand. There, on location, it lingered on the mutilated corpses of Qassem’s entourage (al-Mahdawi, Wasfi Taher, and others). Back to the studio, and close-ups now of the entry and exit points of each bullet hole. The whole macabre sequence closes with a scene that must forever remain etched on the memory of all those who saw it: the soldier grabbing the lolling head by the hair, came right up close, and spat full face into it. (3)

The Iraqi Ba’athists specialised in snuff movies. Saddam’s 1979 party purge was filmed and then broadcast on national television, so that Iraqis could see government officials, Saddam’s own party comrades, being led from the room, terrified, to certain death, or begging for their lives. The regime’s security services routinely recorded their own sessions of torture, rape and murder on videos which they used to blackmail or simply break surviving family members. Some of these showed up on the Iraqi black market after the fall of the regime and Donald Rumsfeld recalled watching one recovered from Baghdad by the U.S. army:

It was a twelve-minute film Saddam’s internal security services had put together. The video documented various methods of torture that his regime used, including beatings, limb and tongue amputations, and beheadings. Men were thrown off three-storey buildings. Some were forced to hold out their arms to have them broken by lead pipes. Saddam’s men proudly videotaped their atrocities to terrorize others. (4)

Video was one of the key tools of terror used by the Ba’ath: they instinctively understood the power of the recorded image and the impact of showing unfiltered violence and body trauma. The way the regime used and reused the bloody footage of the Amiriyah victims was in this tradition, in the sense that it was prepared to exploit the most graphic and gory images available for maximum political effect. 

And the effect was to shatter the consensus that existed after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. For a while, Iraq was considered a “test case” for this new international liberal order, a symbolic precedent that would establish “the soundness of the new thinking, the new system of international relations,” according to Helfont (5). Saddam knew that the fate of this order rested on how he behaved and so he felt no incentive to comply with the conditions that it set. The “new system” that was now emerging required his surrender in order to validate itself. This would fundamentally redefine the nature of his rule and would almost certainly trigger the coup that the Americans wanted anyway. But he wasn’t interested in validating the new system. He didn’t feel suicidal. This was a problem, but the lesson of the Amiriyah massacre and the unfolding disaster of UN sanctions gave him the solution. The “strategy of weakness” had found its definitive subjects: the suffering Iraqi children. This was effective because Iraqi children were suffering. The sanctions, ostensibly designed to drive a wedge between the regime and its people and starve it of any materials that could be weaponised, were in practice cruel and illogical. The regime elite did not suffer (Saddam continued to build new palaces, Uday carried on collecting his Ferraris and Lamborghinis) but they fully leveraged the desperation of their own citizens. Under the tenure of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN tried to establish a new framework for conflicts fought in the name of collective security and humanitarianism. Saddam clearly understood that this ideal, which by its very nature was designed to exclude a regime like his, could be undermined by presenting images of starving, malnourished children as direct victims of a “criminal embargo” imposed by the UN itself.

This resonated with a large and receptive audience in the Arab and Islamic world which Saddam also exploited, as the documents that Helfont has uncovered show in detail. The Gulf War created the conditions for a new alliance between the Arab nationalists of the Ba’ath party and the developing Islamist networks of the early 1990s. For one thing, they had clearly defined, common enemies: America, Israel, and the West. For another, rapprochement with a particular Sunni Salafist strand of Islam allowed Saddam to tap into a powerful stream of populist sentiment in the region without compromising his hostility to Iran. This had begun, tentatively, in the 1980s, but found its true raison d’etre once Iraq was engaged in a conflict with America. Saddam’s grand strategy was to pry Sunni Islamists away from the Gulf States and Iran, and to link the plight of Iraq with the fate of Palestine. Saddam’s key insight here was that he could place Iraq at the heart of a MENA master narrative that linked Western “neo-imperialism” to Zionism in a broad conspiracy against the Arab and Islamic world. He conspicuously rewarded the families of suicide bombers in the Occupied Territories with cash bounties to boost his credentials in the struggle to liberate Palestine. His defiance of UN inspectors and allied No-Fly Zones was the visible evidence of his war against the West. This brand of populism gained traction and had the effect of isolating the more conservative rulers from their populations, thereby constraining the public support the US received from regimes that otherwise hated him. He also partly believed his own propaganda: raised in the Ba’ath tradition, these ideas were easy to reconcile with the anti-Zionist, anti-colonial Weltanschauung of Pan-Arabism. Saddam’s own religious observance was mostly for show and he continued to enjoy his Mateus Rosé and Cuban cigars inside his rapidly proliferating luxury palace complexes. The reconciliation with Islam (and Islamism) was ambiguous, conditional and opportunistic: it was, nevertheless, real. Downplayed by certain CIA analysts who got distracted by the regime’s secular habits, this became very important for a shaken and suspicious Bush administration in 2002. 

Popular support for the Iraqi Ba’ath regime in the Middle East and North Africa was supplemented by the increasing visibility of sympathisers in the West: not only those who could be directly persuaded or corrupted by the Ba’ath party’s international networks, but those willing to play a “voluntary role” by participating in and organising anti-sanctions protests and campaigns. The files Helfont uncovers reveal the scope of Ba’ath influence operations and the active role that party agents took in these efforts. This kind of covert subversion was not inconsequential. As Helfont argues, the Iraqi strategy was to change, to shape, the narrative that had been formed by the U.S. and the UN in the aftermath of the Cold War. The aim was to unpick the consensus that knitted together the coalition arranged against them. Russia was a primary target here: the Iraqis knew that the key to breaking the New World Order was to fracture the emerging relationship between Russia and America. This succeeded to the extent that the relationship did break down and, as Helfont shows, Iraq was the aggravating factor:

Iraqi records suggest the Ba’athists helped transform Moscow’s policy in Iraq into a wedge issue…Communists and hardline nationalists in Russia were inclined to push back against Moscow’s pro-Western, post-Cold War foreign policy even without Ba’athist prodding, but Iraqi machinations and Baghdad’s ability to create opportunities spurred these Russians to turn those inclinations into actions. (6)

Pressure paid off: by the end of 1992, Yeltsin had changed Russia’s policy on Iraq and broken with the U.S. position. Crucially, as Helfont notes, the timeline demonstrates that tensions with the West during the Balkan wars did not influence Russia’s attitude towards Iraq. Instead, the growing disagreements over Iraq exacerbated disaffection with America’s (and therefore NATO’s) position on Serbia and, later, the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia. The Iraqis did not cause this split but, Helfont argues, they had a key role in magnifying and promoting the divisions that ultimately led to it. 

The implementation of the 1991 ceasefire and Security Council Resolution 687 did not end the war for Saddam. In fact, it had only just begun. He never renounced his claims to Kuwait and he never accepted the validity of UN-mandated weapons inspections, the demand to disarm or the NFZs. For Saddam, all of this amounted to a violation of sovereignty. (This was a point that others appreciated, notably Russia and China.) He sometimes used brute force to show his enemies that he remained defiant, but the campaign he waged was largely non-military: the war of spectacle that he had tried to fight in 1991 had developed into a more sophisticated media assault, reinforced by diplomatic strategy and covert influence operations. The final weapon in his campaign of subversion was possibly the most important of all: corruption. The Oil-for-Food programme was a prize for the regime, if not for the Iraqis themselves. By the end of the century, it had transformed Saddam’s fortunes: by exploiting UN maladministration, he was able to seize billions in oil sale revenues that he then used to buy influence and import banned items. The OFFP “gave Iraq the political and economic tools to keep the Security Council divided” (7) and the confidence and assurance with which the Iraqis used these tools was justified by their success. Since the early 1990s, the regime had courted French and Russian politicians with the lure of oil but now they could literally allocate barrels to their international supporters (8). The Iraqi corruption of French politics helped to drive a wedge between Washington and Paris and the chief architect of this break was Jacques Chirac, the man who had supplied the Iraqis with weapons and nuclear technology in the 1980s and had his own deep Gaullist hostility to U.S. power. “Following Chirac’s election”, Helfont writes,

Tariq Aziz declared that Iraq was giving French businesses a privileged position and a wave of French companies rushed to make deals with Baghdad in 1995 and 1996. By April 1996, Chirac broke with the United States, openly declaring that the time had come to welcome Iraq back into the international community. (9)

This policy reached a theatrical climax with Dominique de Villepin’s speech at the UN Security Council in February 2003, a grandstanding performance that, almost as much as anything else that happened, made war a certainty. The regime believed that this strategy — buying allies, isolating the US/UK position, splitting the Security Council and fracturing the international community — had worked to the extent that they were protected against regime change. The failure of the US and UK to impose further sanctions on Iraq in 1997, blocked at the UN by France, Russia and China, was viewed (correctly) by Saddam as a major strategic victory. It exposed the new divide that split the global community in two — a divide that Saddam, as much as anybody else, had opened up. By 2001, the conflict was being described by anybody who was paying attention to it as a “forgotten” or “silent” war (10) while France and Russia worked hard to finish off sanctions and kept their eyes on the final prize: the Iraqi oil fields.

At the end of the twentieth century, Saddam felt confident and safe. Helfont’s new book provides an original and valuable explanation of why he was right to feel this way — at least until September 11, 2001.

1. Samuel Helfont, Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), p.56
2. Helfont, p.57
3. Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (University of California Press, 1997), p.59
4. Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (Sentinel, 2011), p.417
5. Helfont, p.59
6. Ibid., p.98
7. Ibid., p.156
8. Those implicated in this racket included the Austrian neo-fascist Joerg Haider, Russian provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Labour MP George Galloway and the French diplomat Jean-Bernand Merimee. 
9. Helfont, p.132
10. Ibid., p.164

Ann Clwyd was every Labour whip’s worst nightmare — a campaigning politician who was prepared to put principle ahead of party discipline. It was for this reason that she was sacked from shadow cabinet positions by two party leaders and was initially blacklisted by New Labour’s inner circle. “I fully understand the need to support party policy,” she wrote in her memoir, Rebel with a Cause, “but I also believe there are times when you simply have to act with your conscience.” It did not help that one of Ann’s most determined political foes was also a veteran whip with direct influence on the internal disciplinary process. Summoned to Blair’s office to explain why she had traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan without permission in 1995, Ann could immediately detect the black hand of Ray Powell, who still held a grudge after their clash at a murky Ogmore by-election ten years earlier. The whips duly had their revenge, ensuring that she would be the first victim of the new regime, dumped from the opposition front bench for the transgression of witnessing a Turkish military assault on her Kurdish friends. Pointing to chief whip Derek Foster, one of Powell’s old USDAW comrades, she left the room with a parting shot: “He’s your problem. He’s old Labour. He’s the man you ought to get rid of.”

Ann Clwyd was a fighter and a rebel. These were the qualities that defined her political career and they were also the reason she could not be called a career politician. Three core principles rooted her political identity. First, she was an internationalist: as an MEP and then as Shadow Secretary for International Development, her commitments and connections fanned out across continents. But this did not make her a relativist and she always refused to sacrifice human rights to the dogmas of nation, religion or tribe. Second, she was a democratic socialist, a partisan of the labour movement that the Labour party had originally been created to represent. The second was bound up with the first: in the European Parliament of the early 1980s, surrounded by her Eurospectic Labour colleagues, she tried to remind them that “socialism did not stop at our borders; in fact the whole history was one of internationalism.” Third, she was a pragmatist when she needed to be, using the tools of parliament, the art of lobbying and the resources of the press to achieve her aims. She was always prepared to work across party lines in pursuit of a cause and would judge people by their actions rather than their political label. Corruption and hypocrisy were among the most pernicious sins in her eyes, but she did not consider them to be the preserve of any particular political persuasion. 

Ann was elected to parliament in May 1984, at the beginning of a National Union of Mineworkers strike that would soon become an existential struggle for the entire labour movement. The strike of 84-5 turned out to be a twilight struggle and the final defeat of the NUM would mark the end of the old industrial working class and the decline of trade union power in the UK. For Ann, as a new NUM-backed MP representing an iconic Welsh coal community, this outcome was not predestined and she would fight hard to secure victory for the miners’ cause — a stance that could not be taken for granted in the Labour party of the time. The Labour leader Neil Kinnock was the son of a Tredegar miner and had deeper emotional ties to the coal heartlands of the valleys than Ann, but he was trapped by the logic of his own leadership and his personal disdain for Arthur Scargill. Ann had no such qualms: whatever she thought of Scargill and his politics, he was defending the livelihoods of her constituents and she was perfectly happy to march alongside him at the head of a flotilla of NUM branch banners or to share a speaking platform at the Aberdare Miners Institute. When it came to her maiden speech in the House of Commons, there was only one possible subject: “I followed the convention and paid tribute to my predecessor and painted a picture of the constituency. Then I let rip.” 

Ann’s defining cause was her support for the victims of Saddam Hussein. She first encountered the world of the Iraqi exiles in Cardiff in the 1970s and was elected chair of the Committee Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CARDRI) in 1986. This was a bleak time for the opponents of Saddam — in the context of the Cold War, nobody else outside of Iraq and the immediate Middle East had any reason or motivation to care about the crimes of the regime. British government policy was actually worse than indifferent: as the Iran-Iraq war continued to grind on, the Foreign Office noted Saddam’s unquenchable appetite for weapons and decided to treat this as an opportunity to trade. Ann would become one of the most dogged hunters of Trade Minister Alan Clark and pursued a relentless campaign to expose Tory policy from the backbenches. This led, with a kind of remorseless and satisfying logic, to the Scott Report and the ‘arms to Iraq’ scandal, which played its own part in the downfall of the Major administration and, therefore, the Labour landslide of 1997. Ann could never forget or forgive Clark’s insouciance and wrote scathingly that he had

summed up the arrogance of ministers when he dared to suggest that Labour MPs were a bit dim not to understand that, from 1987 onwards, they were being misled by the government and that we should have known Britain was selling arms to Iraq. We did suspect it, we did try to expose it, but he and his colleagues lied to cover it up.

But Clark was not alone: when Ann confronted FCO minister William Waldergrove with credible rumours of a chemical weapons attack on Halabja, he dismissed her with an air of supercilious contempt. There is no proof, he said. “I told him to go and get it,” she recalled. (In the event, CARDRI would have to provide this service.) A few months later, she was appalled to see David Mellor shaking hands with Iraqi regime figures at the Baghdad trade fair — again, on behalf of the FCO. This is what the campaigners against Saddam had to face: a solid wall of indifference and cynicism that could rarely be penetrated. It was also an early taste of the amoral realpolitik that would be practiced by the Major administration during the Bosnian war — strategic decisions that effectively colluded in genocide. For those who had been working on behalf of Saddam’s victims from the start it was a record of horror and hypocrisy that never seemed to end.

Ann developed a close bond with the Kurds of northern Iraq. She knew all of the main players and did what she could to publicise their plight in parliament and the media. In the aftermath of the Gulf War she traveled into the Zagros mountains and met Kurdish refugees fleeing the prospect of regime reprisal killings they saw being unleashed on the towns and cities of the southern Shia. Returning to the House of Commons, she recalled, “I wanted parliamentarians to feel some of the desperation that I had felt and, above all, I wanted the British government to take action.” Ann’s speech was the crucial intervention that would prompt Major to sponsor no-fly zones and a safe haven status for Iraqi Kurdistan. The Iraqi Kurds accorded her such respect that she was able to act as a mediator between the two main Kurdish factions and facilitated a tense prisoner exchange during the Kurdish civil war. Her closest allegiance was to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and she was a loyal friend to its ruling dynasty, the Talabanis. In her memoir, Ann recalled her trip to the Pentagon in 2004 to meet Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. When the conversation came around to the topic of Iraqi presidential candidates, Ann spoke in favour of Jalal Talabani. Talabani would eventually become the first Kurd to hold the office and in this post he kept the Iraqi political establishment together during the civil and sectarian wars of 2006-8. Many of Ann’s old friends — usually Kurds — would rise to positions of prominence in post-Saddam Iraq, often proving to be the most competent and responsible ministers. These included: Barham Salih (Deputy Prime Minister 2006-9, President 2018-22), Hoshyar Zebari (Foreign Minister 2003-14, Finance Minister 2014-16) and former Minister of Water (2003-10) and current President Latif Rashid.

Ann’s position on Iraq never changed. She believed that the Ba’ath regime had to be held to account for its crimes, even if this required a military confrontation. She believed this before Tony Blair did. “He eventually came round to my point of view,” she liked to point out. From her position in CARDRI and its successor INDICT, Ann pursued the legal and moral delegitimization of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, keeping the plight of the regime’s victims as visible as possible and pursuing its agents and allies outside of Iraq. This all came to a head in 2003, in the shadow of a looming war, when she was invited to open the Kurd’s genocide museum in Halabja. The Kurds were still legitimately terrified of Saddam’s chemical weapons and she watched as women brought nappies from markets to use as gas masks and convoys of terrified families streamed out of towns and cities. Her old friend Hero Talabani, the dynamic PUK matriarch, took her to Chamchamal and pointed out the rocket launchers that surrounded the town. “That’s where they’re going to fire their chemical weapons from,” she told her. In this atmosphere of tension and fear the contents of the museum served to magnify Ann’s own sense of futility and loss and reinforced the tragic scale of past events. Even so, her reaction was a surprise:

The day I opened the museum it was snowing, grey and icy. Hundreds of relatives of the dead and victims queued up to watch and tell me their stories. One old man showed me a photograph of fifteen members of his family; he was the only survivor. I was asked to cut the ribbon, but I could feel my voice breaking. I have given thousands of speeches but I simply could not speak. I started walking around the room, trying to compose myself, but when a Kurdish cameraman asked me how I felt I burst into tears. I had never cried in public before.

This was maybe the most eloquent response that she could have given. Her tears were broadcast on television and echoed around Kurdistan. It was the culmination of years of fighting and frustration — years when her commitment had only been matched by the indifference she encountered. She considered this indifference to be a moral abdication, a stain on the human conscience. This was the context of her support for regime change in Iraq.

Ann stood down as MP for the Cynon Valley after the 2019 election. Over the last couple of years she had collected together all of her papers from decades of campaigns and political activity and donated them to the political archive of the National Library of Wales. She would have liked to have entered the House of Lords, not for the pomp and ceremony but for the platform it would have given her to continue campaigning in the way she had always done. This did not happen because of the intrigues of old enemies in the leader’s office, but it did not stop her working for the simple reason that it could not stop her. For Ann, every day was a new day with new challenges and new outrages and new opportunities. Life was activity and action. “The campaigns go on,” she wrote in the prologue to her memoir. “And so do I.” 

R.I.P., Ann.

From an early age, Silvio Berlusconi had been interested in extending the human life span beyond its existing limits. It was an ambition that he shared with his friend and business partner, the avaricious priest Don Luigi Verzé. “We were building an organization that would study how to live until the age of 120 years,” he recalled, much later:

We had everything planned. We bought some land near Verona, and we began the project. We brought in the most famous gerontologists, the best and the brightest. And then Don Verzé died. (1)

Berlusconi was not ready to die. Physically speaking, his life could be viewed as a series of battles fought against the aging process — ongoing campaigns in the ultimate war against death. This took the form of vigorous daily exercise routines, an obsession with personal hygiene and a meticulous attention to self-grooming, all of which culminated in the epic struggle against hair loss that lasted for two decades and transfixed a nation. Perhaps the greatest weapon of all was his dedication to the cult of positive thinking. Berlusconi’s outlook was optimistic, even utopian, and in his ideal realm everybody would be young and energetic and look good. Immaculate Caraceni suits, a healthy hairline and a permanent tan all had their own spiritual qualities but ultimately served the same end — to signal physical and psychological omnipotence. Umberto Scapagnini, Berlusconi’s personal doctor, once described his patient as “technically immortal” and dedicated part of his career to this pursuit of longevity. The “elixir of youth” prescribed by ‘Dr. Fuck’ boosted Berlusconi’s libido well into his seventies, with dire political consequences. But, in the end, Berlusconi could not cheat time. While his death from leukemia at the age of 86 will have no significant impact on the Italian political scene, it does mark the passing of one of Europe’s truly significant “change makers”; in the shadow of Ruby the Heart Stealer and the Bunga Bunga parties, Berlusconi does not always get the credit he deserves as a cultural and political innovator. If Italy is the political laboratory of Europe, then what he created with Forza Italia in 1994 is part of that tradition. He pioneered a political style that would eventually be replicated across the continent and find its ultimate avatar in the 45th president of the United States. 

The Berlusconi revolution began with a residential complex built on the outskirts of Milan, underneath the flight paths of Linate airport. “I wanted to continue with my dream of building new towns,” Berlusconi recalled: 

My idea was to achieve this with a very modern style of urban planning for the time that included lots of green, lots of bicycle paths, roads and walkways. We had to build a place where a young mother could send her kids to school without worrying, where you could love and work and shop and pray and go to the sports club and use the tennis courts and swimming pools and have everything that a family could desire. My idea was to make it possible to do everything at Milano Due so that you would never have to leave. (2)

This was more than simply a housing project — it was a new model community. It was also a vision of the future and heralded more profound changes in Italian society. Completed in the late 1970s, it catered to an emerging breed of bankers, business executives and media operators who would revive Milan and create “a kind of counter-counter-culture” (3) centered on the city. This was the heart of Berlusconi’s early constituency — a Northern yuppie subculture whose ambitions, habits and tastes would go onto capture, then transform, the entire country. At the same time, it sent a personal message to Berlusconi’s allies and rivals, demonstrating the power and reach of an emerging political network that would elevate him onto the national stage: with the help of Don Verzé, he was able to secure the peace of his residents by getting Linate’s flight paths diverted.

Milano 2 also offered cable television station to its occupants, a service that contained the seed of Canale 5, Berlusconi’s first private network. Throughout the 1980s, the budding media mogul aggressively courted private advertisers and invested their funds in Hollywood film rights, sleazy game shows and popular imports like Dallas, Dynasty and The Smurfs, leading a populist assault on RAI’s national broadcasting monopoly. For the intelligentsia and their political allies this was a cultural apocalypse, but the Italians were ready for it — they wanted what Berlusconi was offering. This was a cultural shift with political implications, as Mediaset president Fidele Confalonieri quickly recognised:

You have to understand the context, the way things were back then. By the 1980s, Italy had been living through years of recession and austerity and Red Brigades terrorism and the strong and continuing influence of the Italian Communist Party on society. In that context it was pretty revolutionary for Silvio Berlusconi to launch his commercial TV challenge against RAI. He was going against the prevailing culture and mindset of the Italian establishment. He was offering an alternative lifestyle. That, in itself, was a political act. (4)

When the courts tried to exact revenge by closing down his network, they inadvertently provoked what could be called The Great Smurf Revolt. “The public rebelled,” Berlusconi recalled, 

There were children protesting in the streets, carrying placards that read ‘Give Us Back The Smurfs!’ We had entered into the lives of the ordinary people and we had become part of the family life of millions of Italians. (5)

This time, Berlusconi was rescued by his political patron, the Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. It is one of the peculiarities of Berlusconi’s early career that the main emissary of the Reagan revolution in Italy would find his closest political ally in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Except that, put in context, this wasn’t strange at all. The Craxian Socialists of the 1980s were a new breed of reformer: anti-Communist and pro-NATO, they were also intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, particularly themselves. Their social liberalism was matched by a ferocious economic liberalism, exalting competition, individualism, entrepreneurship and innovation. They preached a permissive consumer creed that was nominally on the left but was also fatally attracted to power and wealth. The PSI hierarchy was the party of Milano da bere, a corrupt and opulent world of expensive nightclubs, exclusive restaurants, tailored clothes, haute couture mistresses, recreational drugs and fast cars. This was the New Italy built on the Milanese stock exchange, the city’s elite fashion houses and the new empire of commercial television: a precursor to Berlusconi’s own ‘Italian dream’. As Paul Ginsborg wrote:

to be a Socialist politician in Italy in these years meant to have a portable telephone and a BMW, to mix with high flying lawyers and businessmen, to lunch at Matarel or Savini in Milan’s Galleria, to have a good line of conversation on information technology and to take exotic holidays. (6)

This was the surface of things, but the foundations revealed a complex network of bribery, kickbacks and mafia contacts that would prove fatal for the PSI and most of the Italian political class. In this context, Craxi was the king of graft: he kept a villa in Tunisia (to which he fled after being investigated for corruption in 1992), apartments in New York and Barcelona, and occupied an entire floor of the Hotel Raphael in Rome where he entertained his mistress, the Tenebrae and Inferno starlet Ania Pieroni. (Berlsuconi would also claim his own Argento victim: Veronica Lario, who famously had her arm chopped off in the bloodbath that concluded Tenebrae, would become his mistress and second wife.) The great unraveling began in Milan when the Socialist politician Mario Chiesa tried to flush 30 million lire of bribes down the toilet as the police raided his apartment. Publicly disowned by Craxi, Chiesa brought the whole house down: Tangentopoli led to Clean Hands which led to the destruction of the First Republic.

Milan was the powerbase of Craxi and this was the most important thing for Berlusconi: it was the foundation of their political and business partnership as well as their genuine personal connection (Craxi was godfather to Berlusconi’s daughter with Lario and Berlusconi would later be accused of transferring millions of lire to him in Tunisia). In contrast to the Communists with their intellectual tradition and theoretical canon, television was the primary mode of communication for the Socialists and so Berlusconi was important to them: in his hands, the PSI message was reduced to a form of public relations crafted around the ruthless charisma of Craxi himself. “By the early 1980s,” wrote Michael Ledeen, “[Craxi] had become the John F. Kennedy of Italian politics, and in Milan, as in Rome, the most glamorous women, the elite of Italian cinema, the new pinup stars of Italian business, and the heroes of Italian soccer joined the party” (7). Craxi was the dominant personality of the PSI, the alpha male, the apex predator, providing a political template for Berlusconi himself. Every element had been put in place to make sense of this strange alliance between the capitalist media baron and the Milanese Socialists: the love of money, the pursuit of power, a relaxed attitude to political principle, a pro-business Lombard identity, a rampant consumer culture, fantastic women, but most of all a dedication to the image. 

In the ruins of the First Republic, when Berlusconi finally decided to enter politics, the power of the image was his guiding principle. He was already a television evangelist in one very specific sense: he believed that the world presented on television superseded reality and could therefore be used to shape that reality for the better. As he once told an adviser: “if something is not on television, it doesn’t exist. Not a product, a politician or an idea.” Combined with this belief was his self-described role as a “missionary of commercial television” in Italy: Berlusconi considered his assault on the commanding heights of RAI to be a key battle in the cultural and political liberation of the country he loved. Where others saw predation and monopoly, he saw deliverance and emancipation; he was helped by the fact that viewers and advertisers largely agreed. The legal cases that followed his entry into television and politics were, from this perspective, rooted in the challenge he presented to the monopolies and interests of the “left-wing” establishment. He dismissed each case as politically motivated, publicly accusing Italian magistrates of conspiring with “Communist enemies” to destroy him, just like they did to Craxi. For Berlusconi, truth was a matter of perception: he had alternative facts, his own truth, and if this truth did not match the ‘reality’ being presented by his enemies, then he had a duty to transform that reality. 

It was Berlusconi, more than anybody else, who led Italy into the new world of mass media and consumerism. He made the postmodern condition a living reality for millions of Italians. He was a man made for the age of seduction, simulation and hyperreality; if he didn’t exist, Umberto Eco would have had to invent him. His mutable values and understanding of truth and reality were primed to exploit the triumph of relativism, the deconstruction of meaning and the end of ideology. He was an unconscious apostle of the Society of the Spectacle, a concept that was both useful and natural to him and that he sought to build rather than destroy. He safely navigated the corruption scandals that undid the First Republic and went on to play a key role in dismantling the sclerotic structures of the old cultural and political elites of Italy, constructing a new Empire of Images in their place. Like Rupert Murdoch, his values and beliefs were conservative but his instincts and his actions were disruptive and radical. Both men helped to create a new political reality, but in Italy Berlusconi took this a step further by deciding to become its face. 

The legacy of Berlusconi’s political career is less significant for what he did (or didn’t do) in office than for the political style he created. The content of the ideology that littered his speeches and articles was fairly consistent and suited his business interests, but it was politically superficial. Free market liberalism was the creed he espoused and probably did genuinely believe in, but it was not what he delivered or prioritized when he was in power (judicial and constitutional reform took on greater urgency as the courts hunted him down). Berlusconi’s innovations had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with organization and presentation. Forza Italia gave Italy a type of politics it had never seen before: a party rooted in a private corporation and exploiting the new political technologies of market research, advertising, branding, commerce and mass media. There were precedents, which the new Berlusconi political machine drew upon: polling techniques perfected by James Carvell for the ‘91 Clinton campaign; advertising methods developed by Saatchi & Saatchi for the Conservatives in ‘87 and ‘92; the Labour party rebranding of ‘87 (although this had echoes of Craxi’s own adoption of the red carnation as a party emblem). But Berlusconi took all of these political tools and used them to create a new political party with no traditional roots or political base within a matter of months and then win power. 

Berlusconi always insisted that he was not a professional politician but an entrepreneur. In truth, he was a political entrepreneur and one of the most skilled and creative in Europe at that time. The 1994 Forza Italian election campaign was his masterpiece: the Italian public and what remained of the old political parties (all operating under new names but showing no ability to successfully rebrand) did not know what had hit them. Berlusconi unleashed a phalanx of untested candidates firmly embedded in the Fininvest family and instructed to pay towards their own media training and ‘kit del candidato’ (“a luxurious bag ‘full of surprises’ — ties, adhesives, lapel badges, a videocassette with the party’s programme, musical cassettes of Forza Italia’s anthem to sing along to’, 8). Forza Italia combined the corporate sales pitch with the lifestyle brand to shape an entirely new political product, communicated in simple soundbites and mediated by images. The core message that the party presented was simultaneously vague and direct: Italy needed Berlusconi to save the country from “Communism” and associated calamities. (Indeed, Berlusconi needed power to save his TV empire from being dismantled by the state.) Policy statements, such as they were, were not promises and certainly not commitments, but tactical messages designed to sell the product rather than articulate a party programme. Winning power was the only priority. 

In the event, this wasn’t a complete success and Berlusconi had to cobble together an unlikely coalition with Umberto Bossi’s separatist Northern League and Gianfranco Fini’s postfascist National Alliance in order to win. But this fragile marriage provided Berlusconi with the opportunity to launch another political innovation: a coalition of right-wing parties that would eventually help nurture the rhetoric and policy platforms of a new European populism. This was a testament to Berlusconi’s opportunism and personal ambition, but also revealed his almost total lack of ideological commitment or principle. In fact, the abandonment of ideology was part of the point and the appeal. Despite the constituencies and votes that his coalition partners provided, it was Berlusconi who would always benefit from these arrangements, as the most visible and popular leader of the New Right that he had, essentially, created himself. He was a billionaire with suspected mafia links and a historical connection to the old disgraced Socialist elite and yet he was able to present himself as a man of the people and a fresh alternative to the politics of the First Republic. He continued to promise deregulation and privatization while channeling the anti-establishment, anti-elite disaffection that fuelled the rise of a party like the Northern League. By adopting this pose he created a model for an Italian anti-politics that would eventually find its purest form in the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo. His ‘Contract with the Italians’ shamelessly plagiarized Newt Gingrich, but his rhetoric both defined and was shaped by parochial anxieties – notably, the increasingly important issue of immigration. Enemies were dismissed as “Communists”, a term he used promiscuously and which came to symbolize a broader threat to liberty and private initiative posed by all politicians of the left, a broad category that included the technocrats and intellectuals of the liberal center (he held particular animus for Prodi and Draghi).

His attack on this “left” resonated widely and was therefore highly effective in political terms; it also displayed a certain relish in blurring truth and distorting reality. This example was useful for the other parties of the populist far-right that were beginning to advance across Europe. It could be argued that Berlusconi set a precedent for the post truth politics of the twenty-first century: mass media democratic populism combined with his own unique attitude towards reality to spawn a new mutant strain of political communication. As Indro Montanelli, the editor of Il Giornale when Berlusconi owned the paper, later remarked: “[he] is a man with an entirely personal view of the truth, so that whatever he says is true. He tells lies, but he believes them” (9). Berlusconi was known to tell prospective advertisers that “powerful images are more important than facts” (10) and, for him, reality was defined by perception and the primacy of the image. Directly linked to this highly personal understanding of truth was an undermining of the concept of objectivity. This is where Berlusconi fatally connected the power of mass media to the politics of anti-politics. Italy had lost its political bearings after the political purges of Clean Hands; the state became a blank slate and the public space a void. This vast chasm was most effectively exploited by Berlusconi and those new populist and far-right mutations, Matteo Salvini’s Lega, M5S and Fratelli d’Italia. The primacy of perception and presentation that undermined the belief in universal truth allowed this New Right to follow Berlusconi’s lead by manipulating facts and redefining reality in their own image. They didn’t invent anything: the popular desires and resentments they channeled were authentic enough, but they became increasingly skilled at crafting the public discourse around their own messages and imagery, harnessing technology to curate their own mass constituencies. Postfascists aside, these were the political progeny of Berlusconi.

It was odd, then, that during the election of 2022 — in a political environment that he had done more than anybody to shape — Berlusconi looked irrelevant, lost. He was running for office again and trying to capture the old magic. He took to TikTok to tell the world: “Italy Needs Me!” The result was not disastrous, but also not successful: he would be found flanking Giorgia Meloni, the woman he once claimed could not run to be mayor of Rome because she would have to look after her children, as she announced her first cabinet as Prime Minister. (The only person who looked more miserable here was Salvini, standing on the other side of her.) But he was still alive. He had survived the indignity of being barred from public office. The European elites had tried to kill him off. Angela Merkel could never forget, or forgive, being called an “unfuckable lard-arse” (“I never said it!” Berlusconi told a visibly delighted Gerhard Schroder). Sarkozy loathed him for other, not always tangible, reasons, exacerbated by his sudden passion to depose one of Berlusconi’s political pals, Gaddafi. Together they instigated a virtual coup d’etat during the Eurozone crisis, ejecting Berlusconi from office in favor of an unelected ‘technical administration’ led by Mario Monti (“Senior officials could be heard boasting: “We do regime change better than the Americans””, 11). This terminal humiliation was, in the end, nothing of the sort: he was still there, giving Meloni a run for her money, l’immortale.

The very things that the EU grandees despised about Berlusconi were the very things that kept him alive: his vulgarity, his personal ambition, his lack of shame, his sheer elan. This was Berlusconi’s own personal touch and it was the final key to his political success: the role of personality in post-ideological politics. What seemed unique to Berlusconi in this regard would eventually be adopted more widely. His distortions served to redefine ‘truth’ as another form of belief. What were seen as flaws by his opponents became assets in the eyes of his supporters. As Mariella Pandolfi told the New Yorker in 2003, 

the language that unites Italy today is Berlusconi’s television language. His grammar is dreadful. He gets the subjunctive wrong. Give him three seconds on television and he makes four mistakes. But you discover that everybody loves his mistakes. That’s his power. (12)

He defined the paradox of the new populists: here was a billionaire, a real estate and media tycoon, channeling the voice of the people. He could do this because so many voters admired his wealth and his success. The more he flaunted, the more they liked it. The bunga parties beneath the Renaissance paintings of Arcore; the replica Greek amphitheater and remote control volcano at his Sardinian Villa Certosa; the helicopter landing on the pitch of San Siro Stadium; the St Moritz pad purchased from Shah Reza Pahlavi. None of this mattered in the way it was supposed to. The ‘Communists’ that Berlusconi conjured out of the air as demons and phantasms did not, in fact, exist as a real threat: the old world of class loyalty that the PCI built their networks on had disintegrated. When Berlusconi declared, “I am the Italian dream!” enough people agreed (or at least didn’t care enough to object) for it to be important. His own grievances became public prejudices. His failures and his criminal convictions fed into everybody’s cynicism so that it did not matter; he would never really have to shoulder responsibility for his own actions. He created his own electorate out of the hollow space left by the Communists and the Church. He created a new culture, and so became a cultural phenomena in his own right. He simply did not understand what conflict of interest meant, or pretended not to, and, accordingly, broke the norms of democratic conduct. Whether he had been watching or not, Berlusconi’s greatest success was, finally, Trump: at the head of the greatest power on earth was a political creation that almost exactly fitted the style he set. But there was one more twist: looking at this kind of cracked mirror image, he did not like what he saw. This was the final indignity. 

1. Silvio Berlusconi quoted in Alan Friedman, My Way: Berlusconi In His Own Words (Biteback, 2015), p.40
2. Ibid., p.38
3. Alexander Stille, The Sack of Rome: Media + Money + Celebrity = Power = Silvio Berlusconi (Penguin, 2007), p.28
4. Fidele Confalonieri quoted in Friedman, p.56
5. Silvio Berlusconi quoted in Friedman, p.60
6. Paul Ginsborg, Italy and its Discontents 1980-2001: Family, Civil Society, State (Penguin, 2003), p.151
7. Michael Ledeen, Freedom Betrayed (AEI Press, 1996), p.124
8. Paul Ginsborg, Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony (Verso, 2004), pps.68-9
9. Indro Montanelli quoted in Stille, p.258
10. Stille, p.23
11. Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World (Penguin, 2018), p.412
12.  Mariella Pandolfi quoted in Jane Kramer, ‘All He Surveys’, The New Yorker, November 2, 2003

I: ‘Welshness’ and Poetic Identity 

Vernon Watkins did not seek fame. He wanted people to read his poems, but his criteria for measuring success did not include book sales, critical acclaim or social climbing. He paid attention to literary trends, but reserved polite disdain for fashionable writers, “contemporary poets” and the literary power brokers he considered misguided and even corrupt. This was a subject he raised with his hero Yeats when they finally met in 1938 and the response was recorded in the poem ‘Yeats in Dublin’:

My quarrel with those Londoners
Is that they try
To substitute psychology
For the naked sky
Of metaphysical movement,
And drain the blood dry.

All is materialism, all
The catchword they strew, 
Alien to the blood of man. –’
One ranting slogan drew
That “Poetry must have news in it”:
The reverse is true.’ (1)

This was recollected with approval — it was Vernon’s own opinion, too. The primary target here was Auden, a poet he admired as a craftsman but could not abide as an ideologue. His antipathy to the prewar influence of Christopher Isherwood and his coterie was more personal. Isherwood was an old friend from Repton College who fell out with Vernon at Cambridge and would publicly humiliate him as Percival, the “gullible” and “gushing” ingénu of Lions and Shadows (2). Personal temperament, artistic principles and private wounds contributed to an uncompromising ideal that Vernon created for himself — the poet dedicated to his muse, scorning all public and didactic functions. 

Once his own poetic role had been conceived in this way he could accept almost anything, including the silence of critics, pathetic book sales and the day job at Lloyds Bank. This was a fundamentalist creed, an act of passive resistance to the vanities and appetites of his more successful contemporaries:   

One critic, I believe, said — perhaps it was of my last book — that each new book of Vernon Watkins is more old fashioned than the last. Well, of course I’ve never cared much about fashion. I think a poet has to think in terms of centuries. It’s a critic’s business to think in terms of decades and to sort out what is happening. Fundamental truths don’t change and I’m a metaphysical poet. I’m entirely concerned with those. (3)

The critics, for their part, remained unmoved by this slight and Vernon’s revolt against fashion went largely unnoticed. There was always a trace of pique in these statements of artistic protest but they were nevertheless authentic. The independence that Vernon felt from ‘the literary scene’ was genuine and consistent. This strength of resolve was rooted in the psychological breakdown he experienced at the age of 23, an episode he described as “a complete revolution of sensibility” that made all of the poems written up until that point obsolete and set a whole new course for his work.

This “revolution” defined Vernon’s ultimate theme (“I could never again write a poem which would be dominated by time,” 4) and, compared to this, temporary success on the London scene did not seem very important or particularly relevant. Despite this, he was not an artistic recluse and made periodic submissions to T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber which led to the publication of seven volumes of his poetry between 1941 and 1968. They did not sell well, partly because the style consistently ran against prevailing poetic trends and ignored contemporary innovations. It’s a style that remains a barrier to this day and so critical interest tends to focus on Vernon’s position as a prominent Welsh or Anglo-Welsh poet, or simply as a friend of Dylan Thomas, in whose shadow he remains. A more refined approach still falls short, as those seeking the true ‘Poet of Gower’ also tend to leave disappointed. In his work contact with the land can seem tenuous and lost in abstraction, yet the Gower fed his imagination and Wales gave him roots. When he began to write seriously again, South Wales would provide him with the physical and symbolic grounding that he needed to begin anew. His first volume opened with two poems located in the mining towns of the valleys and closed with a ballad inspired by the New Year ritual of the Mari Lwyd. During the period of recuperation that followed his breakdown, Vernon roamed the Gower coast and developed an intimacy with its landscape that would saturate his work. But did any of this make him a “Welsh” poet? Born in Maesteg to Welsh-speaking parents, he lived and worked for most of his life in Cardiff, Swansea and Gower and this made him, at least, a Welshman who was also a poet. The correct, and more complex, question is: was he a poet of Wales?

There is very little evidence in his own writing and in the recollections of his friends that he considered Wales to be a “cause” that he needed to or should write for. His own answer to this question was precise: he called himself “a Welsh poet writing in English” rather than an ‘Anglo-Welsh poet’ and the significance of this was language. Vernon was not a Welsh-speaker or reader and his connection to the early literature of Wales, whether it be the Mabinogion, Taliesin, Aneurin or Llywarch Hen, was limited to childhood memory and English translation. This provided just enough to feed his imagination and, later, some of his poetry, but, as his close friend Glyn Jones pointed out, “it is vain to look in his work for the influence of Welsh-language poetry, ancient or modern” (5). He didn’t adopt the extreme rejection of ‘Welshness’ itself that became common in the anglicised South East, but this was the world in which he grew up and which he knew best. A generation of children raised in South Wales had not been taught any Welsh at all; even their Welsh-speaking parents often considered their native language to be a parochial and archaic irrelevance with no place in the dynamic industrial society being forged around them. Vernon’s mother, specifically, left rural Carmarthenshire to be educated in London and then Bolkenhain in the Sudetenland; rather than teach her son Welsh, she encouraged him to learn German, a language in which he became fluent and enabled him to produce translations of Holderlin, Heine and Goethe. Even though he expressed some regret about not knowing Welsh he never actually attempted to learn it, although he did make the effort to learn French, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Latin to complement his already fine German. 

Vernon was a talented linguist with no personal or professional use for what others considered to be his stolen native tongue. “Wales is my native country,” he wrote, “and English the native language of my imagination” (6). Roland Mathias would later claim that Vernon had been “deprived” of his Welsh heritage by losing the language, “the common fate of the first main generation of Anglo-Welsh writers” who were the unwitting victims of petit bourgeois “snobbery” and an English assault on Welsh culture (7). To the extent that this was true, Vernon more than compensated for it by his fluency in European literatures and his participation in the outward thrust of the culture of South Wales at this time, a direction of travel shared by Marxist colliers in Tredegar and Rhymney and the middle class professionals of Swansea, Cardiff and Newport. The actual influence of the Bardic tradition and the Welsh language on his work was, by Vernon’s own account, a matter of rhythm and sound: “my verse is characteristically Welsh in the same way that the verse of Yeats is characteristically Irish…because rhythm and cadence are born in the blood” (8). Like Dylan, whatever ‘Welshness’ was there existed in the sound effects that shaped an English verse otherwise dominated by Blake or Yeats or Hopkins. Vernon’s widow Gwen Watkins would later claim that he

never wished to write in Welsh, because the richness of the English language satisfied him completely; and though he saw no meaning in a narrow nationalism, and loved many countries, Wales always held a chief place in his heart. (9)

Wales was important for many other reasons, but the poetic traditions that he really identified with were not Welsh at all: they were English, German, French and, in the form of Yeats, Anglo-Irish. The ‘Welshness’ of his poetry was evident in the cadence, traditions and landscapes that he used, but these did not define the total ambition of his work which was aesthetic and spiritual rather than ideological or material. He was not extolling the land: he was trying to overcome the tyranny of time. 

It was left to an English critic to mistake Vernon for a Welsh bard. Kathleen Raine was a prominent champion, describing him as “the greatest lyric poet of my generation”, and, as critical accolades of any kind were relatively rare for him, he appreciated the support. But the problem was that her view of what he was actually doing was false: the image of Vernon she painted was a Celtic mirage that provided greater insight into her own fantasy world than the poems she was writing about. For Raine, Vernon was “an heir to the bards”, a poet of “the Celtic tradition” and “the spiritual knowledge of the Druid tradition” (10). While she acknowledged his expertise in German and French literature and his immersion in English culture, to her the “bardic tradition” was the thing that really mattered in his work. She was able to discern the influence of Eliot on Watkins, but found Yeats to be far closer “in his understanding that tradition is not anything and everything that has historically occurred, but a few heroic and religious themes, passed on from age to age” (11). She was partly right about this, but perhaps did not fully appreciate the extent to which the nationalist impulse behind the revival of Irish legends and myths was precisely the thing that Vernon rejected in Yeats. This would lead her to take his talk about rhythm being in the blood to its logical conclusion by identifying “a voice…of the race” in his verse and attributing his “intricate rhythms and assonances” to an intrinsic and immutable Celtic identity that he not only (in her view) consciously adopted, but could not escape from even if he wanted to. But this doesn’t really seem to have been what he had in mind. It was certainly too much for Roland Mathias, Raine’s editor at the Anglo-Welsh Review, who accused her of “not having read his work carefully enough” (12) and pointed out that “there is very little evidence that the bardic spirit had any place in Vernon Watkins’s approach to poetry” (13). 

Watkins did adopt the legendary figure of Taliesin in six of his poems, which possibly set Raine down this wrong path in the first place, but these do not do enough to justify her claim that “the Lay of Taliesin” constituted “his classical ground” (14). In fact, he did not so much adopt as adapt: Taliesin gave Vernon a poetic device that he could use in the service of his own obsessions. This had almost nothing to do with ancient knowledge, the Druid tradition or the bardic inheritance and everything to do with his own philosophical project, for which he took everything he could. Mathias notes that Vernon came to associate Taliesin with Gower based on a tenuous connection with its own source and uses:

In Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion (1877) there are extensive notes of the text account of the life of Taliesin: one of these quotes a document from the Hafod Uchtryd Collection which, while following Anthony Powel of Llwydaeth in making Taliesin the son of Saint Henwg of Caerleon and having him captured by the Irish while coracle fishing in the course of a visit to the court of Urien Rheged at Aberllychwr, alleges that, escaping, he was cast ashore on the coast of Gower rather than at Aberdyfi. (15)

Vernon used this slender reference as his starting point, a fixing point, for his Taliesin poems: it allowed him to place the legendary poet in the landscape he knew best and could interpret. Mathias is particularly good at showing how Watkins was able to fit Taliesin “the time conqueror” into his own “post-Blakean spirit of cosmic mystery” and “practical Christianity” in poems like ‘Taliesin in Gower’ and ‘Taliesin and the Spring of Vision’. A shard of Mediaeval biography, Heroic poems, the figure of the shapeshifter and the prophet are incorporated into a developing theological superstructure with no regional or nationalist relevance. Vernon’s adoption of Taliesin did not add anything substantial to the old heritage but became a vessel for something altogether new and personal. 

For example, ‘Taliesin in Gower’ presents a “vision” of “the landscape to which I was born” where the gulls, curlews, kestrels, larks, lapwings and herons of Gower are “holy creatures” that “proclaim their regenerate joys” (16). Nature is encountered as a script, a recital (“the script of the stones…the tongue of the wave”) that is played out on the “mighty theatre” of Oxwich, Pwlldu and Three Cliffs Bay. Taliesin defines his role as an interpreter of this natural drama, striving to “loosen this music” of nature, to “celebrate…marvellous forms” and  “make manifest what shall be.” ‘Taliesin in Pwlldu’ unites this neo-Platonism with a more pragmatic Christian vision:

My Master from the rainbow on the sea
Launched my round bark. Through darkness, trailing hands,
I drifted. Wave-gnarled images of gods
Floated upon the whale-backed water-plains.
I looked; creation rose, upheld by Three. (17)

This reconciliation is advanced in ‘Taliesin and the Spring of Vision’, the most explicit exposition of Vernon’s personal philosophy:

Life changes, breaks, scatters. There is no sheet-anchor.
Time reigns; yet the kingdom of love is every moment,
Whose citizens do not age in each other’s eyes.
In a time of darkness the pattern of life is restored
By men who make all transience seem an illusion.
Through inward acts, acts corresponding to music. (18)

If time reigns, then it can be tempered by duality and regeneration and, finally, defeated by human memory and art: “the measure of past grief is the measure of present joy” and, so, “time’s glass breaks, and the world is transfigured in music.” This Taliesin is a prophet who can penetrate the secret patterns of nature and reveal the final triumph over time that finds symbolic form in the natural world and poetry itself (“the soul’s rebirth”). The land to which Taliesin “belongs” and with which he “identifies” is not simply the Gower coast to which his wooden boat returns, but an interior landscape in which he can trace the abstract, hidden patterns of nature and therefore God.

II: Swansea and Memory 

There is no Welsh ‘tradition’ to which Vernon truly belonged, other than a sketchy ‘Anglo-Welsh’ lineage traced by Mathias, Kiedrych Rhys, Glyn Jones and Raymond Garlick, a literary identity that he himself categorically rejected. But there was one Welsh group that Vernon did identify with and this was no tradition at all, nothing like a movement and barely existed as a tendency. To the extent that it did, it displayed no particular interest in the parochial concerns of local heritage or tradition.

The “gang” that met in Swansea’s Kardomah Cafe before the Second World War was hardly anything more than a group of very talented friends with wide interests and varied talents. This was a largely middle class set with mild bohemian pretensions that was well represented by Dylan Thomas and Vernon, both products of the thriving, increasingly confident and self-enclosed society of the affluent Swansea bourgeoisie. Vernon was the son of a bank manager and Dylan the son of a grammar school teacher; they were both raised in the elegant suburban splendour of the Uplands, safely removed from the dirt and danger of the slums and docks, watching over a fiery landscape of industrial production. If there is one thing that the ‘Kardomah boys’ all shared then it was their refusal to set limitations on their intellectual or artistic ambitions. Their bourgeois Swansea enclave — and even Wales itself — was simply too small to contain them. It is where they came from, where they lived and where they usually worked, but they were always scanning wider cultural horizons and plotting their escape. Their conversations had a cosmopolitan range that revealed their expansive aspirations and was captured by Dylan in Return Journey: “Einstein and Epstein, Stravinsky and Greta Garbo…Communism, symbolism, Bradman, Braque, the Watch Committee, free love, free beer, murder, Michelangelo, ping-pong, ambition, Sibelius, and girls” (19). Inevitably, they would look back on all of this with a mixture of nostalgia, idealism, even awe, and the destruction of the old cafe on Castle Street during the Swansea Blitz hit them hard, especially Dylan, maybe the most sentimental of the lot. 

For Vernon, Swansea had multiple and overlapping points of significance: it is where he first discovered the treasures of English poetry; where he first watched his heroine Pearl White plunge to her death on the Uplands Cinema screen; where he first met Dylan (like many others, he would forever associate Cwmdonkin Park with his dead friend); and where, in the Kardomah, he came closest to finding an artistic community in whose company he felt like he belonged. For those reasons and others too, Swansea became a positive place for him. In his 1962 ‘Ode to Swansea’ he even treated the town’s industrial legacy in positive terms,  eulogising the “merchants, traders, and builders” moving through the streets and the “hammering dockyards/launching strange equatorial ships” (20). Swansea, “dense-windowed, perched/high”, remained “anchored” by its own “myth”: a “Leaning Ark of the world…taking fire from the kindling East” and linked into a maritime trading empire that stretched far beyond the Devon horizon. This was a time when Swansea was still a vital place: not just in terms of its cultural and social vibrancy but also industrial power. The combination of coastal ports with coal fields and copper, iron, steel and tin, had, by the time Vernon was born, produced one of the first developed industrial societies in the world. While this was not to everybody’s taste and provided the most powerful challenge to the nationalist focus on the Welsh language and rural communities, it was also the most effective catalyst for wealth creation, political development and social progress the country had ever witnessed.  Swansea was in the vanguard of this industrial drama and it was this town that Vernon chose to mythologise. The industry and the ships, the smoke and the noise, were all part of its culture; in fact, they were the reason it existed in the ambitious, dynamic form that he saw in the artistic coterie that assembled at the Kardomah. 

So, in the symbolic network of his poetry, Swansea took on eternity:

Would they know you, could the returning ships
Find the pictured bay of the port they left
Changed by a murmuration,
Stained by ores in a nighthawk’s wing?

Yes. Through changes your myth seems anchored here.
Staked in the mud, the forsaken oyster beds
Loom; and the Mumbles lighthouse
Turns through gales like a seabird’s egg.

That emphatic “yes” serves a dual function: to confirm change wrought by time and to affirm the eternal and indestructible identity of the town itself. Here time is manifest in seasons, cycles, the rhythms of commerce and industry, the daily routines of work and the turning of the Mumbles lighthouse, but the eternal and unchanging identity of the town itself ultimately defeats its passage. On a personal level, it would serve this function too, becoming a site of memorial on multiple levels. During three nights in February 1941 the centre of the town was almost entirely razed by German air raids (see my previous essay ‘The Town Blazing Scarlet’: Swansea’s Blitz) and the landscape of Vernon’s youth and early adulthood changed forever. His long war poem ‘The Broken Sea’ was, in part, a eulogy for this erased landscape that also attempted to immortalise its physical landmarks in verse. These were, for Vernon, the landmarks of memory, both collective and individual:

Child Shades of my ignorant darkness, I mourn that moment alive
Near the glow-lamped Eumenides’ house, overlooking the ships in flight,
Where Pearl White focused our childhood, near the foot of Cwmdonkin Drive,
To a figment of crime stampeding in the posters’ wind-blown blight. 

I regret the broken Past, its prompt and punctilious cares,
All the villainies of the fire-and-brimstone-visited town. 
I miss the painter of limbo at the top of the fragrant stairs,
The extravagant hero of night, his iconoclastic frown. (21)

When he is writing with this level of concrete, physical clarity it is usually to enrol nature in his thematic universe. In this case, he comes close to doing what he usually avoids: the poem almost serves a public function by creating a memorial for a lost town littered with images that defined it. But then these landmarks are also personal: the Uplands Cinema screening Pearl White serials, Cwmdonkin Drive (home to the young Dylan) and the College Street flat of the painter Alfred Janes. This is not only a memorial to a physically destroyed town, but also to the loss of the Kardomah gang, dispersed by ambition, opportunity and the passage of time rather than Luftwaffe bombs. 

His memories of the town also became entwined with the memories of Dylan Thomas. He would write a series of poetic eulogies to his friend, not all necessarily tied to Swansea, although he could never write about the town without some direct or occluded reference to Thomas. In the poem ‘A True Picture Restored – Memories of Dylan Thomas’, Cwmdonkin Drive and the park become the site of a slightly overwrought origin myth:

Climbing Cwmdonkin’s dock-based hill,
I found his lamp-lit room,
The great light in the forehead
Watching the waters’ loom,
Compiling there his doomsday book
Or dictionary of doom.

More times than I can call to mind
I hear him reading there.
His eyes with fervour would make blind
All clocks about a stair
On which the assenting foot divined
The void and clustered air.

That was the centre of the world,
That was the hub of time…(22)

For those familiar with the biographies of the two men and the physical reality of the Uplands, this is not obscure at all: Vernon is writing about Dylan’s childhood bedroom, in which he lived and where he wrote most of his early poems while working as a reporter for the Swansea Evening Post. This is where Vernon first met Dylan and shared something like a moment of sublime recognition, a poetic epiphany: at a certain time, artistically and emotionally, this was the centre of the world for him. Maybe it was ground zero for Swansea’s artistic renaissance. 

Being engaged in a personal war on time it was inevitable that Vernon would become a serial eulogiser: it was one of the most powerful weapons at his disposal. Dylan was only one of his subjects and many other poets and friends received the same treatment. In each case this served a specific emotional purpose, but it ultimately served the same end: the attempt to conquer time. Whether fixing the image of Dylan writing in his bedroom or composing visual images of a town flattened by the Nazis, memory and the act of memorialistion became potent weapons in this psychological battle. Before his breakdown, he had treated poetry as a romantic vocation, but afterwards it would become a means to overcome the otherwise inescapable reality of death. Places and people were part of this struggle rather than subjects in their own right.

In a talk titled ‘The Place and the Poem’ Vernon directly addressed the relationship between place and memory in his work. “Memory itself works very intricately,” he noted, 

episodes and half-episodes are photographed obliquely: a hundred thousand moments of transience are recorded in minute detail. At first they look like small coloured pictures stuck in a scrap-book by someone with no discrimination. The Swansea of my childhood’s scrapbook, so much of which has been destroyed, is full of such pictures. (23)

Among the most potent of these memories was the silent movie actress, Pearl White:

The first Great War had broken out, and we were full of stories of heroism; but the heroine of many of those serials was Pearl White, the American actress who could express horror with wider eyes than anyone else, and who really used to throw herself off buildings into rivers and risk her life in the making of the films. She was always my heroine, and I looked to her to do all the heroics which I knew I would not dare to do myself, and felt a vicarious sense of achievement when she performed them. Her name became the centre of many fights and struggles.

I grew up out of her memory. (24)

In the poem ‘Elegy on the Heroine of Childhood’, composed after Vernon read about White’s death on the eve of the Second World War, the silent Hollywood star is not simply a dead movie icon. Her memory is the memory of childhood itself, evoking the early days of the First World War (“the time when Arras fell”) and the childhood locations of the Uplands (“From school’s spiked railings, glass-topped, cat-walked walls…We run to join the queue’s coiled peel”). Her pale image, resplendent and flickering on the cinema screen, becomes the ghost that haunts Vernon’s mature imagination:

Week back to week I tread with nightmare speed,
Find the small entrance to large days,
Charging the chocolates from the trays,
Where, trailing or climbing the railing, we mobbed the dark
Of Pandemonium near Cwmdonkin Park.

Children return to mourn you. I retrace
Their steps to childhood’s jealousies, a place
Of urchin hatred, shaken fists;
I drink the poison of the mists
To see you, a clear ghost before true day,
A girl, through wrestling clothes, caps flung in play. (25)

Her image is entwined completely with the physical recollections of childhood (“episodes and half episodes…photographed”) and her multiplying death scenes become a cheap way to cheat death: her resurrection and immolation in each new movie becomes a symbol of cycles, renewal and therefore permanence. Pearl White defeated time until she actually died in real life and this immaculate image was brought back to reality and childhood ended:

How near, how far, how very faintly comes
Your tempest through a tambourine of crumbs,
Whose eye by darkness sanctified,
Is brilliant with my boyhood’s slide.
How silently at last the reel runs back
Through your hundred deaths, now Death wears black.

While it is true that Swansea was a positive place for Vernon  — after all, along with the Gower, it was the place that healed him and gave him back his life — in these poems it is usually defined by loss and grief: the elegies to Dylan, his childhood and Pearl White, and the town demolished in the Blitz. The fact that they record the things that have been lost in the end serves to preserve them. For Vernon, this process is fundamental to his understanding of life, death and art.

If Vernon could mythologise Swansea in this way it was because, for him, the town was already a symbolic place, a site tied into his own, extended, poetic universe. It was a tribute to the vitality and atmosphere of the place that it could sustain such pressure. How true this view was is not really the point. The “loitering marvel” that he painted was a place of the imagination, which made it immortal. It was a half-truth: at a certain moment Swansea had a creative vitality and depth that was unusual, not only for Wales. This meant everything to Vernon and partly gave him back the paradise he lost when he left Repton College: a circle of inspiration, comfort, camaraderie and love. For him, Swansea was like a town from the Italian Renaissance but without any patrons, and so he made high claims for it:

Swansea is a town where art is alive. If it became a cultural centre or a resort where art was fashionable and where it was always being discussed but never created, it would be a town where art was dead. Such a Swansea, such a Salzburg-on-the-Tawe I could not imagine; but a Swansea without art I cannot imagine either. There is no room in Swansea to be pompous without it being ludicrous. But the town itself, the town of windows between hills and sea, is unforgettable. What should Swansea become? It should, I think, generate its own species and become what it is now, a town where art is alive. If you give Swansea more power, make it the capital of Wales, then you spoil everything. I want Swansea to be, not the capital, but the interest of Wales. (26)

In the ‘Ode to Swansea’ he made this loyalty to his half-imagined utopia clear:

Prouder cities rise through the haze of time,
Yet, envious, all men have found is here.
Here is the loitering marvel
Feeding artists with all they know.

Swansea, a once great town of global significance, provided him with a symbol of creativity and the immortality of man. 

III: Gower and Landscape  

But what about Gower, “the first of places for him,” in the words of his widow, Gwen (27)? 

His friend, the poet Michael Hamburger, wrote that “the Gower landscape is as inseparable from my recollections of Vernon as his poetry and person are inseparable from the place in which he chose to spend all his mature years” (28). His sometime neighbour, the Swansea painter Ceri Richards, described the experience of being given a tour of Vernon’s “immediate and familiar” Gower: 

He took you straight to his personal vantage points. He was remarkably sure-footed. Far down on the foreshore, when you called to see him, and the tide was right — you saw him from aloft — and he was master with the prawns, crabs and lobsters, striding through pools, over rocks slippery with seaweed, up rocky faces and sand dunes, and through acres of bracken and gorse, in his own natural diversity of ways. (29)

This was the south coast of the peninsula, the golden belt of sandy bays, remote coves, prehistoric caves and limestone cliffs extending from Bracelet Bay sitting in the lap of Mumbles Lighthouse to the grand sweep of Rhossili and Worm’s Head (“end of Earth, and of Gower!” 30). Vernon once defined the geography that shaped the early imagination of Dylan Thomas as “the sea town, the park, and the Gower peninsula stretching from Mumbles to Rhossili, and from Rhossili to Worm’s Head,” (31) and this almost exactly demarcated his own interior landscape, too. Unlike Swansea or Germany or the Ireland of Yeats, South Gower was, for him, a self-enclosed world, a permanent and privileged micro-continent that supplied him with many of the tools he needed for his own work. He was a part of this landscape and was fully attuned to all aspects of its environment. He could read it closely and created a network of symbols out of its raw materials: the sea, geology, birdlife and vegetation; the storm beaches and sand dunes; the seasonal winds and the changing light. 

The first true success of Vernon’s second period of poetry (that is, the period of poetry he was content to see published, rather than incinerated) was ‘Griefs of the Sea’, an elegy to dead sailors that he “heard” one day “coming out of the grasses of the cliffs of Pennard and Hunt’s Bay” (32). Gwen Watkins recalled that

the spring and autumn equinoxes were times of great fascination for Vernon; the gales then came more exactly to the dates than they seem to now, and the idea of day and night standing equal as the storm-winds raged round his home was immensely exciting. (33)

In this poem the wild Gower winds are the driving element of natural chaos that once claimed the lives of the sailors that the poem mourns: “a horrible sound”, “a wicked sound…that follows us like a scenting hound”, the sound of death and therefore time. Some of the symbols are established here that would recur in the rest of his work: the “blind” waves and their “wild wreath of foam” and “weeds…beneath the sea”; the wild wind and the ominous stars (34). This is the beginning of a private network of imagery that would become more elaborate and complex over time; the poem lacks the taxonomy of colour and the precise inventory of Gower’s wildlife that would become central to his work, but it is the first example of the Gower being used by Watkins in the way it would always be from then on. The landscape inspires “thought” which, in turn, “changes” or transfigures it: a walk on a windy day to his favourite bay sparks a vivid meditation on death, mourning and memory. Random natural elements are transformed by a cosmic drama that is, ultimately, the same thing as his own human drama. As he would later put it, “a place is altered by a poem” (35). 

One of the most important places in Vernon’s elect landscape was Pwlldu Bay at the mouth of Bishopston Valley, a recurrent location with its own natural and symbolic properties. In ‘The Return of Spring’, the stream that winds through the valley down to the beach is a fresh course of water in which “all secrets under the Earth grow articulate” (36). These are the secrets of time: at the bottom of the valley, beyond the great shingle bank that separates the beach from the wood, the stream and the reed beds, “the eyes turn seaward/To laugh with waves that outlive us”; “the receding seawaves…knock at the hour-glass,” a majestic and immortal rhythm that finds its cyclical residue in the sand, pebbles and rocks that construct the landscape of the bay. Meanwhile, in the valley, leaves mend “Winter’s wild net”, “taut branches exude gold wax of the breaking buds”, “sweet finches sing” and “diamonds of light” suffuse the woodland as life returns to “bring beauty to Earth.” But with the annual regeneration of nature there is also darkness, decay and death: as Roland Mathias recognised, “an awareness of the necessary interlocking of light and dark, of death and life” was a central tension, or balance, in Vernon’s work. For Mathias, “grief and darkness” lay at the heart of Vernon’s Christianity and his conception of life itself: “it was through grief and darkness, not through the near-whites of nature or human satisfaction, that he had perceived the single, yet multiple, pattern of Christ” (37). This is what he saw at Pwlldu, with spring light breaking through Bishopston Valley (“I divine those meanings/Listening to tongues that are silent”): the secret patterns of natural regeneration, cycles of life always touched by death. This was the balance that he found in Plotinus and the New Testament that provided him with some measure of understanding to replace dread: “What first I feared as a rite I love as a sacrament”.

At Pwlldu, the “waves…outlive us” and Bishopston stream is witness to the regeneration of life within the cycle of seasons. The beach and valley are sites of eternity, an idea revisited in ‘Ballad of the Equinox’ which emphatically declares Pwlldu “an eternal place!” Again, the landscape is a stage on which this cosmic human drama is played out: 

There the great shingle-bank
Props a theatrical scene
Where guess the generous dead
What lovers’ words may mean. (38)

In ‘The Return of Spring’, Watkins writes: “Thunder compels no man, yet a thought compels him.” The natural world has no meaning, symbolic or otherwise, without the “thought” that makes meaning. It is the human faculty to divine the patterns of nature — or in the poet’s own theological system, the patterns of God — that recreates the landscape and makes it intelligible in artistic and philosophical terms (“a place is altered by a poem”). In ‘Ballad of the Equinox’ this process is at work, and explicitly so: for Watkins, the world’s a stage, but man is no mere player: he makes meaning. 

In ‘Return of the Spring’, Bishopston stream carries light and life in its cool and fast flowing water; in ‘Ballad of the Equinox’, this same water flows into the pool at the foot of the shingle bank, under the stones and into the sea. “The black stream under the stones/Carries the bones of the dead,” Vernon writes, transforming Pwlldu into a dark memorial, a “sterile porch of Hell” with “the devil…in the wild winds” and “the tides of the grave” dispensing in its foam “A spent and weary log/A crab with a million eyes/And a cast-up, wicked dog”. In a later poem, ‘Bishopston Stream’, the water is still “black” but once again functions as a symbol of renewal, balance and life: “Out of the wood I come, astonished to find you/Younger and swifter” (39). The stream is loaded with dual meaning in this poem, as the water speaks with two voices: a meeting place and an image of separation. The duality, the balance, the tensions between light and dark, white and black (black water, white stars, white foam) hold the key to Vernon’s method and thought. Opposites are never reconciled and so nothing is resolved in this way. Opposites exist within each other without losing their separate qualities. The lack of resolution is the resolution. The poet’s only answer to the problem, or the tragedy, of time is to learn how to interpret it: “Even by day you run through a continual darkness/Could we interpret time, we should be like the angels”. 

Pwlldu, Hunt’s Bay, Rhossili, Oxwich, Three Cliffs, Paviland Cave, Worm’s Head, Crawley Wood: these are the Gower landmarks that populate Vernon’s poetry and are transformed by it. They have the same tangential relationship to memory and lived experience in the poems as Swansea does. As Gwen Watkins remembered it, the poem ‘Rhossili’ was partly inspired by “a disastrous canoe trip which Vernon made at the beginning of the war” with his friend David Lewis: 

They intended to arrive on Rhossili beach and camp for a night or two; but their failure to practise double-paddling or to check the times of the tides, or to load their gear evenly, led to their arrival very late at night. They were instantly apprehended by the local Home Guard as German airmen coming ashore. Their English public-school accents did not help matters, but after hours of questioning, they were allowed to camp for the rest of the night. David Lewis went home by the first bus the following morning, but Vernon stayed on, and went out to the end of the Worm. (40)

This mildly calamitous expedition is reimagined as an epic Homeric voyage: Worm’s Head becomes  “The rock of Tiresias’ eyes!” and Vernon a latter-day Odysseus, battling through the currents from Pobbles to “the needle around which the wide world spins,” about twelve miles west. He climbs the face of the worm and is attacked by screaming herring gulls who lunge at his head, “crazy with fear for the loss/of their locked, unawakened young”; later, lying on the sands at Llangennith, he watches “dolphins, plunging from death into birth” that are “held by the Sybil’s trance!”

Rhossili figures quite precisely in this account and anyone familiar with the terrain would be able to recognise the wreck of the Helvetia or the blow hole near the centre of the Worm. But these physical landmarks are filtered through the transformative properties of memory which, in this case, finds expression in the mock heroic narrative. Like ‘Elegy to a Heroine from Childhood’, ‘Rhossili’ is a particular type of memory poem that does not try to precisely recall the past, but attempts to convey the way memory works in the imagination, combining recollection with sensation and experience. ‘Rhossili’ was not written for the sake of describing Rhossili: it was not about the place. The origin and content of the poem remain oblique without Gwen’s account of Vernon’s canoe trip or some familiarity with the physical and natural features of landscape and geography. The poem exists to question the nature of memory on a personal scale and within the wider context of human perception and creativity. 

The presence of Gower in the poetry of Vernon Watkins is not just evident in, say, poems named after beaches. Kathleen Raine was correct when she noted that all of Vernon’s poems “seem…like parts of a single poem” (41) and Roland Mathias made a similar point when he wrote that “the truth he was after had been caught, if at all, only in an endlessly mended net of words and symbols” (42). The natural imagery of the peninsular is woven densely into these poems and across the whole body of his work. But however precise, evocative or vivid these details were, he was not writing about the landscape of the Gower for its own sake. He was not a landscape poet. He never intended to be merely descriptive, a point he made explicit to George Thomas in 1967: “I’m fundamentally a religious and metaphysical poet. I’m not a nature poet or a descriptive poet” (43). And, in a talk delivered in 1961 (‘Poetry and Experience’), he explained:

Constancy within change is the theme of so many of my poems, and until it enters a poem I can never find my imagination wholly engaged. I marvel at the beauty of landscape, but I never think of it as a theme for poetry until I read metaphysical symbols behind what I see. (44) 

By all accounts the Gower was the most important place on earth for him but it had a strictly demarcated role in his poetry. It served a function, however rich and complex that function was. The Gower was one stage for his own human drama which, for him, was the human drama: to escape the domination of time and transcend the final fact of death. Even if it was the most important stage he had, it was still a stage: he was never really writing about Gower because he was writing about his own conflicts and concerns. As Mathias put it, Gower epitomised the entire world for Vernon Watkins and what he found here was not simply the pleasures and interests of the landscape itself or his own personal memories, but the ultimate revelation of truth and order. 

IV: Nationalism and Poetry

In this sense, then, Vernon barely wrote about Wales at all. He loved Wales, but he had no intention of tying his work to the earth. Poetry, for Vernon Watkins, was an existential art, a private, even hermetic, affair. It was not meant to proselytise for a cause, however noble or historic that cause may be. And, importantly, Vernon did not consider Welsh nationalism to be a noble cause. 

This was the one point of contention between Vernon and Yeats in 1938. Again, it was partly written down in ‘Yeats in Dublin’:

We talked of national movements.
He pondered the chance
Of Welshmen reviving
The fire of song and dance,
Driving a lifeless hymnal
From that inheritance.

I thought of rough mountains,
The poverty of the heath.
‘Though leaders sway the crowd’, I said,
‘Power is underneath.
The sword of Taliesin
Would never fit a sheath.

In the same year, Keidrych Rhys tried to recruit Vernon to his new Welsh poetry movement with the taunt: “Did you know Yeats believes in National Poetry?’ He should have known this wouldn’t work. At their meeting, Yeats asked Vernon about the state of Welsh poetry and told him, “Poetry must not be nationalist, but must be national” (45). Vernon responded: “How can there be a national poetry?” The idea was inconceivable, a tragic limitation on the imagination. Taliesin himself could not be reduced to the national question; apart from anything else, the working bard was employed by rival and sometimes warring princes and was therefore as much a symbol of national disunity. In fact, nationalism was the one thing that had, in Vernon’s eyes, blighted some of Yeats’s own work, which was otherwise beyond criticism. 

Despite the hairsplitting (‘national’ rather than ‘nationalist’), Vernon recognised Yeats as the “great nationalist” that he was and therefore, in this regard, considered him subject to an “arrogant blindness” (46). He was responding here to a political disposition later defined by Conor Cruise O’Brien as a volatile mix of Anglophobe Irish nationalism and aristocratic authoritarianism that contained within it a “sometimes mildly critical…never hostile, almost always respectful, often admiring” attitude towards fascism (47). In contrast, Vernon, though politically naive in many ways, detested fascism and Nazism on first contact. He had been on holiday in Germany with his sister Dorothy during the Nazi book-burnings and almost caused a diplomatic incident, as Gwen Watkins recalled:

Vernon told me that two German friends had taken him to a Nazi gathering…and they discovered Nazi officers lighting a bonfire and people were bringing books and laughing and cheering. The Nazis shouted out the names of the authors as they threw the books. The friends wanted to leave, but Vernon heard the name of Heine shouted out, and began to try to push to the front to save the books. The two friends rapidly took his arms and rushed him away in spite of his struggles. He would say jokingly that if the officers had caught him I would probably have had to find someone else to marry. (48)

This was a visceral response to the violent philistinism of the Nazis; Vernon would also recoil from the totalitarian racial utopia that they planned, a vision that was anathema to his own personal and universalist creed. As Nazi and fascist power grew in Europe his instincts diverged from Yeats, who became more excited and enthusiastic with each victory. Writing to a friend on the day Chamberlain flew to Munich, Vernon used unusually vulgar terms: “Don’t you think that all racial purists ought to be pissed on hard and long — or isn’t that too good for them?” (49). In the end, it was his fluent German that would enable him to fully contribute to the anti-Nazi cause when he was recruited to Bletchley Park in 1941. 

As Gwen later wrote, Vernon “saw no meaning in narrow nationalism” of which Nazism was one particularly virulent manifestation, but which he would also reject in the more benign form of a proposed Welsh poetry movement. When he was invited to join the  ‘national’ poets of the ‘New Wales Society’ in 1939 (of all times!) his response was scathing: “those nationalists who are most bitter at this moment should try to distinguish between the imperfections of their country and the imperfection of their style” (50). They would, in effect if not intention, be making the same errors as Auden and Yeats, but without the talent to back it up and built on a brittle foundation of parochial resentments and historic grievance. He held nothing but contempt for this position and was more than happy to make common cause on this point with Dylan: “We were both Welsh, both Christian poets, we both preferred the sea to politics and hated nationalism” (51). As Vernon’s biographer Richard Ramsbotham noted: “what was important for Watkins about Yeats had nothing to do with nationalism or political causes, but with the universal character of his individual imagination” (52). Universality was the only legitimate aim for poetry; the imagination its only cause. 

The whole objective of Vernon’s life as a poet was to escape the limits of time. Memory and the act of eulogy were key components to this, but he did not intend to use them to put new or different limitations on the imagination. As Raymond Garlick noted, there is a strain of Anglo-Welsh literature in which “the past is a constant theme, triumphant and golden”, a consciousness of belonging to “a country of great age,” as R. S. Thomas put it (53). This was a tendency that would attempt to find its voice in the New Wales Society and really would find a voice in R. S. Thomas’s own work. This was not a concern for Vernon Watkins. Even when he invoked Taliesin, the historical associations were slight and the intention to revive “tradition” largely absent. His mature work was driven by his own revolt against time, in which all of the material that he had collected from his past and his present was put to use. Time reigned, but not the national timeline. The idea of a collective past, a national history or a Welsh tradition had no purchase on his true ambition. He was not a poet of Wales, writing to extol the landscape or glorify the past. For this reason, his refusal to fully exploit “Welsh heritage” or take it up as a cause was not only a necessity, but a source of strength. He consciously avoided all of the traps that caught Yeats. He had no interest at all in adopting the collective grievance fueled by the nationalist party. He refused to produce propaganda, however erudite it may have been.

Mathias recognised that there was no “revolt or reconciliation” (54) in this attitude, even if he did not fully approve of it. This was not a fight or an argument or a revolution, it was a matter of fact and fate; the result of private experience and personal philosophy. Vernon Watkins was a Welsh poet but he did not write for Wales and he did not belong to Wales. That was a good thing. 

1. Vernon Watkins, ‘Yeats in Dublin’ in The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (Golgonooza Press, 1986), p.65
2. Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows (Vintage, 2013), pps. 74-5
3. ‘Insert for Spectrum’, interview with Dr. George Thomas, 16th February 1967 in Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas and Other Poets & Poetry, ed. Gwen Watkins and Jeff Towns (Parthian, 2015), p.128
4. Vernon Watkins, ‘Poetry and Experience’ in Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas and Other Poets & Poetry, p.155
5. Glyn Jones, ‘Whose Flight is Toil’ in Vernon Watkins 1906-1967, ed. Leslie Norris (Faber and Faber, 1970), p.25
6. Quoted in Richard Ramsbotham, An Exact Mystery: The Poetic Life of Vernon Watkins (The Choir Press, 2020), p.187
7. Roland Mathias, Vernon Watkins (University of Wales Press, 1970), p.11
8. Quoted in Ramsbotham, p.6
9. Gwen Watkins, ‘Vernon Watkins 1906-1967’ in Vernon Watkins 1906-1967, p.15
10. Kathleen Raine, ‘The Poetry of Vernon Watkins’ in Vernon Watkins 1906-1967, p.38
11. Ibid., p.41
12. Roland Mathias, ‘Grief and the Circus Horse: A Study of the Mythic and Christian Themes in the Early Poetry of Vernon Watkins’ in A Ride Through the Woods: Essays in Anglo-Welsh Literature (Poetry Wales Press, 1985), p.120
13. Mathias, Vernon Watkins, p.97
14. Raine, p.38
15. Mathias, Vernon Watkins, p.98
16. Vernon Watkins, ‘Taliesin in Gower’, Collected Poems, p.184
17. Watkins, ‘Taliesin in Pwlldu’, Collected Poems, p.353 
18. Watkins, ‘Taliesin and the Spring of Vision’, Collected Poems, p.224
19. Dylan Thomas, ‘Return Journey’ in Dylan Thomas – The Broadcasts, ed. Ralph Maud (J.M.Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1991), p.183
20. Watkins, ‘Ode to Swansea’, Collected Poems, p.285
21. Watkins, ‘The Broken Sea’, Collected Poems, pp.80-1
22. Watkins, ‘A True Picture Restored — Memories of Dylan Thomas’, Collected Poems, p.286
23. Watkins, ‘The Place and the Poem’ in Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas and Other Poets & Poetry, p.176
24. Ibid., p.178
25. Watkins, ‘Elegy on the Heroine of Childhood’, Collected Poems, p.4
26. Quoted in Gary Gregor, ‘Swansea’s Other Poet: Vernon Watkins’ in The Journal of the Gower Society, Volume 65, 2014, pps. 55-6
27. Gwen Watkins, ‘Vernon Watkins 1906-1967’, p.16
28. Michael Hamburger, ‘Vernon Watkins, a Memoir’ in Vernon Watkins 1906-1967, p.48
29. Ceri Richards, ‘Remembering Vernon’ in Vernon Watkins 1906-1967, p.95
30. Vernon Watkins, ‘Rhossili’, Collected Poems, p.119
31. Watkins, ‘The Wales Dylan Thomas Knew’ in Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas and Other Poets & Poetry, p.111
32. Quoted in Ramsbotham, p.85
33. Gwen Watkins, ‘Taliesin in Gower: Vernon Watkins — A Retrospect’ in The Journal of the Gower Society, Volume 48, 1997, p.23
34. Vernon Watkins, ‘Griefs of the Sea’, Collected Poems, p.7
35. Watkins, ‘The Place and the Poem’, p.175
36. Watkins, ‘The Return of Spring’, Collected Poems, p.116
37. Mathias, ‘Grief and the Circus Horse’, p.111
38. Vernon Watkins, ‘Ballad of the Equinox’, Collected Poems, p.189
39. Watkins, ‘Bishopston Stream’, Collected Poems, p.315
40. Gwen Watkins, ‘Taliesin in Gower’, p.25
41. Raine, p.40
42. Mathias, ‘Grief and the Circus Horse’, p.91
43. Interview with George Thomas, p.129
44. Vernon Watkins, ‘Poetry and Experience’ in Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas and Other Poets & Poetry, p.163
45. Quoted in Ramsbotham, p.169
46. Ibid., p.186
47. Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats’ in Passion & Cunning: Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism and Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 1988), p.54
48. Quoted in Ramsbotham, p.105
49. Ibid, p.176
50. Ibid., p.186
51. Ibid., p.127
52. Ibid., p.186
53. Raymond Garlick, Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (University of Wales Press, 1972), p.53
54. Roland Mathias, Anglo-Welsh Literature: An Illustrated History (Poetry of Wales Press, 1986), p.94

That’s the hope I still have for Iraq — that it can rediscover its destiny as a richly various and pluralistic society, a meeting ground of all sorts of creeds and groupings. That’s the hope that sustains me.
Kanan Makiya, 1992 (1)

I: Sweets and Flowers

By the end of 2004, Kanan Makiya was beginning to lose hope. “My realisation…that Iraq was sliding toward civil war was a turning point in my life,” he wrote at the end of his 2016 novel, The Rope. “The whole edifice of hopes that had clung to that slim possibility of a different kind of transition from dictatorship crumbled. Self-doubt began to eat away at the optimism that had sustained me since 1991” (2). Until then, this optimism had been a source of strength, but also a liability. Over time, even Makiya’s friends and allies had started to notice — and comment on — the rather unreal quality of his idealism and expectations for Iraq. Ali Allawi, Iraq’s first Finance Minister after the fall of the Ba’ath regime, dismissed his “solitary path in a campaign to mobilise Iraqis in exile behind a post-modern, somewhat ethereal, vision of a tolerant and pluralist Iraq” (3). George Packer, in his chronicle of the Iraq war, The Assassin’s Gate, saw “more than a little naïveté in Makiya – a worrying trait, given the project he was about to sign on for” (4). Fellow Iraqi exiles who returned to Baghdad at the same time and with some of the same illusions soon found his persistent talk of democracy and liberalism, in a country that was visibly falling apart around them, exasperating, even infuriating. One told Packer: “Kanan is living on another planet. He doesn’t have a clue. He drives to the Green Zone and back to the hotel” (5).

Kanan Makiya had a vision – but he was almost alone. In one way, Allawi was correct: within the exile community he cut a rather ethereal figure among the ex-Ba’athists, Shia clerics and Kurdish politicians who had their own ideas about what Iraq would look like after Saddam. Makiya was a secular liberal with a refined political disposition formed by his late discovery of “Hannah Arendt…Isaiah Berlin, John Stuart Mill, Hobbes” (6) while writing Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq during the 1980s. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Republic of Fear became an overnight bestseller; in 1990, it was the only book in English that gave graphic details of the highly secretive and brutal regime that was now making global headlines. In the fractious world of post-Gulf War exile politics, Makiya joined Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress (INC) to make a public case for regime change in Iraq. In 2002, he worked with other Iraqis on the State Department’s Future of Iraq project and drafted the Democratic Principles Working Group’s ‘Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq’ — a text which he used to articulate his own vision of a secular democratic constitution that would balance the competing interests of Iraq’s clans, tribes, ethnic groups and religious sects. He then pursued this plan with an obsessive and even arrogant idealism that offended and alienated some his fellow exiles, hence, perhaps, Allawi’s curt assessment. 

Given the factions that developed over Iraq it was perhaps inevitable that Makiya would take sides in the fierce civil war that broke out inside the Bush administration after 9/11. This period of internal conflict provided a key to the enigma of the 2003 war and Makiya had his own view on it. “The Department of State was seeking change from within the Ba’ath regime, not from without by means of the organised Iraqi opposition,” he explained, a decade later: “Regime change led by former Ba’athists was their way to the future…it was about regime change without democracy” (7). Makiya embraced Chalabi’s allies in the Department of Defence and Vice President’s office instead, a neoconservative faction that had been engaged in ideological hostilities with the State Department for decades. This conflict spilled over into the Bush administration, both driving and derailing U.S. strategy when it came to Iraq. “Deep internal American conflicts hobbled the whole enterprise from the outset,” Makiya later claimed, “matters reached the level of hatred between and among Americans.” The post-Saddam collapse had its root in these departmental hostilities and bitter personal feuds — in effect, factional schisms within Washington’s foreign policy elite helped set the stage for an explosion of sectarian hatred in Iraq.

But, as Makiya was always at pains to point out, these divisions predated the American intervention and it was the Iraqis themselves who chose to go to war with each other after 2003. Responsibility and agency were central to his views on the region and on human nature. Makiya’s optimism was always tempered by bitter experience. He knew all about the dangers of sectarianism and political mythology in the Arab world. He had seen his old comrades on the secular Arab left defeated by their enemies, former allies and, finally, their own degraded political culture. “We were locked in the dynamic and the language of the Lebanese civil war,” he recalled:

Issues of human rights, of building civil society, of dictatorship, of our own responsibility for our own ills, were all constantly being subordinated by the old language of anti-Zionism and anti-Imperialism. I had come along with Republic of Fear and said the most important thing is what we have done to ourselves. (8)

This was not always what people wanted to hear and when he applied this experience to Iraq in 1993’s Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (9) he made powerful enemies among the political and cultural elites of the Middle East, albeit not among the Iraqi exiles themselves. Cruelty and Silence, perhaps the most recklessly brave book written in the 1990s, exposed Arab complicity in the violence and repression of the Iraqi Ba’ath, a complicity that provided political cover for Saddam’s crimes in Kuwait and Kurdistan. Makiya saw only one route out of this for Iraq and the region: the removal of Saddam by the only power that could apply the necessary force to destroy his regime. This was a sin against Arab solidarity and honor, a taboo only the most desperate of Saddam’s enemies had been willing to break, and it would end in the Oval Office, with Makiya telling Bush and Cheney that American troops would be greeted with “sweets and flowers” in Iraq.

For Makiya, the 2003 war was — and remains, despite its failure — a war to liberate Iraq from Ba’athist tyranny. Like the Iraqis he wrote about, his past and his politics had been shaped by suffering and pain. His writing was a response to this; a way to understand and overcome it. His original Iraqi trilogy (Republic of Fear, The Monument and Cruelty and Silence) was the work of a dedicated archivist: a collector of documents, stories, pictures and videos that detailed the secret history of Ba’athist violence and power. Work on Republic of Fear began with his own files, a substantial collection even by the mid-1980s. This was later supplemented by material uncovered in public libraries; SOAS at first, and then the New York Public Library, where he discovered a large cache of Ba’ath pamphlets and documents. The Monument grew out of his father’s rich library of architectural manuscripts, drawings and plans, a collection that allowed him to enter the cultural life of Iraq both before and during the Ba’ath era. Finally, the success of Republic of Fear made Makiya a recorder of testimony as the regime’s victims sought him out to tell their stories, stories that he collected in the first part of Cruelty and Silence and that planted the seed for his final archival project — the post-war Iraq Memory Foundation.    

This vast and fragmented archive formed the basis for all of Makiya’s early work and helped to shape his understanding of Iraqi Ba’athism in the context of pan-Arab nationalism and as an heir to Europe’s totalitarian parties and movements. The final legacy of the Iraqi Ba’ath party was the destruction of pluralism in Iraq — a pitiless campaign waged for decades by pan-Arabists and Ba’athists against ethnic minorities, religious sects and independent political parties. Makiya, in his great trilogy of books about Iraq, used the archival records at his disposal to reclaim political power on behalf of all these victims; in the end, it was the only way to reclaim the integrity of their past and to dignify their memories. 

II: Republic of Fear and Arab Nationalism

Following the publication of Republic of Fear, Makiya noted an “upsettingly common reaction” among his Iraqi Arab readers: “Why did you give so much space to the plight of a handful of Jews in 1968? Didn’t every Iraqi suffer?” (10) His answer was obvious and important: how the regime treated its most vulnerable minorities revealed how it would treat all of its citizens in time. As he would note in Republic of Fear, the “anti-Zionist” campaigns of 1968-70 “turned out to be the thin end of the wedge in a generalized campaign of terror that finally touched every Iraqi” (11).

It wasn’t the Jewish state that destroyed Iraqi Jewry but the conspiratorial and antisemitic pan-Arab ideology that found a home in the military regimes that would eventually rule Iraq. The first Jewish pogrom in the modern Middle East took place in Baghdad, encouraged by the pan-Arab allies of the Axis powers: the 1941 Farhud was an explicitly Holocaust-related event, incited by Nazi propaganda and pro-fascist militias. Successor pan-Arab regimes and parties would finish the job, not only in Iraq but in states across the Middle East and North Africa: 850,000 Jews fled these countries after 1948, driven out by the antisemitic campaigns of pan-Arab forces. This legacy would prove to be a powerful weapon in the hands of the Ba’ath party, providing it with a model of persecution and control that it would apply for decades after. The ascendancy of pan-Arabism in Iraq, whoever was leading it, would always be linked to ethnic persecution and violence: Arab nationalist army officers effectively cut their teeth during the Simele massacre of Assyrians in 1933 and the Farhud directly followed the overthrow of the pro-Nazi regime of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. Ba’athism itself sought unity in its own pan-Arab ideology; it abhorred diversity and individualism, both philosophically and as a practical threat to its authority, which had to be total. The Jews were the most powerful and visible ethnic minority in Iraq and so they became a symbol of the very pluralism that had to be eradicated in order to forge a pure Arab identity.

If, as Makiya claimed in Republic of Fear, “the essential core of Ba’athism is pan-Arabism” (12) then Ba’athism became, in effect, an Arab nationalist project to overcome the “embedded social pluralism” of Iraqi society. The centre and symbol of this was Baghdad, a city that was once a vital regional metropolis with the liveliest local nightlife outside of Beirut. Arabs, Jews, Christians, Shia, Sunni, nationalists, Communists, liberals, middle class professionals, artisans, artists, poets and musicians all contributed to the creative chaos that had, historically, defined the city. In the end, the greatest threat to Baghdad’s rich cultural fabric would be the brand of pan-Arab nationalism pioneered by Sati al-Husri. Appointed Iraqi Minister of Education in 1920, al-Husri redesigned the Iraqi education system with the aim of eradicating the cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic reality of Baghdad. This new curriculum would go on to shape a generation of Iraqi Arab nationalists and coupists. Tamara Chalabi, in her family memoir Late for Tea at the Deer Palace, vividly described the impact that al-Husri’s reforms had on her uncles in the 1930s:

Both Rusdi and Hassan noted with great unease how their school had become more militant and overtly nationalistic in its teachings, as had other schools. During morning assemblies, the boys winced as the school anthem kept changing, with more aggressive language being added to its verses. Their history books were full of alienating references to those who weren’t Arab Sunni, and all the students were encouraged to undergo military training…It was an uncomfortable atmosphere that, they felt, pushed each person towards his basic sectarian or religious identity. (13)

Like all such movements, including Ba’athism, al-Husri’s pan-Arabism proved to be narrowly sectarian in practice: he wasn’t just antisemitic, but also despised the Shia and successfully barred their entry to higher education and teaching posts, much to the chagrin of the ambitious Chalabis.

It is important to understand the philosophical origins of al-Husri’s version of pan-Arabism in order to understand where it ended up and to fully grasp the scope of Makiya’s dissection of the Ba’ath in Republic of Fear. The nationalism of al-Husri and his disciples  — which included Michel ‘Aflaq, one of the founders of Ba’athism and the hero of its Iraqi variant — was a reactionary, populist creed rooted in the traditions of German romanticism and cultural nationalism. Inspired by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, al-Husri extolled an expansive Arab nation unified by a common language, history and cultural heritage. This had nothing to do with the liberal models of British parliamentary democracy or the French state; it was, in fact, directly opposed to these traditions. What al-Husri had in mind was an “organic” Arab nation that was exclusionary and authoritarian and superseded nation states. Observing the fragmented, polyglot countries of the Middle East and North Africa during the 1930s, he decided that what the Arabs really longed for was an “Arab 1871” – as if pan-Arabism was a regional parallel to pan-Germanism, then being pursued by the Third Reich. Pan-Arab nationalism was the movement that would restore the “glorious Arab past”, something that seemed distant and remote in the corrupt and cosmopolitan world of modern Baghdad. It was al-Husri, wrote Bassam Tibi, “who began this tradition of populist germanophile Arab nationalism”:

His nationalism was not mystificatory, fanatic or fascist, but he laid the foundations for the kind of fanatical nationalism formulated by his disciple Michel Aflaq, which…found expression in the semi-fascist military dictatorship in Iraq and Syria under the aegis of the Ba’ath party. (14)

In Republic of Fear, Makiya devoted considerable space to Iraqi pan-Arabism and the pan-Arab roots of Ba’athism: in effect, the book showed how a movement founded by “the Arab Fichte” culminated in the “Arab Prussia” of Iraq’s military and Ba’ath regimes. Makiya saw Ba’athism as the logical conclusion of pan-Arabism and, for this reason, his project ranged beyond the specific details of Saddam’s regime to launch an even more ambitious attack on the very ideology that had captivated the Arab nations and led to their ruin. 

This had a key place in Makiya’s own biography. In 1967, as an Iraqi college student with an English mother, he had listened to BBC broadcasts during the Six Day War and learnt about the destruction of the Egyptian air force while his classmates were still digesting reports of Arab victories on Baghdad Radio:

All lies and bullshit. And I remember knowing that it was bullshit at the time. I had my first political discussion with young men and women of my age in Baghdad, at a public swimming school where we gathered. I said, ‘it’s lies, it’s lies, it’s not true.’ The Arab world was losing the war, superfast, but there was this denial. And ordinary people only had what the regular news was saying. I remember being infuriated by that obvious lie. (15)

Makiya was successfully inoculated against Arab nationalism by this experience. The Six Day War was a defeat that destroyed the pan-Arabism of Nasser but it did not die completely: it found a new, more brutal form in the Ba’ath regimes of Iraq and Syria. Republic of Fear was the book that rooted Ba’athism (and the dictatorship of Saddam) in the ideology and lineage of pan-Arabism and therefore held the “lies and bullshit” of 1967 to account.

For Makiya, the legacy of Arab nationalism was military dictatorship, secret police states, antisemitism and ethnic cleansing. The Jews of Iraq once found hope in the development of Iraqi nationalism, in which they felt included, but fell victim to the triumph of pan-Arabism, an ideology that would gain coherence and strength through their exclusion, persecution and, finally, expulsion. The ultimate enemy of the pan-Arabists was Iraq’s social diversity and their target was its parliament. “In practice,” wrote Makiya,

the Iraqi parliament before 1941 was astonishingly vibrant as a mechanism for drawing out individuals from their communities. It was, moreover, the only institution responsible for inculcating and symbolising the true breadth of societal freedom – typified by a completely open press – in which every shade and current of opinion, however bizarre, resonated. (16)

To the pan-Arab imagination, the pluralism of the Iraqi parliament was a nightmare. Representative politics fundamentally undermined the purity and strength of the Arab nation. From the pro-Axis coup of 1941 to the butchery of 1958 and the successive nationalist and military regimes that followed, the war on pluralism intensified in the name of pan-Arabism, finding perfection, finally, in the Ba’ath machine of terror.

The Ba’ath party could not tolerate diversity. Pan-Arabism could only work by defeating local nationalisms (Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian) and eliminating all rival forms of identity, whether tribal, confessional or political. As Makiya illustrated, for Ba’athism — the final embodiment of pan-Arab politics — “the only freedom that is logically possible is the freedom to act as one with the mass, and be sacrificed to its cause” (17). This is the significance of the Ba’ath party’s pan-Arabism and the roots of pan-Arabism in German nationalist thought: here, the road also led to totalitarianism and genocide. Iraqi Ba’athism was “consistently egalitarian in its hostility to everything that is not itself,” (18): its idea of freedom was “total unity” which meant, in practice, the “obliteration of separateness, privacy, independence, difference, autonomy, variety, character, and personality” (19). Michel ‘Aflaq, the true philosopher of Ba’athism, originally described the essential philosophy of the party as “love” and “faith” in the “Arab Spirit” but the other side of this was a pure hostility to the enemies of Arabism. The Ba’athists proved to be great haters and the Iraq they created would be defined by fear, suspicion, violence and revenge. This would find apotheosis in a speech delivered by Saddam in 1978, in which he warned:

the revolution chooses its enemies, and we say chooses its enemies because some enemies are chosen by it from among the people who run up against its program and who intend to harm it. The revolution chooses as enemies those people who intend to deviate from its main principles and starting points. (20)

This was a politics of exclusion, something beyond Arab supremacy but also rooted in it, a statement that certified inclusion through loyalty to the principles of the Ba’ath, and therefore the ‘Arab Spirit’. True loyalty would be judged by the party — or the leader — on an arbitrary basis. It was a formula for mass murder.

III: The Monument and Totalitarian Art

In the spring of 1980, Mohamed Makiya received an offer he could not refuse.

This was the first year of Saddam Hussein’s presidency and the new dictator was looking forward to hosting the Conference of Nonaligned Nations, an event that would inaugurate his leadership of the movement for the following three years. To prepare for the occasion, Saddam decided to completely renovate his capital city. He gathered his aides and asked who, among all the remaining Iraqi architects, could meet the challenge of redesigning and rebuilding Baghdad in the space of two years. There were only two candidates with the required experience and skills: Rifat Chadirji, who was in jail, and Mohamed Makiya, who was living in exile in London, having fled Iraq after being included on a Ba’athist blacklist in the early 1970s. When Makiya was first offered the project, he refused, but the second approach, made with an assurance of “safe return” (“the most chilling part,” his wife Margaret would note), was too dangerous to refuse. Also, for an architect born in Baghdad, the commission itself was a historic temptation: Makiya was being offered the chance to reshape the city of his youth, the second Arab city of the modern era, the old capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the heir to Babylon itself. The Ba’athists seemed like a detail compared to this.

After the Iranian revolution Saddam turned his attention to Iraq’s Islamic heritage. He had been impressed by Mohamed’s redesign of the Khulafa mosque in central Baghdad, an early masterpiece that elegantly fused the International Style with Mesopotamian vernacular and would lead almost directly to Makiya’s later commission. Back in Baghdad, working alongside his old friend Chadirji (now released from prison), Makiya was drawn further into Saddam’s project, inspired by the historical dimensions of the task. His son, Kanan, remained in London to manage Makiya & Associates on behalf of his father and did not approve. “I said we shouldn’t be doing this,” he explained in 1992,

We just shouldn’t be doing it. My father would answer, ‘This is for history. It’s not for the people there now. It has nothing to do with them – they’ll be gone. This is for Iraq – it’s for the future.’ And, in a way, in all this he was simply being consistent with his usual approach: he always showed total disdain for the client – because he wasn’t doing this for them, it was always for the future. Architects are such megalomaniacs. (21)

Mohamed Makiya was born “when the British entered Baghdad” in the words of his mother — although, as Kanan remembered it, nobody ever really knew if she meant 1914 or 1918 (22). He was from the old city. “It was like the Middle Ages,” he recalled decades later, in London:

I wouldn’t have to read about a medieval city because I lived it. There was no electricity, no water, no sanitation. I’m very much influenced by it. I’m deeply Baghdadi, and I’ve been thinking of Baghdad all my life. (23)

After graduating from the School of Architecture in Liverpool and completing his PhD at Cambridge University, Makiya returned to Baghdad in time to benefit from Iraq’s newly revised oil concession in the 1950s. With money pouring into government accounts, the Iraqi Development Board hired newly qualified Iraqi engineers and architects to redesign and rebuild the capital. Prestige projects with big budgets lured the most famous architects in the world to Iraq. Walter Gropius was asked to design the new University of Baghdad, where, in 1959, Makiya would found the School of Architecture that he led for over a decade. Le Corbusier was offered a sports complex (destined, one day, to be the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium), Alvar Aalto the national art gallery, and Frank Lloyd Wright completed his visionary, but unrealised, Plan for Greater Baghdad, which included an opera house on the banks of the Tigris. They were all guests in Makiya’s home and he would later recall driving a “very bossy” Wright around Baghdad in his car.

Mohamed was a witness to the cultural and political revolutions that overtook Baghdad from the 1950s through to the 1980s, and participated in some of them. The period between the Second World War and the 1958 coup was a cultural golden age for Iraq and gave birth to an artistic and literary renaissance in Baghdad. This was the moment a generation of postwar Iraqi intellectuals came of age, influenced by communism, modernism, existentialism and liberalism, as well as Arab and Iraqi nationalism. In the Baghdad public library and the cafes and bookshops of Rashid Street, artists, writers and politicians debated Marx and Sartre and the Arab revival, formed new societies, rival parties, political alliances and personal enmities. This was the city that gave birth to the first free verse movement in the Arab world and produced a deluge of newspapers, journals, poems and novels that rivaled the output of Cairo and Beirut. Thriving cinemas, first introduced by the British in 1917, fed the Iraqi hunger for Hollywood films, while theaters, clubs and concert halls contributed to the city’s vibrant nightlife. Glamorous Iraqi chanteuses — like the Armenian ‘Iraqi Blackbird’ Affa Iskandar and the Baghdadi Jew Salma Mural (‘The Voice of Iraq’) — found fame across the Middle East and North Africa. Tamara Chalabi described family memories of a city “filled with music and verse” at this time:

In the small cafes in the old neighbourhoods, gramophones blared out Egyptian love songs and Iraqi melodies, increasingly performed by female singers. The music of Iraq catered for all tastes: there were popular tunes, Bedouin songs, gypsy songs, songs sung in falsetto by men dressed as women, women’s bands for female social occasions, the dirges of official mourners, religious music, the songs of labourers – ranging all the way to the more formal and elegant maqam that held a unique position in the high music of the region. (24)

The city’s nightlife was dominated by the Baghdadi Jews, who, along with the Christians, owned most of the clubs, concert halls and cinemas, primarily because of an old Ottoman convention that forbade Muslims from acquiring entertainment licences. Mohamed Makiya was part of this Baghdad, and the redesigned Khulafa mosque was his first and most significant contribution to its landscape. All of his big commissions from later years – the mosques and ministries and private residences in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and UAE – built on what he had achieved in Baghdad in 1963.

When Kanan began to write The Monument, Saddam had not yet invaded Kuwait and Republic of Fear was only being read by regional specialists and Iraqi exiles. The project was completed alongside a lavish monograph on his father’s work (Post-Islamic Classicism, 1990) and both books, in different ways, touched upon a similar theme: the achievements and failures of a postwar generation of Iraqi intellectuals. At the centre of The Monument stood the pioneers of modern Iraqi art from the ’40s to the ’60s — architects, sculptors and painters like Rifat Chadirji, Jewad Selim, Khalid al-Rahal, Mohammed Ghani and, among them, mixing modernism and Islamic tradition, Mohamed Makiya. “Largely through their efforts,” Kanan wrote,

Baghdad became in the 1950s the centre of some of the most dynamic and original experimentation in the visual arts anywhere in the Arab world. Certainly in no other Arab country did visual talent cohere into such a powerful, self-reinforcing, particular way of looking at felt reality, rooted in Iraqi experience. An indisputably Iraqi way of thinking about the plastic arts came into being, made up of talented, opinionated and generally very productive individuals knocking against each other, yet springing out in different directions. (25)

This lasted longer than the monarchy but it didn’t last any longer than the final Ba’ath coup. Until then, the nationalists had some use for the modernists and gave them some latitude. Jewad Selim’s Freedom Monument, a complex bronze mural influenced by Picasso and completed in 1961, was originally commissioned by Qasim to extol Iraq’s republican revolution. It still stands in Liberation Square and provided an ironic and tragic backdrop to the anti-Zionist lynchings of 1969.

Makiya would describe the Freedom Monument as the last legitimate product of Iraq’s cultural renaissance as well as the last large-scale public art work to be attempted in Iraq until al-Bakr and Saddam’s Baghdad development plans. As such, it presented “a kind of bridge between the Baghdad of the 1940s where a remarkable artist achieved artistic maturity, and the Baghdad of the 1980s” (26). The second renovation of Baghdad was, ultimately, Saddam’s project, driven by his determination to construct a new Iraq and to shape the new Iraqis who would serve it. This is the moment that aesthetics and totalitarianism fused, a moment Mohamed chose to participate in. He wasn’t alone: as Kanan noted, Baghdad at this time was a major testing ground for postmodern architecture as the regime used the resources provided by Saddam’s nationalisation of oil to rebuild the city. In an echo of the oil-driven rebuilding of the 1950s, the greatest architects in the world were invited to enjoy the spoils and did so without any obvious reservations. “Overnight Baghdad became a giant construction site,” wrote Makiya

new and wider roads, redevelopment zones, forty-five shopping centres in different parts of the city opened to the public by 1982, parks (including a new tourist centre on an artificial island in the Tigris), a plethora of new buildings designed by Iraqi and world class architects, a crash programme for a subway system, and many monuments – all were put in hand. (27)

The transformation was not just cosmetic, but also ideological – an attempt by the regime to “translate the collective force of the Iraqi people…into symbols” (28). By this point, “the Iraqi people” had been fully excluded from the public realm and the regime no longer permitted them to exist as individuals. Their worth was measured as a mass, a collective body at the service of the Ba’ath revolution and pan-Arabism. Something in Ba’athism still aspired to mass politics as George L. Mosse understood it: a civic religion with its own myths, symbols, rituals and monuments. This new Baghdad was not built for people as individuals; it was a landscape of power.

As the money poured in and the regime further degenerated into a tribal fiefdom, the city became a landscape of vulgarity and kitsch. An emblematic project of this era was the 1982 competition for a new Baghdad State Mosque. Mohamed Makiya’s entry was monumental and made direct reference to the Abbasid tradition; likewise, the Japanese architect Minoru Takeyama took inspiration from the original circular plan of Baghdad and the Great Mosque of Samarra. But for Kanan Makiya the most interesting and apposite entry came from Robert Venturi, who submitted a design that resembled “something out of Disneyland crossed with the scenery from Errol Flynn’s film, The Thief of Baghdad” (29). Venturi’s veneration of kitsch, irony and populism found a new and appropriate place in the Baghdad of Saddam’s imagination. For Makiya, he became an emblematic figure — a patron saint of totalitarian kitsch — but there was nothing that Venturi could say or do to compare to the brutal vulgarity of the Victory Arch, commissioned and partly designed by Saddam with monstrous bronze replicas of his arms and piles of helmets collected from the corpses of dead Iranian soldiers. Makiya’s next question was key:

What would have happened had Venturi’s mosque been built in the city of Saddam Hussain’s monument? In place of art, ugliness – which Venturi wanted to extol – has acquired a meaning that he never intended. Thus although the vulgarity of Saddam Hussain’s monument takes it out of the realm of art, in the end by playing this game, the President defeats art. (30)

The portrait of the Iraqi intelligentsia presented in The Monument was, finally, a study of defeat: the defeat of individuals condemned to death or incarceration (like Chadirji), exile (like his father) or compromise (like Khalid al-Rahal and Mohammed Ghani Hikmat who helped Saddam design the Victory Arch). This was the difference between the 1940s-50s – a time of experimentation, modernism, pluralism and relative tolerance – and the 1980s, the Iraq of Saddam and his internal empire of totalitarian kitsch. Apart from the landscape of power he planned for Baghdad, with its superficial veneer of prestige lent by international celebrities, the aesthetic reality of Iraq in the 1980s and 90s was a banal wasteland of presidential portraits staring out from wristwatches, billboards, posters statues; sickly murals of Saddam as a modern day Saladin, riding a white horse destined to liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem; the nouveau riche excess of his gold and marble palaces; or the gangster chic of Uday and his high rolling security detail. This was an aesthetic of conspicuous wealth and raw power to which the surviving artists and writers of Iraq were forced to submit their talents. 

All of this was the outcome of 1958 and the dreams and hatreds of pan-Arabism taken to a logical extreme. “Romanticism in art and romanticism in politics met in Iraq in the shape of the twenty-year-old Ba’thi regime,” wrote Makiya, and in many ways this was the final, degraded aesthetic residue of al-Husri’s Germanophilia (31). Successive military regimes, increasingly in thrall to pan-Arabism, shrank the space between politics and culture so that “culture itself as an aloof, professional and critical enterprise began to give way to propaganda” (32). The immediate requirements of ideology and power combined in the goal of “unity” which was reached by a pitiless war against pluralism partly fought in the realm of aesthetics. “The idea of unity,” wrote Makiya,

played the same metaphysical role in Arab culture as the tradition of organicism and a return to nature in romantic Western thought. In both, an illusory hunger for wholeness is at work, originating in a deep hostility (albeit contradictory) to the pluralistic, fragmented, schizoid, individualised nature of modernity. (33)

To achieve this aim of unity, Saddam became a myth-maker – an “artist-President,” to use Makiya’s phrase. This myth-making had many objectives: to extol the Iraqi masses, to serve the Ba’ath revolution, to unify Iraq under Ba’ath rule, to promote the cult of Saddam and to elevate Iraq’s role as leader of the pan-Arab revival. Like Mussolini and Hitler, Saddam took a keen interest and even active involvement in the cultural productions of his regime. Projects like the Victory Arch or the regime-financed 1983 film Clash of Loyalties – a truly unique attempt to produce a homegrown David Lean-style epic about the 1920 Revolt starring an extravagantly drunk Oliver Reed – were as intrinsic to Saddam’s regime as internal terror and regional war. Personal proclivities were not as important here as the question of control:

To find, as in post Ba’athist Iraq, boxes of file containing hundreds of pages of correspondence from the Office of the President providing guidance on the minutiae of wall posters and paintings and murals and monuments made in Baghdad under Saddam, even as he was waging wars with Iran, Kuwait, and the United States: this is the true measure of totalitarian culture…(34)

But the notion of Saddam as an “artist-President” went deeper than his interest in aesthetics and propaganda: if Saddam was an artist, then his raw material was the Iraqi people. Like Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism, Ba’athism, from Aflaq through to Saddam, had strived to create a new mass man — a new Arab, an ideal Ba’ath subject. And like Mussolini contemplating his raw material of lazy, pasta-eating Italians, Aflaq’s dream ultimately led him to despair:

the perfection of his ideal Arab…made him recoil from the real Arabs all around him. Here were ordinary people, who, like the rest of us, had their foibles, prejudices, and simple wants and desires. These filled ‘Aflaq with contempt, a condition bordering on hate. (35)

Late Ba’athism, in particular the party of mass terror perfected by Saddam, was made of stronger stuff: torture would become a tool to “reform” and “mold” people. “When the Ba’ath talk about the “new man” and the “new society” they wish to create, these are not metaphors,” Makiya observed in Republic of Fear:

The objects of torture are not criminals but sick patients or morally incomplete individuals whose deviancy lies in the subjective realm, rather than in concrete transgressions. Torture goes about fashioning them anew, and if death is a frequent result, at least somebody cared enough to try. (36)

Ba’athism was a permanent revolution, “a dream of change”: “their programme is not to win over the masses, but to change them” (37). In this programme, the individual did not matter because society, represented by the state, owned by the Ba’ath, with Saddam as its ideal, took priority over the individual, who represented, if anything, an atomised enemy of Iraqi unity and the pan-Arab revolution.

Except, of course, the individual did matter, precisely as this enemy, which Ba’athism needed in order to define itself. As Makiya wrote in Cruelty and Silence (at the very moment the regime’s programme was disintegrating in the aftermath of the Gulf War): “Saddam Hussein invents and reinvents his enemies from the entire mass of human material that is at his disposal” (38). At some point, the purpose of the Ba’ath party in Iraq went from moulding the new man and the new society to engineering a unitary state that only existed to protect and project its own power. This was the moment when Saddam’s regime, which had partly transcended sectarian divisions, became the principal agent of sectarianism. Torture and individual executions escalated to ethnic cleansing, genocide and ecological destruction. Baki Sidqi’s massacre of Assyrians of 1931 showed that Iraqi pan-Arabism already contained the seeds of ethnic mass murder, but it was the Ba’ath who turned mass murder into an art form in Iraq. The ‘Arabisation’ of the north, partly achieved through dispossession, forced migration, the raising of villages and chemical extermination, was an attempt to permanently change regional demographics by displacing the Kurds and Assyrians. From the perspective of the Ba’ath this was not simply revenge, but a technical solution to a political problem. This existential, ethnographic project had its sequel in 1993, when Saddam chose to solve the problem of Shia militias in the south by draining the marshes and destroying the ancient communities and culture of the Marsh Arabs. This was another creative, technical response to a purely political problem, and on a grand scale: the construction of dams, dykes and the realignment of the Tigris river banks was a vast civil engineering project designed to achieve a new demographic and political reality. 

Ultimately, the draining of the marshes had the same political and philosophical root as the redesign of Baghdad undertaken by Mohamed Makiya and his colleagues in the 1980s. Saddam, the artist-President, used all the tools at his disposal in the attempt to create a unitary Iraqi state in line with the ideology of the Ba’ath, the dream of pan-Arab revival and the projection of his own personal power. In order to build this new society, art, architecture, engineering and propaganda served the same end: the destruction of pluralism and liberty.

IV: The Rope and the Shia

In January 2007, a battle took place between U.S. forces and an obscure messianic Shia sect called Jund al-Samaa’, or the Soldiers of Heaven. Jund al-Samaa’ believed it had a duty to hasten the return of the Hidden Imam and the Day of Judgement by fomenting chaos and insurrection; the Americans had been given a tip-off that they would use the ceremonial procession of Ashura to attack the holy city of Najaf and massacre its grand ayatollahs. In The Rope, Makiya’s narrator — a young Sadrist — blames the father of his best friend for their demise:

A great mystery surrounds this operation, but it later transpired that the Americans were acting on false information supplied by the House of Hakim. Uncle believed the villain was Abu Haider; he had fabricated a claim, backed by his friend the governor of Najaf, a man also from the House of Hakim, that the Soldiers of Heaven were a Shia offshoot of al-Qaeda; and the credulous Americans believed him, even though everyone else in Najaf knew this was nonsense. Why the Occupier did not know these things, and was so wasteful of his own military resources, is a mystery only known to God. Mercifully, Haider, who was in the habit of relaxing and unwinding in their company, was not visiting the camp at the time of the air strikes. Several hundred harmless innocents were killed in a matter of hours – men, women, and children. Afterward, everyone – the Americans, the House of Hakim, and the government – colluded to cover up the outrage. (39)

In his personal note at the end of the novel, Makiya returned to the subject:

I had access to a detailed Iraqi police report written in the immediate aftermath of the attack, replete with pictures, smuggled to me by an Iraqi security officer who was one of the first to visit the devastated area after the event. I do not know if the Americans knew what they were doing, and I am inclined to agree with Iraqis on the ground who told me they were tricked into it by Shia enemies of Jund al-Samaa’. (40)

This episode — and Makiya’s description of it — provides one small glimpse into the dark world of betrayal and conspiracy that confounded the Americans during their years of occupation. According to the account presented by Makiya, the Soldiers of Heaven were not simply victims of American arms — their corpses were the collateral of intra-Shia rivalry. This fratricidal conflict erupted alongside the ongoing war against the Sunni insurgency, itself a deadly but conditional collaboration between Abu al-Zarqawi’s international jihadi brigades and the tribes of Anbar. It is maybe ironic that Makiya – later known and even ridiculed for his dream of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq at peace with itself – actually predicted this civil and political meltdown in 1991.

Cruelty and Silence was a bleak book steeped in Iraq’s confessional and ethnic dysfunction following decades of Arab nationalist revolution, tyranny and war. But, for Makiya, the Intifada that it described also represented a watershed moment in the history of Iraq, one that provided hope for life after Saddam. Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. To begin with, the revolt against the regime had two fronts, and the most organised groups were also the most prominent. The Kurdish parties and peshmerga led the rebellion in the north, while Iraqi Shia militias in the south found little resistance from the regular Iraqi army, which rapidly disintegrated. The revenge of the regime was intense – and sectarian. By 1991, Ba’athism in Iraq had degenerated into the rule of a tight clique around Saddam made up of old party comrades and purge survivors, Tikriti tribesmen and the dictator’s extended family. During the Intifada, large numbers of Iraqi Sunni, terrified by the Shia revenge killings in Southern cities and the lynching of Ba’ath party officials, rallied behind Saddam. “The soldiers deployed”, reported Makiya,

appear to have been selected from the Sunni towns of Hit, Mosul, Shirkat, Beigi, and from the Yazeedi community, a tiny sect based in Northern Iraq which has a history of conflict with Shia Muslims…The slogan painted on the tanks of the Republican Guard, “No more Shia after today,” was clearly not a local initiative; it was official policy. (41)

In the midst of this counterattack, special units burned precious books and manuscripts and incinerated libraries, religious schools and seminaries in Shia towns, as Saddam made good on his promise to target the very roots of Shia identity. Regime newspapers described the Shia as being “anti-Iraqi” and inflated Iran’s role in the uprising. Makiya recorded eyewitness accounts of advancing Badr Corps units – SCIRI’s paramilitary wing, the army of the House of Hakim – burning bars and casinos and decorating southern towns and cities with posters of Khomeini and Ali Khamanie. The regime convinced its supporters – and possibly even believed – that the combined forces of Badr, the old Shia party Dawa and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were pouring over the Iranian border to lead the revolt.

In fact the Iranians expected a rout and did not encourage their Iraqi assets to waste their lives. The battle of Karbala ended with Republican Guard soldiers executing doctors and nurses and throwing patients out of hospital windows, shelling the Imam Hussein Holy Shrine and arresting and executing any Shia male over the age of 15 who crossed their path. With no discrimination, helicopter gunships strafed anyone trying to escape the besieged city. Over a decade later, Patrick Cockburn recorded a conversation with a Shia dissident from Basra who claimed that SCIRI and Badr Corps

played no part in igniting the uprising, which was a spontaneous reaction to the army’s defeat in Kuwait and the reckless and foolhardy actions of Saddam. Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and his people, supported by Badr, were supposed to come through Mehran to Kut, but they never came. This was one of the reasons for the hostility later between the Sadrists and al-Hakim. (42)

Shia rivals still accuse Badr and SCIRI leaders of speaking Farsi among themselves and maintaining families back in Iran – a detail later picked up by Makiya in his depiction of Abu Haider in The Rope. They are considered “external” agents who betrayed the Intifada, standing aside as their fellow Shia were slaughtered. They were rumoured to have been the most enthusiastic and brutal torturers of Iraqi captives during the Iran-Iraq War.

As Makiya feared, the uprising left nothing but a legacy of conflict everywhere in Iraq – even Kurdistan, where partisans of the KDP and PUK fought a battle for power that threatened the very existence of their hard-won autonomous region. This was inevitable in the polity forged by Saddam where the assault on pluralism in the name of Arab unity had the effect of intensifying ethnic and confessional identities. “What will happen tomorrow in Iraq?” asked Makiya in 1993,

Kurdish nationalism is stronger and more aggressive today than at any time in the past, fueled by a growing realisation of what an Arab state did to the Kurdish people…Sunni-Shi’i hatred is today the most virulent potential sources of new violence. These forces are Saddam Hussein’s legacy to all Iraqis. (43)

The central theme of The Rope had been foreshadowed over a decade earlier in Cruelty and Silence: “If Iraq dissolves into even more chaos and bloodshed in the post-Saddam era, it will be principally because Shi’i political leadership failed to rise to the historic occasion and to the responsibilities which its own numbers imposed on it” (44). By 2016, Makiya’s verdict was in: the Shia leadership had failed.

The defining event was the murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr on April 10, 2003, the day after the fall of Baghdad. As with Sadr’s conflict with the House of Hakim, the murder of al-Khoei was the result of family rivalry: a fight for supremacy in the Holy city of Najaf. Aside from the personal animosities, tactical and doctrinal disagreements divided the houses of Sadr, Hakim and al-Khoie, as well as a deep antipathy between those who had left Iraq to escape Saddam and those who remained and suffered. Abdul Majid al-Khoei had been a well-connected exile in London and America, a friend of Makiya and Cockburn, with allies in the U.S. and European governments. This was only one reason for his eventual demise in Najaf, but in some ways it was enough. In The Rope, Makiya’s narrator sees al-Khoei dying in a back alley after being stabbed to death at the door of Muqtada al-Sadr’s residence and asks his Uncle, a Sadrist, who he is: “an American agent,” is the reply (45). The role of the Sadrists in the murder of al-Khoei would eventually be covered up by the political leaders of the Shia in Baghdad, the group of exiles who went from the Governing Council to running Iraq and who saw the Sadrists as key to securing their own power. These were men, according to Makiya, who sacrificed Iraq to sectarian war in order to secure their own futures, and the cover-up of al-Khoei’s murder was a key part of this. In an interview with Dexter Filkins in 2007, Makiya recalled the new attitude among his fellow Shia exiles, including, to his dismay, the man he believed had “broken the mould of Arab politicians,” Ahmed Chalabi: “There was this attitude: “This is a war, this is it — the showdown — why don’t we just gird ourselves for it, why not recognise it as a war and fight it to win? Because we can win” (46).

It was this background that would inform his later, only very lightly fictionalised, account of Shia machinations on the Governing Council:

He was in a room with them one day when a secular Sunni Arab Council member from London, a close personal friend of his Shia Council members, also from London – they all went to the same clubs – realised his Shia friends were up to something. Following a succession of speeches made by members of the House of the Shia to cover up how they had secretly decided to vote, it suddenly dawned on this Sunni council member that a hidden agenda was being advanced under his nose, and by his London Shia pals. His face turned ashen in utter disbelief. In the deathly silence that filled the normally noisy room, sectarian politics was born. (47)

For Makiya, the disintegration of Iraq happened because the politics of sectarianism was adopted by the new rulers of Iraq, not just grassroots militias or foreign terrorist gangs. With sectarian division baked into the political structures designed by the Americans, the Shia politicians, as the majority identity in Iraq, inherited responsibility for the country’s future. When they chose to cover up the murder of somebody as significant as al-Khoie — their old friend from years of exile and opposition to Saddam — they chose to compromise their own victory. The first Shia democracy in the Arab and Muslim world began with a “big lie” at its heart and this was not just a detail, it was a deliberate choice that would determine how the country would be governed. Makiya’s novel was an indictment of this choice and those who made it, “the men who created the politics that gave rise to all the killing, all friends of mine,” (48) who came to see Sadr and his Mahdi Army as “the shock troops in the Armageddon against Sunni Arabs that was being prophesied” (49). “The cover up,” Makiya would conclude, “lies at the core of the Shia elite’s failure after 2003” (50).

There were different poisons entering the bloodstream of Iraqi society: the poison of Najaf between the three clerical houses of the Shia and the poison of Sunni resentment at their loss of authority. The second poison found its voice in Fallujah and the other iconic cities of the Sunni insurgency that had attacked the American occupation with such fury, before turning its attention to the Shia. The Shia instruments of restitution and revenge were twofold: de-Ba’athification, which became a tool for sectarian vengeance, and the Ministry of the Interior which was occupied by Shia militias that became death squads, roaming Baghdad at night and leaving the corpses of their enemies lying in the streets or washing up on the banks of the Tigris to be discovered in the morning. While the Sunni jihadis gained international notoriety for their blades and beheadings, Shia killers also had their own grisly signatures. In The Rope, the narrator’s best friend Haider leaves Najaf to become a notorious Shia militiaman in Baghdad, renowned and feared for his inventive brutality:

His name popped up whenever a new pile of Sunni corpses was found with holes drilled into their hands and feet, and especially when the coup de grace took the form of a hole drilled all the way through the victim’s skull. Rumour said that the electric drill was Haider’s trademark. Sunni killers preferred the knife – the Prophet’s Companions used knives, they said – beheading their foes, not crucifying them. The Sunni knife was pitted against the Shia drill all through the battle for Baghdad. (51)

This was not a fictional embellishment on Makiya’s part. Anybody could see Sunni handiwork for themselves: they posted videos of their ritual beheadings on the internet. Shia violence was told in stories and rumours: Patrick Cockburn, a useful source for Makiya, described the work of Mahdi Army leader Abu Rusil, who “would leave a note on the bodies of dead Sunni saying ‘best regards’”:

‘There is no innocent Sunni,’ he said, claiming that his brother had been shot dead at a Sunni checkpoint. Abu Rusil’s victims are found with drill holes in their bodies, their bones smashed by being pounded with gas canisters, and their hands and feet pierced with nails. Once a poor man, the death squad leader preyed on his victims, confiscating their goods. He now has a house and three sport-utility vehicles, and consequently an incentive for the killing to go on. It would only end, Abu Rusil said, when every Sunni had left the country and Muqtada al-Sadr was the ruler of Iraq. (52)

Sometime in 2006, Meghan O’Sullivan, the Deputy National Security Adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, who shared the same hopes for Iraq as Makiya, had a frank conversation with Bush: “Baghdad is hell, Mr. President,” she told him, bluntly. In the sweltering nights, pitch black because there was no electricity, murder and kidnapping and sectarian conflict raged. In the city, there was a deadly plurality of groups whose enemy was pluralism and who sought, by means of violence, purity. When The Rope’s narrator attempts a taxonomy of all the armed groups in Iraq at the request of his Sadrist uncle he is defeated by the task: “This list is incomplete. There are other groups about which I know nothing, not even their names” (53). His uncle reads the final report in despair. Even the arch-sectarian – the man who gloried in the murder of al-Khoie in the alley outside al-Sadr’s residence – recognises the significance of Iraq’s descent into militia rule, each loyal to its own sect, its own rulers and ideologies:

Iraq is just a name, son, no longer even an idea, much less a nation. A name…one more to add to the two hundred sixty-eight other names you have just given me. Would that I could say otherwise, but I cannot; I would be wrong. Perhaps its fragility is why it never ceased to require the presence of a strongman to arbitrate between its different factions. But now even the name is fast disappearing. Notice not one of the organisations on your list confers allegiance to something called Iraq. That was never the case in the past. (54)

V: All Of Us Who Leapt Into the Future With Our Eyes Shut

“And Iraq?”
“It has turned into a question for itself.”

So what did Kanan Makiya expect? What did he want?

Democracy, of course, was important — particularly because, as Makiya saw it, the usual solutions to Saddam offered up by the CIA or the State Department Arabists or the merchants of realism in Europe or other interested parties in the region tried to elide democracy altogether in the name of an authoritarian remedy that they could manage. But also key — again, as Makiya saw it — was Iraq’s historic destiny as a pluralist nation: a counter example to the pan-Arab nightmare made by the Ba’ath parties of Iraq and Syria, or to Lebanon’s sectarian carnival of death. Finally, he wanted to preserve Iraq itself – or to help the nation to redefine itself, to forge a new Iraqi identity.

As everything unravelled, the fundamental question emerged: what was Iraq? “Under Saddam, the overwhelming majority of people had been brutalized, and this brutalization had led to a very deep atomization of society – of the destruction of Iraqi identity,” Makiya explained to Dexter Filkins in 2007. “And so I asked myself: how can I find hope in this darkness? Upon what do you hang a new Iraqi sense of identity?” (55) His answer was a mutual recognition of suffering by Iraqis from every part of Iraqi society, and his practical contribution was the Iraq Memory Foundation: an archive of suffering assembled from Ba’ath party records and video interviews with victims of the regime. He hoped this would play its part in a truth and reconciliation process modeled on post-apartheid South Africa. He planned to build a museum for it on the site of the Victory Arch. But, as early as 1993, he had also spotted a problem with this:

The fact that Iraqis are already competing with each other over who has suffered the most is a sign that whether or not Saddam is still around in person, what he represented lives on inside Iraqi hearts. Herein lies the greatest danger of all for the country’s future. (56)

It was this legacy of victimhood – combined with the lure of power – that drove the decisions made by the Shia on the Governing Council to embrace, rather than transcend, their sectarian identity at the expense of Iraq itself:

In the end, they couldn’t think of themselves as Iraqis. They didn’t realise the greater prize, the whole country, is far more important than the prize of just competing with Sunnis or Kurds over who gets the most out of the pie that they now inherit. They kept on thinking of themselves in that small-minded way. Therein lies a large portion of [The Rope]. I deal with these ideas: how men internalise their victimhood, how they are unable to rise to the occasion of governance. (57)

More than the Sunni insurgency – which had its seeds in an underground network of safe houses and arms caches prepared by the Fedayeen Saddam and the Ba’ath Party militia – the breakdown of Iraqi politics along sectarian lines and the resulting civil war was Saddam’s most effective revenge on those who deposed him:

the competition over victimhood – ‘we suffered, you suffered, I suffered, I suffered more than you so I should get more’ – is a natural outgrowth of Saddam’s tyranny. The politics of victimhood is one of the diseases that tyrannies leave behind within terrorised populations. (58)

“My past,” explains Makiya’s narrator in The Rope, “the past of all of us who leapt into the future with our eyes shut in 2003, is the rule of the Great Tyrant” (59). And this past determined the future: the leap into the future was a leap into the dark.

One of the tragic ironies of post-Saddam Iraq is that the political system that the Americans helped the Iraqis to build actually embedded sectarianism within the new institutions of state. The makeup of the first Iraqi Governing Council established this error: the apportion of seats along sectarian and ethnic lines set the pattern for competition rather than collaboration, as Makiya illustrated in The Rope. The American attempt to manage plurality and balance interests, made in good faith, ended up creating a state structure that simply exacerbated conflict. (Some Iraqis concluded that this had been the plan all along.) As Emma Sky noted in her memoir, “the focus on subnational identities was at the expense of building an inclusive Iraqi identity,” an oversight that led directly to the unravelling of that very identity (60). Makiya would make a similar point at the end of The Rope, accusing the Americans of “promoting and instituting sectarianism into the body politic” (61).

The institutions of state would eventually become weapons wielded by sectarian actors – in this case, the triumphant Shia. The practical consequences of this were stark. Ahmed Chalabi, for example, took control of De-Ba’athification and converted it into a naked tool for sectarian revenge, ensuring that the Shia reckoning with the past would be violent. The Sadrists took over the Ministries of Transport and Health, which meant they could control who flew in and out of Baghdad International Airport and hospitals became sectarian killing grounds. The Interior Ministry and National Police were infiltrated by Shia militias and so became, effectively, a force of sectarian death squads, engaged in extra-judicial executions, running private prisons and kidnapping Sunni targets. Iraq’s very diversity worked against it: as Makiya had feared, nobody was willing to speak for the country as a whole or across confessional and ethnic lines. Identity politics triumphed at the expense of pluralism. 

The rich fabric of Iraq’s most diverse cities was ripped apart again. By 2006, Baghdad was being partitioned along sectarian lines, with entire neighbourhoods cleansed of Sunni and Shia, leaving a patchwork of purified confessional cantons at war with each other. In Kirkuk, the outcome of ‘Arabisation’ under Saddam was reversed by Kurds who expelled Arabs from their homes and began a process of ‘Kurdification’. This kind of ambitious demographic engineering was also adopted by the Iranian-backed Shia militias who took advantage of a key turning point in recent Iraqi history: the rise of ISIS, which temporarily threatened the existence of Iraq’s borders. Led by Iran, Shia militias were organised into a broad front – the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) – which eventually helped to defeat and clear ISIS out of northern Iraq. But then they never left: the militias, mostly from southern and central Iraq, now proceeded to seize property, agricultural land and oil fields in Mosul and the rest of Ninewa province, effectively displacing former Sunni occupants and Christian residents who had fled ISIS genocide. The PMF temporarily symbolised the deep overlap between state institutions and Shia militias whose loyalty to the idea of Iraq was, in some cases, highly dubious. But it also exposed another fault-line that now overshadows Iraqi politics: intra-Shia rivalries and feuds. The backbone of the PMF was the Badr Corps and other Iranian-aligned militias, but it also contained units loyal to Ayatollah Sistani and Sadr: its decline in late 2021 degenerated into a fight between these factions, with the Sadrists in the ascendancy. This is now, in August 2022, reaching a climax, as Sadr and his street gangs hold the entire Iraqi political process hostage.

So Makiya’s idea of – or hope for – a democratic Iraq collapsed as these conflicts emerged and raged. His dream of democracy was destroyed by the death of pluralism in Iraq. Early on, he understood that peaceful coexistence could only be achieved on the basis of mutual agreement on basic values, or a shared idea. Ultimately, this had to be the idea that Iraq was a coherent state in which majorities and minorities shared a common destiny. Not a commonality based on ideological unity, but forged by plurality. Makiya was not a political philosopher who sought to define a new theory of pluralism in his writing. He was influenced most closely by Arendt in his defining work, Republic of Fear, but did not attempt grand theories like she did in The Origins of Totalitarianism.  Instead, he studied her work and found in Ba’athist Iraq something close to her totalitarian idea: an architecture of fear and a political aesthetic; an intricately designed network of para-state party organisations, secret services and systems of torture and surveillance; a programme of ethnic and sectarian genocide pursued in the name of an expansive, apocalyptic ideology.

Makiya’s own vision of post-Saddam Iraq was something else again: a confluence of influences, allegiances, vague tendencies and — more importantly, and a running theme until the bitter end — hopes for what could come after. This was encouraged by his own experience and studies of what Iraq had once been and had offered the world before the pan-Arabists imposed their own dreams on the country. Undoubtedly he had also been influenced by his adopted countries during exile – Britain’s parliamentary democracy, of course, but mostly America, which had built a system based on pluralism by writing a constitution for the states that chose to unite after a revolutionary war. The constitution written for Iraq after Saddam – by Iraqis but overseen by the U.S. – did not achieve this balance: it was either too soon or too late; it was certainly flawed, and encouraged the sectarianism he had hoped it would destroy. Dialogue died, and violence and dreams of power replaced it. Despite his own hopes, Makiya had himself recorded and explained the reasons why this would happen from his earliest writing on Iraq. But even at the end, at the final moment of despair, he would not concede its inevitability:

Civil war and a complete breakdown in Sunni-Shia relations were not inevitable consequences of war and occupation; Iraqi leaders knowingly or unknowingly willed them into existence. Individuals with weight, who would not cater to the basest sentiments, might have made a difference. (62)

They never did; to this day, they still haven’t. For Makiya, this was, in some ways, the most bitter lesson of all.

1. Quoted in Lawrence Weschler, ‘Architects Amid the Ruins’, New Yorker magazine, January 1992
2. Kanan Makiya, The Rope (Pantheon Books, 2016), p.303
3. Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale University Press, 2008), p.72
4. George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), p74
5. Quoted in Packer, p.179
6. Alan Johnson, ‘Putting Cruelty First: An Interview with Kanan Makiya (Part 2)’, Dissent magazine, 2006: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya_article/putting-cruelty-first-an-interview-with-kanan-makiya-part-2
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (Penguin, 1994), see Section 2, ‘Silence’.
10. Ibid., p.80
11. Ibid.
12. Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (University of California Press, 1998), p.149
13. Tamara Chalabi, Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family (HarperPress, 2011), p.157
14. Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation State (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997, 3rd Ed.), p.118
15. Quoted in Johnson, 2006
16. Republic of Fear, p.163
17. Ibid., p.256
18. Cruelty and Silence, p.219
19. Republic of Fear, p.257
20. Quoted in Republic of Fear, p.20
21. Quoted in Weschler, 1992
22. Kanan Makiya, Post-Islamic Classicism: A Visual Essay on the Architecture of Mohamed Makiya (Saqi Books, 1990), p.18
23. Guy Mannes-Abbott, ‘Mohamed Makiya: Deeply Baghdadi’, Bidoun: https://www.bidoun.org/articles/mohamed-makiya
24. Chalabi, p.166
25. Kanan Makiya, The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (I.B.Taurus, 2003), p.79
26. Ibid., p.82
27. Ibid., p.20
28. Ibid., p.22
29. Ibid, p.62
30. Ibid., p.66
31. Ibid., p.113
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Kanan Makiya, ‘What is Totalitarian Art?: Cultural Kitsch from Stalin to Saddam’, Foreign Affairs, Vol 90, No.3, May/June 2011
35. Republic of Fear, p.204
36. Ibid., p.69
37. Ibid., p.141
38. Cruelty and Silence, p.219
39. The Rope, p.198
40. Ibid., p305
41. Cruelty and Silence, p.97
42. Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq (Scribner, 2008), p.68
43. Cruelty and Silence, p.212
44. Ibid., p.226
45. The Rope, p.31
46. Quoted in Dexter Filkins, ‘Regrets Only?’, New York Times, October 7, 2007
47. The Rope, p.91
48. Ibid., p.301
49. Ibid., p.303
50. Ibid., p.308
51. Ibid., p.187
52. Cockburn, p.186
53. The Rope, p.202
54. Ibid., p.206
55. Quoted in Filkins, 2007
56. Cruelty and Silence, p.219
57. Quoted in Lawrence Weschler, ‘We didn’t have politicians up to the task: A conversation with Kanan Makiya’, Public Books, November 2016
58. Quoted in Johnson, 2006
59. The Rope, p.185
60. Emma Sky, The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (Atlantic, 2015), p.60
61. The Rope, p.317
62. Ibid., p.316

During the Spartacist Revolt of 1919, Rosa Luxemburg led an occupation of Mossehaus, the headquarters of Rudolf Mosse’s publishing empire in Berlin. The Spartacists wanted to stop the publication of the Berliner Tageblatt, one of Germany’s leading liberal newspapers, as part of their revolutionary takeover of national institutions. Mosse, in response, sent his son-in-law and company director Hans Lachmann to negotiate with the occupiers. As Lachmann’s son George Mosse later recalled, his father spent the whole night talking to Luxemburg; by the time their conversation had finished, the next day’s edition of the Tageblatt had been printed and delivered across Berlin. “For the rest of his life,” George wrote, “this committed liberal and capitalist was fond of saying that Rosa Luxemburg was the most intelligent woman he had ever met” (1). In the following days, the Communist uprising was crushed and Luxemburg was murdered by Freikorps troops, a casualty of the counterrevolution that would contribute so many men to the ranks of the SA and SS. Although they did not know this yet, the Mosses would also become victims of these same forces, targeted by the Nazis as “ready-made symbols of the so-called Jewish Press” (2).

The Mosses belonged to a Jewish community that was among the most successfully assimilated in all of Europe. In The History of Zionism, Walter Laqueur described German politician and economist Ludwig Bamberger’s unbreakable faith in “the symbiosis, the identification of the Jews with the Germans” that was commonly shared:

They had been thoroughly Germanised well beyond Germany’s border; through the medium of language they had accepted German culture, and through the culture, the German national spirit. He and his friends thought there was obviously some affinity in the national character which attracted Jews so strongly to Germany and the German spirit. (3)

Like Bamberger, George Mosse grew up with precisely this sense of cultural belonging. An unusually privileged child of Berlin’s liberal Jewish elite, he did not consider his “opulent lifestyle” of country estates, urban mansions, servants, chauffeurs and governesses to be unusual or special in any way. The Mosses were a fixture of the Berlin establishment; they were employers, philanthropists and patriots, positions that made them complacent about the threat posed by the Nazis. “Like many liberals of his generation,” George recalled, “my father could bring himself only with difficulty to take the Nazis seriously. He used to say that Hitler did not belong in the front part of the newspaper, but in the Ulk, the comic supplement” (4). The family considered itself to be German “without giving it another thought” (5) and did not recognise the new reality that had been created by a regime that defined them, without any mitigation, as enemies of the völk. “To be sure,” he wrote, “such families as ours shared some of the self-criticism of Jews and had a lively consciousness of antisemitism, but in the last resort, German, Jew and family were interchangable concepts” (6). For the Mosses, German patriotism, liberalism and the tradition of the Enlightenment — which had, after all, secured their emancipation and provided them with the opportunity to succeed so spectacularly — also underpinned their anti-Zionism, a position that George would only abandon later in life. 

Everything changed in 1933 when the Nazi agent Wilhelm Ohst held Lachmann at gunpoint and forced him to sign over the Mosse firm as part of the mass expropriation of newspapers and publishing houses by the Nazis. An SA thug, racial occultist and petty criminal backed by the power of an antisemitic regime, Ohst was no Luxemburg, as Mosse later noted: “this indeed was a different sort of occupation from that of the Sparticists with whom [my father] had dealt so easily after the First World War” (7). With no prospect of negotiation, the family was forced to abandon their business and property and escape into exile in France. They would never return to live in Germany and the experience of dispossession and exile would define the rest of their lives. For George, it would determine his future course as a historian of fascism, nationalism and racism: “I could not simply walk away from the failure of socialists and liberals to understand National Socialism,” he wrote in his memoir, “this failure in which, as we have seen, my own family’s publishing empire had been involved, was constantly before me” (8).

It turned out that the Mosses were fortunate to have been targeted so early. By the Second World War they had settled in America, safe from Nazi extermination. Nevertheless, in an essay to mark his retirement, Mosse would conclude that

all my books in one way or another have dealt with the Jewish catastrophe of my time which I always regarded as no accident, structural fault or continuity of bureaucratic habit, but seemingly built into our society and towards life. Nothing in European history is a stranger to the Holocaust… (9)

Like Benedetto Croce, Mosse believed that “past history is always contemporary” and this was the root of his contention — by no means universally accepted — that the Holocaust was not a historical aberration but an event with deep roots in the European experience. Croce was a key influence on Mosse and in 1976 he would tell the young historian Michael Ledeen that the Italian had “influenced me, above all, through his concept of the totality of history, something I believe very much — that outside history there is no reality” (10). His belief — in common with Croce — that the individual is central to historical understanding helped him to maintain a careful balance between political commitment and impartial analysis in his own work. He would later acknowledge that his identity as a Jewish German exile and a closeted homosexual had largely determined his central historical themes, writing that

I have always been instinctively suspicious of historians who have held an overriding belief, including a faith in a traditional religion. Now I realise that this attitude, while still desirable as an ideal, was unfair…The temper of the times made a neutral stance impossible and perhaps even undesirable to maintain. (11)

But this was subtle: political commitment did not give way to activism and he would never explicitly link his research to a contemporary cause. His work overlapped with the Frankfurt School and he would scope out territory explored by Foucault and later occupied by Gender Studies, but he would never join an intellectual movement or adopt the terms of passing theoretical trends. This was a form of freedom: it is what gave his writing its scope and clarity but also determined his own historical methodology.

For Mosse, “empathy is the chief quality a historian needs to cultivate” (12), but when he tried to view the interwar fascist movements as they had viewed themselves he transgressed the boundaries of acceptable academic inquiry in a way that was considered either misguided or sinister. This independence — or singularity — led to relative obscurity outside of the niche of comparative Fascist Studies. In Italy, where he was genuinely and widely appreciated, fame was clouded by the scandal surrounding his friend Renzo De Felice that followed the publication of the 1974 Intervista sul fascismo with Michael Ledeen. As Ledeen recalled:

for months, it was virtually impossible to read a newspaper, watch an evening of television, or listen to a few hours of radio without running into a supercharged attack on De Felice, not only for the presumed ‘errors’ of his historical analysis but also for ‘corrupting Italian youth.’ More than one critic suggested that he be forbidden to teach at Italian universities. (13)

Mosse, for his part, publicly defended De Felice and the two historians found inspiration and support in each other’s ideas and work. Most importantly, they quickly acquired the same enemies and for largely the same reasons: by taking the ideas and aesthetics of fascism seriously they found themselves accused of revisionism by critics who sought to make political gains from the scandal or recognised the challenge to their own theoretical assumptions.

At the heart of this was a deliberate misunderstanding of ‘historical empathy’ which Mosse had defined as “putting contemporary prejudice aside while looking at the past without fear of favour” (14) and which was emphatically not the equivalent of sympathy. In practice, this method allowed Mosse to focus on the myths, symbols and perceptions of fascist movements, their supporters and mass participants. Crucially, this did not simply mean the study of high culture, but also popular culture or populist theories, ranging from pulp novels to occult movements. This doesn’t seem very controversial now, but Mosse broke etiquette in two ways: by analysing cultural materials that had been treated as unworthy of consideration by serious historians and treating fascism and Nazism as coherent ideologies in their own right. In the introduction to his 1999 essay collection The Fascist Revolution, Mosse described his approach and its relation to contemporary interpretations of fascism: “Fascism considered as a cultural movement means seeing fascism as it saw itself and as its followers saw it, to attempt to understand the movement on its own terms,” he wrote, “only then, when we have grasped fascism from the inside out, can we truly judge its appeal and its power” (15). The objective of this was not to rehabilitate fascism, but to understand it better: both its historical reality and its existing danger. 

Mosse’s breakthrough work of 1964, The Crisis of German Ideology, put forward a new, and for German historians difficult, proposition: that Nazism was made possible by a German völkisch movement that had  “penetrated deeply into the national fabric” and “showed a depth of feeling and a dynamic that was not equaled elsewhere” (16). This was the first attempt to analyse the cultural traditions of Germanism and the institutionalisation of völkisch thought in the German Youth Movements, schools, universities, nationalist organisations and political parties of the right. (‘Leadership, Bund and Eros’, a chapter devoted to the links between masculinity, homo-eroticism and völkisch ideals, was a revolutionary piece of research and analysis in itself.) The point wasn’t that Nazism was an inevitable culmination of German history or an innate expression of German character  — the ‘From Luther to Hitler’ school or Sonderweg paradigm. Instead, Mosse argued that the success of völkisch ideas in a newly unified and rapidly industrializing Germany created the conditions in which Nazism could succeed through a general popular consensus. The “human perceptions, hopes and longing for the good life” (17) that contributed to this could not be seen in total isolation from broader economic and social forces common to other countries, but the specific historical reality of Germany could not be avoided: “as a result of the lost war, Germany became the nation in which the völkisch dream was realised [and] the alliance between racism and völkisch nationalism triumphed” (18).

Racism was key to the development of German nationalism and the central innovation of Nazism was to turn the German Revolution into an Anti-Jewish revolution (“the dehumanisation of the Jew is perhaps one of the most significant developments in the evolution of the völkisch ideology”, 19). Hitler’s defining achievement was to organise a diffuse völkisch movement into a new religion of state by combining the irrational mysticism of the Germanic Faith with ruthless and pragmatic political tactics. “Mein Kampf is devoted 50 percent to theory and 50 percent to organisation,” Mosse told Ledeen in a 1976 interview, “and that’s about right as far as Hitler is concerned because he believed that theory was all important — the myth was central — but it would be no good unless it could be translated into action” (20). The Nazi myth needed a tradition to activate and The Crisis of German Ideology was the first attempt to analyse and catalogue the origins, character and structure of that tradition. “You cannot have any successful myth without historical preparation,” Mosse explained, “I tried, then, to show the roots of this myth” (21).

The scope and range of Mosse’s work at this time was unique but not everybody thought it was warranted. Fritz Stern had covered similar ground a couple of years earlier, but most of Mosse’s contemporaries considered fascism to be empty of theoretical content. This was largely because fascism did not conform to their own definitions, as Mosse was willing to point out:

all fascisms rejected classical political theory, that is why Anglo-Saxon scholars have such a difficult time discussing it. They’re always looking for logical, consistent political theories. But fascism regarded itself, always, wherever it was, as an attitude of mind, an attitude towards life. (22)

Unlike Communism, with its foundation in the canonical works of Marxism, fascism was not a textual doctrine, but a visual revolution; it did not proceed by rational explication of theory, but by the mobilisation of masses of people through myth, symbols and ritual. This crucial insight provided the foundation for Mosse’s 1975 masterpiece The Nationalization of the Masses in which he described the contribution that national monuments, sacred spaces, architecture, public festivals, theatre, cultural organisations and popular taste all made to the Germanic myth. Here Mosse touched on new themes that would contribute to a general theoretical framework for all of his work: the idea of politics as a civic religion; the continuity between fascist and bourgeois aesthetics; the connections between the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, nationalism and fascism; and the concrete objectification of myth in rituals, art and monuments. Mosse termed this the ‘New Politics’ and defined it as a secular political style that developed from the French Revolution to the Second World War “through the use of national myths and symbols and the development of a liturgy which would enable the people themselves to participate in such worship” (23). In Germany and Italy — the youngest of the major European nations — the end point of this was fascism, a political style that stood outside the rational, logical systems of traditional political theory:

the fascists themselves described their political thought as an “attitude” rather than a  system; it was, in fact, a theology which provided the framework for national worship. As such, its rites and liturgies were central, an integral part of a political theory which was not dependent on the appeal of the written word. (24)

This would later be described as Mosse’s “visual turn” — an analysis of fascism that that incorporated aesthetics and anthropology to redefine the terms of the debate.

The Nationalization of the Masses — a relatively short work of 216 pages — established a new foundation for the cultural history of nationalism and fascism. The book had its greatest impact in Italy where it complemented the work of De Felice and set a new course for Emilio Gentile. In an interview published in Corriere della sera in 1985, Mosse speculated that his popularity in Italy was due to “the widespread diffusion in your country to think visually: a predisposition which is very important for understanding my writings, the encounter between symbols and myths” (25). During this time, the relationship between Mosse and De Felice was particularly productive — even their disagreements led to clarity and refinements. Their insistence on the differences between Nazism and Fascism led to separate conclusions: for De Felice it rendered any general definition of fascism futile, while Mosse would attempt a generic definition in his 1979 essay ‘Towards a General Theory of Fascism’. The distinction De Felice drew between the radical, activist ‘fascist-movement’ of the squadristi and the reactionary, establishment ‘fascist-regime’ of Mussolini found an echo in Mosse’s own analysis of Nazism as an “anti-bourgeois bourgeois revolution” (26) and the provocative link he made between Hitler’s apocalyptic racism and bourgeois tastes. For both historians the defining difference between the Nazis and Fascists was their view of human nature. The Nazis viewed human identity as biologically fixed and rooted in ancient history, while the Fascists saw it as open-ended and dynamic, a matter of ‘spirit’ rather than blood. These fine but crucial distinctions, shared with slight nuance by both historians, directly challenged the received wisdom of Marxist and liberal historiography in Italy and were bitterly contested. The “storm over De Felice” exploded precisely because the bestselling Intervista sul fascismo presented these ideas with a clarity and concision not found in his own books. In fact, this clarity was important: it did not minimise the crimes of the Fascist regime, but helped to define its true nature. 

In 1978, Mosse finally reckoned with the origins of Nazi mass murder and produced one of the angriest books he ever wrote: his history of European racism, Toward the Final Solution. The anger, as such, did not communicate itself in the style or the tone or even the method, all of which was as cool and expansive as ever, but in the details of his analysis and conclusions. Mosse traced the roots of modern European racism to two traditions: Romanticism (also the root of nationalism) and the Enlightenment. Racism combined scientific classification with Greek ideals of beauty in the form of eugenics, physiognomy and the Aryan stereotype. In Germany this combined with völkisch nationalism and led a nation down the fatal path of racial mysticism, race war and Lebensraum. Racism, as a political ideology, social aesthetic and national movement, required an antithesis and an enemy to give it dynamism: in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe this could only be the Jew. The Jew in this taxonomy was therefore given a distinct look that stood in direct contrast to the Aryan male, itself a derivation of Classical aesthetic models revived during the Enlightenment: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, for Mosse, visual ages, a key element in his analysis. Finally, the Jewish stereotype came to embody everything that threatened or corrupted the national community: urban culture, financial capitalism, international cosmopolitanism, and sexual and aesthetic decadence.

It was this middle class development and promotion of stereotypes that underpinned Mosse’s description of the Nazi as the ideal bourgeois and also inspired his depiction of the nineteenth century “struggle to control sex” (27) through stereotypes and manners in 1985’s Nationalism and Sexuality — an equally angry book that was in many ways a companion piece to Toward the Final Solution. For Mosse, racism and respectability stemmed from the same impulse to classify and thereby exclude, as well as the same fatal combination of science and aesthetics. The story of racism was not “the history of an aberration of European thought” but “an integral part of the human experience” (28), while

respectability provided society with an essential cohesion that was as important in the perceptions of men and women as any economic or political interests. What began as bourgeois morality in the eighteenth century, in the end became everyone’s morality. (29)

This was the paradox of the Enlightenment that Mosse identified — what gave birth to liberalism and led to Jewish emancipation also spawned the twin evils of racism and respectability. 

These were key concerns for Mosse because they were directly rooted in his own past and personal experience. However, in his late memoir, he qualified one crucial aspect of this attack on the European bourgeoisie: “the repression involved in the maintenance of respectability seemed to strike reviewers, and indeed I might have overstressed this aspect of nationalism and respectability by failing to suppress sufficiently my anger over the fact that the strictures of respectability had made my own life so much more difficult” (30). Furthermore, in his preface to the republication of The Crisis of German Ideology, Mosse expressed second thoughts about the origins of National Socialism that had implications for all of his work on nationalism, racism and fascism:

If I were to write this book today…the First World War, which prepared the breakthrough of völkisch thought, would be given greater space. Not only because the myth of the war experience proved susceptible to völkisch ideas, but because, as a result of the lost war and its consequences, Germany became the nation in which the völkisch dream was to be realised. This could not have been foreseen before the war. (31)

Mosse redressed this in Fallen Soldiers, his 1990 study on the memory of war that finally gave the First World War the “space” it had not been accorded in his earlier work. Influenced by cultural historians such as Marc Ferro and Paul Fussell, Mosse came to see the First World War as the great catalytic event of the twentieth century, a collective experience that gave nationalism and racism the dynamism and momentum that led directly to fascism and the Holocaust. Fallen Soldiers drew together all the social, cultural and military trends that had developed from the French Revolution to 1914 in order to identify the defining features of the Great War and its aftermath: the myth of the war experience, the cult of the fallen, the worship of the nation, the brutalisation of politics, the mechanisation of all aspects of life and the dehumanisation of the enemy. For Mosse, “the encounter with mass death” during the war “took on a new dimension, the political consequences of which vitally affected the politics of the interwar years” (32). All of the nations involved felt these effects to different degrees, but none more so than Germany, a country both traumatised and brutalised by the war experience and with a völkisch ideology ready to be activated and exploited by the parties of the right, with the Nazis at the vanguard. The First World War was the decisive point at which all the key elements Mosse had traced in his work — from the stereotypes of race and gender to the ideologies of nationalism and völk — were fatally radicalised, with antisemitism, racial mysticism and the cult of violence moving from the margins to the centre of European politics. In the final analysis, it was the Great War that led to Nazi culture and Holocaust morality, the dark heart of European modernity. 

The last major works of Mosse — Fallen Soldiers and The Image of Man (1997) — developed all of the key themes and subjects from across his career, providing a rich coda to his long study of the politics of nation, race and gender from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Both books represented a final reckoning with his times and with his own personal experience; they were also his most beautiful and underrated works. After his death in 1999, tributes were paid to his influence and achievement in the form of obituaries, essays and conferences, and to this day his academic legacy is kept alive through programmes, funds, conferences and prizes all bearing his name and often paid for by the Mosse estate, stolen by the Nazis in 1933 and returned by the newly unified German state in 1990. Most significantly, in 2020 the University of Wisconsin Press finally began to publish Mosse’s collected works with new critical introductions, and as a result The Crisis of German Ideology, Nationalism and Sexuality, Toward the Final Solution and The Fascist Revolution have returned to print. I assumed this would be big news, but then I have not seen any acknowledgment of these new editions in the British or American press — not in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books or even Commentary, a magazine that once published him.

Maybe this is to be expected because the innovations of Mosse still go largely unacknowledged, even in research areas he helped to establish. There are exceptions: Roger Griffin continues “the Mossean legacy” in his own work and Emilio Gentile still plots a course set by his original encounter with Mosse’s books. Their respective studies Modernism and Fascism (2007) and The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (1993) are key works in the Mosse lineage. Furthermore, Mosse’s subliminal influence is  pervasive, as Griffin suggested in 2008 when he noted “the appearance of a series of books by a younger generation of historians who find it a matter of ‘common sense’ to engage with fascism not as a reactionary, backwards-looking force, but as a revolutionary, futural one deeply bound up with the early twentieth century revolt against existing modernity that took on myriad aesthetic, social and political forms” (33). The uncontroversial acceptance by contemporary historians writing about fascism of ideas first pursued by Mosse (along with De Felice) in the face of fierce ideological hostility is, in the end, the sum of his legacy. It is a large one, but his name is invisible. The same holds true for the wider terrain of cultural history (Linda Colley’s Britons seems to me to be a very Mossean book, but he appears to have no acknowledged impact on her method or thinking) as well as the various schools and departments of Gender Studies, Queer Theory and LGBT history, fields in which he was a genuine pioneer. The reasons are likely to be political or stylistic, but this is wrong: Mosse still has plenty to say about the world we live in now, and he always has done. “This is still the age of mass politics,” he once wrote for an untitled speech on the subject of indoctrination,

and the same longings which were operative in 1945 are still with us surely — the political process is still a drama transmitted to us by the media…the old traditions seem to have broken down, but now we have them again under a different form, mediating between us and the world, between us and our hopes in escaping from the crisis of our time, which is the crisis of mass politics and mass democracy. Indoctrination is in reality this mediation and it would not work if it did not represent a principle of hope. Rather than condemn it we must understand its function: then perhaps we can begin to escape its all pervasive present. (34)

I think we should be reading Mosse carefully, and learning from him. 

1. George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p.40
2. Ibid., p.66
3. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (Schocken Books, 2003), pps.30-1
4. Mosse, Confronting History, p.41
5. Ibid., p.43
6. Ibid., p.26
7. Ibid., pps.67-8
8. Ibid., p.184
9. Quoted in Steven E. Aschheim’s introduction to George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), p.xxv
10. George L. Mosse and Michael A. Ledeen, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism (Basil Blackwell, 1978), p.29
11. Mosse, Confronting History, p.6
12. Ibid., p.5
13. Michael A. Ledeen, Freedom Betrayed (AEI Press, 1996), p.25
14. Mosse, Confronting History, p.5
15. George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (Howard Fertig, 1999), p.x
16. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p.10
17. Ibid., p.x
18. Ibid., pps.x-xi
19. Ibid., p.141 
20. Mosse and Ledeen, Nazism, p.59 
21. Ibid., p.32
22. Ibid., p.108
23. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (Cornell University Press, 1991), pps.2-3
24. Ibid., p.9
25. Quoted in Giorgio Caravale, ‘“A Mutual Admiration Society”: The Intellectual Friendships and the Origins of George Mosse’s Connection to Italy’ in George L Mosse’s Italy: Interpretation, Reception and Cultural Heritage, ed. Lorenzo Benadusi and Giorgio Caravale (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p.65
26. George L. Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Wayne State University Press, 1987), p.6
27. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (Howard Fertig, 1997), p.9
28. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Howard Fertig, 1997), pps. xxviii-xxix
29. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, p.191
30. Mosse, Confronting History, p.180
31. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p.x
32. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 1990), p.3
33. ‘The Fascination of Fascism: A Concluding Interview with Roger Griffin’ in A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. Matthew Feldman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p.214
34. Quoted in Karel Plessini, The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), p.207

Review of the Arrow Films box set Years of Lead: Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers, 1973-1977

Mario Imperoli’s Like Rabid Dogs opens with a brutal armed robbery that takes place in the bowels of Rome’s Stadio Olimpico during the 1976 Serie A play-off between Lazio and Sampdoria. The film uses real footage of the match, a relegation fixture that was the first game in Italy to be patrolled by carabinieri with German shepherd dogs. On the pitch you can see the blonde mop of Luciano Re Cecconi, Lazio’s star player, who would be shot dead the following year by the owner of a jewellery shop in Rome, “a victim of the same violence we see in the movie,” as film critic Fabio Melelli put it. The original screenplay was inspired by the Circeo Massacre, a case of three middle class students who raped and murdered two girls in Lazio the year before and the lurid details of their crimes seep into the sleazy atmosphere and class dynamics of the film itself. Like Rabid Dogs is the product of an imploding society: it doesn’t just reflect the world it portrays, it belongs to it.

In an essay written for the Arrow Films box set Years of Lead, which contains a pristine restoration of Like Rabid Dogs, Troy Howarth roots the 1970s cycle of Italian crime films in the 1960s thrillers of Carlo Lizzani, suggesting a loose overlap with neorealism that is partly a matter of politics and partly technique. Imperoli’s use of footage from a real football match is one example of this and his habit of filming car chases in live traffic in the middle of Rome is another: Like Rabid Dogs is filled with spectacular chases shot without permission from the city authorities, supervised by one of the top specialist stunt drivers working in Italy at the time, Sergio Mioni. This was the same year that Ruggero Deodato shot a motorbike pursuit for Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man in the Roman rush hour before the police even knew what was happening. Like Lizzani, Deodato began his career as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini and would later combine the tricks of neorealism with the excesses of the mondo documentary to explosive effect in Cannibal Holocaust. The chaos and lawlessness that Imperoli and Deodato put on screen was an integral part of the way these movies were actually made — they were conditioned by the world they depicted. 

The death spiral of the First Republic was the grand Italian drama behind all of this. The source of the crisis was external, but the effects were strictly local. In his 1975 shocker Savage Three — another film in the Arrow set — Vittorio Salerno took cues from A Clockwork Orange, but replaced literary concerns with the parochial details of a national conflict. The location of Turin was key: the home of Fiat and the Agnelli network, it became a symbol of Italy’s economic miracle. For the same reason, it was also the heart of industrial action and Red Brigade terror during the Years of Lead. From this point of view, then, the city was a symbol of Italian disunity — or, as Emilio Gentile described it, the fragility of the myth of the nation. Turin had been the first capital of Italy and unification was led by the Piedmontese, who imposed their own laws and institutions on the rest of the country. The south resisted ‘Piedmontization’ from the very beginning and this sense of historic resentment was intensified by mass migration to the industrial north during the postwar boom. Southern workers, languishing on low wages in overcrowded apartments, felt alienated and despised here. This was the city of Savage Three: a highly combustible, racially charged slum.

For Salerno, Turin’s faded streets, piazzas and parks provided the perfect stage for an outburst of nihilistic violence led by Ovidio Mainardi (Joe Dallesandro), a slowly unravelling psychopath employed in a computer processing plant on the outskirts of the city. His friend Pepe (Guido de Carle) is a Sicilian who lives with his extended family in a packed apartment; like the Parondis in Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers, he is dangerously alienated and adrift in this new urban environment. The Turin shown in Savage Three is awash with anti-southern prejudice: the Sicilians and Calabrese packed onto factory floors are considered racially inferior and prone to irrational violence by the city authorities. When Ovidio and his accomplices brutally murder a prostitute and her pimp they leave the bodies hanging from the Monumento al Conte Verde and the gruesome tableaux is described by Inspector Santagà (Enrico Maria Salerno) as “a defamation and offence to the sacred legacy of the nation.” Santagà’s comment is both ironic and bitter: being a southern migrant himself, he is alert to the racism of his colleagues. For them, the crime wave is the inevitable result of southern migration and a symbol of the political bankruptcy of the nation (these are the future foot soldiers of Lega Nord). Santagà, however, immediately sees the crimes for what they really are: not the result of genetics or beliefs, but blank outbursts of boredom and despair. 

In Savage Three, Turin looks like a city that has been defeated: the football stadium, the streets and the buildings are visibly broken, exhausted, unclean, crumbling. This is not the Turin celebrated for its elegance and ceremony, but a 1970s urban sprawl which Salerno depicts as a human trap: citizens crowded into constricted living and working spaces that create the conditions for intolerance, conflict and murder. And this is not just the city: everything looks depressed and drained, in line with the common visual tone of the poliziotteschi. In these films, the sky is invariably blank and grey, a featureless ceiling of drab cloud that creates a simultaneously flat and oppressive atmosphere; the saturated colours of the gialli and the seductive monochrome of neorealism are replaced by an ugly, washed-out tonal range. The poliziotteschi city is a bleak, malignant place, where all human relations are negative and most human interactions are violent. Turin has unique divisions caused by southern immigration and its racist reaction, but the general malaise is shared across the country. Fernando di Leo’s Milan is not defined by beautiful arcades or the Duomo di Milano, but by rotting ghettos that run alongside the canals, grey rain-drenched piazza tiles and warehouses where corpses wait a long time to be discovered. Umberto Lenzi’s Rome is not the Rome of romantic weekends and ancient ruins, but a dirty and congested labyrinth of squalid flats, dank alleys, damp staircases, bleak wasteland and scrappy tenement rooftops, settings for various acts of torture, rape and murder. Enzo G. Castellari’s Genoa is perhaps the most desperate of them all: a terrifying, feral, decadent city, rotten with vice and corruption, festering on the edge of the Ligurian sea. The fate of Italy’s cities in the 1970s is encapsulated by some of its most famous crime titles: Fernando di Leo’s Milano Calibro 9 (1972), Marino Girolami’s Violent Rome (1975), Lenzi’s Gang War in Milan (1973), Rome Armed to the Teeth (1976) and Violent Naples (1976). The cities are the focal point of Italy’s crisis: the piazzas and train stations are bombed and the banks are robbed, while criminal gangs and rogue policemen rule the streets and citizens are terrorised by random acts of slaughter. Perhaps the definitive Italian crime title is the one that Sergio Sollima gave his 1970 hit man melodrama, Città violenta, even though that film is set in New Orleans. The cities are violent places that condition their inhabitants to commit more violence: an endless, animalistic cycle that Salerno depicts so well in Savage Three.

Lucio Fulci once claimed that “violence is Italian art” and the art of the poliziotteschi is a very Italian aestheticization of violence. Even the ugliness has style. This is why these films always tread a fine line between exploitation and art, nihilism and morality. The films of Imperoli and Salerno are perfect examples of this: they can be hard to watch, but they are impossible to dismiss. The violence is extreme, but makes its point for this reason. The question of motive is always present, but usually has no clear answer. In Savage Three, Santagà is the only one who understands that the brutal acts instigated by Mainardi are a response to the alienating conditions of contemporary Turin. In Massimo Dallamano’s Colt 38 Special Squad (1976) the motivation for the crime is key but also ambiguous. At first the operation planned by the Marseillaise (Ivan Rassimov) seems like a simple case of common theft, albeit conducted on a grand scale, but as Rachael Nisbet shrewdly points out in her accompanying essay to the Years of Lead set, there is something more sinister at work:

While the motivations of the common criminal are clear, the Marseillaise is a more complex individual; a man driven by a certain sense of madness and anarchic glee…his perverse sadism and disregard for life suggest that his actions are motivated by something far darker than the driving factors of vengeance and retribution…

Mainardi and the Marseillaise are both nihilists but the scale of the Marseillaise’s plan is more ambitious than the spasm of violence unleashed by Mainardi. He wants to inflict a grievous wound on Turin and live to see it; the motivation of wealth does not adequately explain this instinct. This is more than simply a plot point, or an absence of one: it taps into the atmosphere of uncertainty that defined the atrocities of this period, and was never adequately resolved.

Italian political culture in the 1970s was so convoluted and secretive that when Henry Kissinger claimed that he did not understand it nobody thought he was joking. In 1988, the Italian state set up the Commissione Stragi (‘The Slaughter Commission’) tasked with uncovering the truth behind the bombings that occurred between 1969-88 and had been variously attributed to the Red Brigades, anarchists, neofascists and the CIA. Predictably, it failed to remove the opacity of the period or provide any real psychological closure. The scenes of carnage that follow the bombings of Turin railway station and market in Colt 38 Special Squad stand out for their graphic brutality and emotional poignancy. Dallamano shot the film only four years after the Piazza Fontana bomb, so these scenes pierce his movie like unmediated expressions of national post-traumatic stress: they were not shot for thrills, but carry a lot of psychological weight and evoke still raw memories. What can’t be answered in the film, and what could never be effectively answered in real life, is the reason for all of this destruction and cruelty: the Slaughter Commission could not solve it and Dallamano refuses to provide a neat conclusion in the character of the Marseillaise. The ambiguity of the violence and the veil that fell over the most extreme events that ripped through Italy in the 1970s are a central part of the poliziotteschi world view: if nobody can fully account for this violence, then perhaps it is simply endemic to the fragile and conflicted Italian nation, something that can never be solved. 

But Colt 38 Special Squad also fulfills another function common to these films: it provides a psychological outlet, a form of mass catharsis. The disintegration of Italian society was intensified by the prominent role of organised crime, black markets and corruption in a free falling economy. The Italian crime films give voice to the pervasive feeling that the Italian authorities had fallen behind the criminal gangs, even if they were not already hopelessly compromised by them. Fear and helplessness combined with anger; the films responded with bleak cynicism and tales of rough justice. Quite often the stories revolve around detectives or special units within the police force going rogue, using unorthodox and even illegal methods in order to catch or destroy criminal antagonists. The Special Squad in Dallamano’s film is put together to crush the crime wave that has tipped Turin into near anarchy; they are given licence to use Colt 38 revolvers and pursue their targets with freedom that stops short of murder (or is supposed to). It is only by going beyond the limits of legal authority that the Marseillaise is finally stopped. Stelvio Massi’s 1977 Highway Racer (another film in the Arrow box) pays homage to Armando Spatafora, a member of Rome’s Squadra Mobile whose 1960s exploits were legendary. In the film the young Squadra Mobile driver Marco Palma (Maurizio Merli) soups up a boxy Alfa Romeo and demands a Ferrari from his boss, the Spatafora doppelganger Tagliaferri (Giancarlo Sbragia), because “I don’t want to lose before I begin.” Retaking the advantage is key and requires special measures. Merli excelled at playing rogue cops like Inspector Tanzi in Umberto Lenzi’s frantic and stylish films Rome Armed to the Teeth and The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist (1977), characters that pushed their job description beyond law enforcement into the realms of vigilantism. These were cops who had not been given any special license, but had simply gone off the rails, driven to rage and despair by inability to deliver justice. The poliziotteschi, with their special squads and vigilantes, gave Italians an alternative reality in which this imbalance was finally redressed and Italian society redeemed, however morally questionable that redemption was.

But they also provided a troubling critique and quite often without any release or redemption. Italy in the 1970s was paralysed by corruption and this was more insidious than terrorism and crime because it undermined any sense of security in state and local authority and, even, any trust in the reality of appearances. Vittorio Salerno’s 1973 film No, the Case is Happily Resolved is the one entry in the Arrow set that focuses on this total breakdown in trust, with a narrative so pure in its inexorable and dire logic that it almost presents a parable for the Italian crisis. The corruption in this case is psychological and sexual: at the opening of the film Professor Eduardo Ranieri (Riccardo Cucciolla), a quiet and respectable maths and physics teacher, brutally beats a Roman prostitute to death in a reed bed outside of the city. Fabio Santamaria (Enzo Cerusico), a young working class man who witnesses the murder, eventually finds himself framed, arrested and jailed for the crime after a relentless series of misjudgments that recall the fate of Richard Blaney in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972). Santamaria makes the fatal decision not to report this crime and to try to cover up his presence at the scene, largely because he distrusts and even fears the police. This instinct proves correct: the police believe Ranieri because of his position and his appearance, while jailing Santamaria with only a cursory investigation. Murderous and possibly perverse impulses are veiled by the professor’s exterior presentation and this is compounded by an official corruption that renders the police ineffective and even dangerous to defenceless citizens. All the authority figures in this film either conceal their true identity or cannot be trusted to do their jobs safely: all certainty is therefore undermined and Italian society is shown to be based on deception and illusion, a place where reality is inverted and nobody is secure.

The Italian crime films of the 1970s did not just reflect their own society, then, but made an active contribution to the atmosphere and dynamics of the Italian crisis. The poliziotteschi cycle played out in the shadow of real and relentless atrocities committed by political and criminal groups and state actors. The films did not always or necessarily comment on any of this, but political violence and social degeneration were part of their visual and thematic fabric. The Italian peninsula was tense, fragile and paranoid, its traditions and moral base challenged by the rise of industrial cities, mass consumerism and the cultural influence of America. As Emilio Gentile noted, all of this occurred in the ruins of the myth of the nation, at a time when “Italians were experiencing a mass anthropological revolution in their attitudes and behaviours” and the state was being contested by the existential conflict between Catholicism and Communism. In this context, popular culture had a crucial role to play in shaping narratives, ideas and emotions on a large scale and Italian artists seemed to instinctively grasp this. This is not to assign responsibility for any specific events to these films but to accord them their due social and cultural power, even at the low level of the regional cinema circuit. It so happened that the Italian crime films of the 1970s had a more profound and immediate relationship with their world than any of the more fêted artistic products of the time. The importance of Arrow’s Years of Lead set is that it recognises this and therefore values the films at their true worth.

The real difficulty here is that we don’t know exactly what we intend to do in this country. Can you persuade people to take your side when you are not sure in the end whether you’ll be there to take theirs? No wonder they hesitate; and it would take a good deal of potent persuasion to make them think that your side and theirs are compatible. 
Gertrude Bell, Basra, 1916

Britain is a high-maintenance ally.
I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States, 2003

I: The Cairo Conference

When T. E. Lawrence met the Iraqi delegation of Gertrude Bell, Sir Percy Cox, Jafar Pasha al-Askari and Sasun Effendi Eskail at Cairo train station on March 11th, 1921, he could have expected a frosty reception. Bell, in particular, had been furious with Lawrence for his harsh criticism of the post-war British occupation of Mesopotamia under Arnold T. Wilson. “Things have been far worse than we have been told,” Lawrence wrote in The Sunday Times, “our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows” (1). “Tosh…pure nonsense,” Bell had responded defensively, but by the time they met again in Cairo this disagreement had faded into insignificance. They had important work to do. “Dear boy,” Bell warmly greeted her old Orientalist comrade. “Gertie,” Lawrence replied, scanning the colonial delegates stepping off the train, “everyone Middle East is here” (2). “We arrived yesterday,” wrote Bell in her diary, “T. E. Lawrence and others met us at the station — I was glad to see him. We retired at once to my bedroom at the Semiramis and had an hour’s talk…” (3). Here they discussed their joint strategy, in preparation for the conference called by the Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill. Both had the same objective: to convince Churchill to adopt the principle of Arab self-determination in Mesopotamia and appoint Faisal — the third son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca — King of Iraq.

Even when they argued, Lawrence and Bell were in accord. Bell sympathised with Lawrence’s criticisms of Wilson because she basically agreed with them. Wilson was a colonialist who believed that Mesopotamia should be absorbed into the British Empire under the direct authority of the British crown. He was not alone: his staff in Baghdad agreed with him and, following his example, froze Bell out of all the social and professional engagements that they could, dismissing her as a female dilettante and pro-Arab adventurer. The fate of Iraq under the British had been caught between the parochial ambitions of two British institutions: the government in India wanted to annex the Iraqi state and keep control of Arabia, while the British administration in Egypt aimed to incorporate the former Turkish vilayets of Mesopotamia into an Arab Kingdom that Britain would influence but not directly rule. The Cairo Arabists were willing to cede more autonomy to local clients than the Indian government, who reacted with fury to this challenge: “I devoutly hope that this proposed Arab State will fall to pieces, if it is ever created,” Viceroy Hardinge wrote in a letter to the Foreign Office, “It simply means misgovernment, chaos and corruption, since there never can be and never has been consistency among the Arab tribes” (4). This rage was partly due to a sense in India that their power and influence over the tribes had been lost, particularly after the propaganda triumph of the Arab Revolt led by Faisal and orchestrated by Cairo. Bell had been highly influential in the conception and execution of this campaign — as Lawrence acknowledged in a radio interview in 1927 — her geographical, cultural, linguistic and political knowledge of the territory and its tribes providing unrivalled intelligence for British officials.

Both Lawrence and Bell were British imperialists who believed in Arab self-determination under the tutelage of British administrators such as Cox, Bell’s main ally in Baghdad. They blamed Wilson for stoking anti-British sentiment that culminated in a nationalist revolt among the Arab and Kurdish tribes in 1920, and considered his brutal response — bombing villages and Shia shrines, machine-gunning insurgents and burning down their homes — to be counterproductive, or “bloody and inefficient” as Lawrence wrote in the Times. Wilson’s preference was for colonial subjugation: he did not see any prospect for successful local rule and he did not want it anyway. Wilson was a complex character: after leaving the Middle East and entering parliament he became a vocal supporter of Hitler and Mussolini, but then died in a plane crash in Dunkirk in 1940 after enlisting with the R.A.F. volunteer reserve (he would later be a model for Sir George Corbett in Powell and Pressburger’s One of Our Aircraft is Missing). 

Meanwhile, Lawrence and Bell both worked towards Arab self-rule, but against British withdrawal from Iraq. Having outmaneuvered Wilson and convinced the Indian government of their case, the prospect of abandoning the nascent Iraqi state remained the gravest threat hanging over the Cairo conference. Churchill summoned the key Middle East administrators and Orientalists to help resolve a number of outstanding and interrelated political issues in the British mandates, but he also wanted to save money. The British public, in the midst of post-war depression and strikes, had protested against the cost of pursuing British ambitions in the Middle East, and a lead article in the Times had asked a question that would haunt later occupiers: “how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?” (5) Churchill was himself inclined to pull out of Iraq, leaving only a controlling presence in the strategically critical vilayet of Basra — “I’m going to save you millions,”  he crowed to the press. Bell, Lawrence and Cox were aghast at the possibility of abandoning their Arab allies, which they saw as a recipe for territorial disintegration rather than independence.

For Bell the conference was a success because it avoided this outcome, although she didn’t know that the key decisions had already been made in London. As Bell later wrote, somewhat surprised, “Sir Percy and I, coming out with a definite programme, found when we came to open our packet that it coincided exactly” with Churchill’s proposals (6). The Iraqi borders that she had drawn up in Baghdad were reinforced, incorporating the vilayet of Mosul, home of the Kurdish tribes. Churchill was sceptical of its place in the new Iraqi state and favored their independence, but Bell and Cox insisted on it as a way to counter the imbalance between the urban Sunni minority and the rural Shia majority, and he had finally agreed. Furthermore, the principle of self-determination under her own preferred ruler, Faisal, was affirmed, while his brother Abdullah was chosen to rule Transjordan as a temporary governor. Despite her own modest disavowals, Bell returned to Baghdad as a state builder and a kingmaker. For the rest of her short life, her influence over the creation of modern Iraq was unrivaled and her identity intimately woven into the elite cultural and administrative structures of the new state. Faisal considered her to be an honorary Iraqi. She loved the country and felt responsible for its fate, although by the end of her life she was troubled by the course of its development and the behaviour of the King, her old friend and confidant.

Following the end of their mandate in 1932, the British handed control to Iraq’s parliamentary government, while protecting their own political and business interests in the country they had just created. The result was a cultural and economic boom in the cities of Basra and Baghdad, but also resentment of the British that permeated all sections of the Iraqi population, even those identified closely with them, like the monarchy, the governments of Nuri al-Said and the Jews of Baghdad. Despite his desire for independence and the end of de facto occupation, al-Said believed that it was in the best interests of Iraq to work with the British rather than to expel them, but this position was compromised by the economic and military priorities of the British themselves, as exposure of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 made clear to all Iraqis. This fed into the atmosphere that led to the 1958 military coup which effectively terminated British colonialism in Iraq. The revolutionary officers and their Baghdad mobs butchered the royal family in their Palace, while anybody identified with the ancien régime faced a choice of incarceration or slaughter.

Tamara Chalabi’s family memoir Late for Tea at the Deer Palace paints a vivid picture of the terror and chaos of that day, when families associated with the monarchy and the government fled in desperation to safe houses and, eventually, the country. “Whether it was as a direct result of the Suez debacle which Britain had suffered a few years earlier, or a calculated plan to sell out their friends,” Chalabi writes, “it was unclear what lay behind the apparent indifference of the British. There had been a subtle shift of attitude amongst the British in Baghdad, who were clearly aware that propaganda against the monarchy had reached immense proportions within Arab circles” (7). To the horror of aristocratic families like the Chalabis (who fled to London) the British did nothing to stop or reverse the coup, even when their Embassy residence was burnt down and a British staff member was shot dead. They had made their own calculations and abandoned their Iraqi allies with ruthless expediency. 

After 1958, British engagement with Iraq was more fractured and distant. During the years of the Ba’ath regime the British tried to intervene in different ways, each ultimately unsuccessful and simply reinforcing the broken link with the Iraqi state that they had created. This essay is about those interventions. It is a tangled tale of exile and opposition, political strategy and foreign policy, invasion and occupation; a story haunted by Britain’s imperial past and the events set in motion by Churchill, Lawrence, Bell, Cox and Wilson.

II: Someone must keep track of these things

On March 18th 2003, the day that Parliament voted to approve the invasion of Iraq, Ann Clwyd wrote a combative op-ed for the Times that made graphic claims about the methods of torture and execution being used in Saddam Hussein’s prisons (8). This included details of screaming prisoners being fed into huge plastic shredders, a claim that was dismissed as simplistic propaganda by opponents of the war but which caught the attention of the U.S. Deputy Security of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz. There followed a unique tête-à-tête in Washington between the Labour member for the Cynon Valley and the neoconservative Pentagon civilian that typified the complexities and controversies of the 2003 intervention.

It turned out that they had more in common than she had expected. “Surprisingly, we hit it off,” Clwyd recalled, “it emerged that he had a long-standing association with human rights issues, dating back to his time as ambassador to Indonesia” (9). She was not the only person that Wolfowitz surprised in this way, but Clwyd also had a tendency to surprise people. Her support for intervention in Iraq did not go down well with former friends, allies and colleagues. “At Swansea, while attending a Welsh Labour conference, I was openly jeered and called ‘Bradwr’, ‘Traitor’. Somehow it sounded so much worse in Welsh” (10). Clwyd’s pragmatic approach to politics awarded her diverse allies, from Wolfowitz on Iraq to Jeremy Corbyn on East Timor. “In general, when weighing up whether or not to lend my support to causes and campaigns, I have learnt to make decisions based on what I believe is the right thing to do rather than the personalities involved” (11), she wrote in her 2017 memoir Rebel With a Cause. The cause of human rights in Iraq eventually left her isolated within her own party.

During their meeting Wolfowitz asked Clwyd who she thought would be the best candidate for the role of interim Iraqi president. She had acquired many contacts and friends over decades working with the Iraqi opposition, particularly within Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC), Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), but her choice was unequivocal: 

I spoke strongly in support of Jalal Talabani, since I felt he had the ability to draw the factions together, in other words he would provide the glue. At that point Donald Rumsfeld came into the room, and Wolfowitz said, “Tell him what you just told me.” We discussed why I was against some of the names he had mentioned and why Talabani would be such a strong candidate, and I was delighted when Talabani did indeed land the job as interim President of Iraq. (12)

Clwyd had credibility with the Iraqis and her opinions were taken seriously in London and Washington. During the years of Saddam’s genocidal Anfal campaign she had publicised the plight of the Kurds in parliament and the media, while the British government tried to consolidate their own covert trading relationship with the Ba’ath regime. Following the Gulf War she travelled into the Zagros mountain range to meet Kurdish refugees, taking personal and political risks in order to witness and record their suffering. She was instrumental in lobbying for no-fly zones and could take some credit for the designation of Iraqi Kurdistan as a safe haven. During the 1996 Kurdish civil war, she facilitated a delicate prisoner exchange between the PUK and KDP, negotiating an agreement between Talabani and Barzani that foreshadowed their eventual political settlement.

In her memoir Clwyd is vague about the details of the intra-Kurdish conflict but it was a key moment, not simply for the political course of Iraqi Kurdistan but for the Iraqi opposition as a whole. The civil war was exacerbated by the failure of the INC-Kurdish military offensive of March 1995, an operation that drove a deep wedge between the Kurdish parties after the KDP pulled out at the final moment, unsettled by the Clinton administration’s late denial of support. In the factional scramble that followed, the KDP, hounded by the PUK and its Iranian allies, sought protection from Saddam, a desperate and catastrophic move that led to the reinvasion of the northern safe haven by Iraqi troops in August 1996. Saddam used this opportunity to wipe out the INC: the Iraqi army attacked their camp at Qushtapa and occupied Erbil, executing all the INC personnel they could find and seizing their computers. The CIA airlifted the surviving INC members to Guam and evacuated Iraq, leaving the Kurds to their fate. Clwyd was present in northern Iraq during the operation and took desperate calls from the INC leader Ahmad Chalabi who implored her “tell the world” (13) what was happening. “It was a tragedy for us,” Chalabi later reflected, “‘Twas a devastating blow” (14).

This outcome seemed to confirm Churchill’s early misgivings about Bell’s plan to incorporate the Kurds into the Iraqi state: he had wanted to establish an independent Kurdish home in the north “to protect the Kurds from some future bully in Iraq” but had been overruled by the Foreign Office (15). However, by the 1990s, the Kurds carried the hopes of a democratic and unified post-Saddam Iraq on their shoulders, an outcome the PUK was far more committed to than the KDP. For this reason, the Kurdish collapse into open war and Saddam’s cunning exploitation of the division between the Kurdish parties was a bitter blow for their supporters, and Clwyd did not try to hide her own despair. “I pulled no punches in my conversations, even using emotional blackmail to remind them of my long-standing commitment to the Kurdish cause,” she writes, “I was blunt in telling them of the pain they were now causing their own people” (16). It was a low point for the exiles and their allies. The northern safe haven had been penetrated by Saddam’s army while British and American warplanes watched and did nothing. More importantly, the linchpin of the opposition and the supplier of its most effective existing fighting units, the Kurdish Peshmerga, had disintegrated as a united force. But for Chalabi — among the most resourceful and ruthless of the Iraqi exiles — this was only the beginning of a new, and more successful, phase in the war against Saddam.

To understand the origins of Clwyd’s role in all of this it is crucial to understand Britain’s status as a haven for Iraqi exiles. After 1958 a number of surviving members from the constitutional government fled to London, among them Chalabi’s father Hadi, who had been head of the Iraqi senate before the coup. They would later be joined by émigrés from successive purges until, by the end of the 1980s, London hosted a large and prestigious community of Iraqi refugees. This was partly explained by the close links that remained between the British state and the old Iraqi elites. These ancien régime survivors retained their anglophone sensibilities and a powerful nostalgia for pre-coup Baghdad having benefited from the prosperous and liberal society of the Hashemites and their British sponsors; for some later additions, there were MI6 links. Then, during the years of the Ba’ath, the genteel elegance of their lives in Mayfair, Bloomsbury and Surrey had been overshadowed by the threat of Saddam’s assassins: famously, Chalabi’s rival Iyad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord had been attacked by an axe-wielding intruder in his Kingston-Upon-Thames home and left for dead by the side of his swimming pool. The escalating brutality and depravity of the Ba’ath regime, as well as Saddam’s willingness to murder his enemies on foreign soil, focussed minds among the opposition groups, although they remained too fractious and scattered to pose any real threat to the dictator. 

London remained a key base for Chalabi, who kept his Knightsbridge office as an operational hub for the INC until the eve of the 2003 invasion. The Chalabis were, in many ways, the epitome of the elite Iraqi exile families: wealthy, cultured, well-connected and determined to return to Iraq to reclaim their stolen inheritance and identity. While he shuttled between Washington and Tehran for the INC, Chalabi kept his family in an opulent Mayfair apartment overlooking Green Park, replete with silk Persian rugs, European and Middle Eastern paintings and a resident maid. When he relocated to northern Iraq in the 1990s, he recreated this refined environment in his house in Salahuddin, decorating it with local sculptures and paintings, hardwood and walnut furniture carved in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, a state-of-the-art stereo system and a library of imported cookery books from which he taught his Kurdish cooks French cuisine.  One of his favorite relaxations in Kurdistan was to rewatch videos of his favorite TV programme: the 1981 ITV production of Brideshead Revisited, a work with great personal and atmospheric resonance for him. “Fighting Saddam does not mean you have to eat bad food or live in shabby surroundings,” he insisted (17).

Clwyd had worked closely with Chalabi as chair of the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CARDRI) and its successor INDICT, in the effort to archive evidence of Saddam’s crimes against humanity. In her memoir, Clwyd recalls the time Chalabi visited her in Cardiff on INDICT business and requested a visit to the National Museum of Wales to see the Davies Sisters’ celebrated collection of Impressionist paintings: “as we walked past the renowned Brangwyn Panels, Ahmad pointed at them and said casually: ‘I bid for those at auction’” (18). For Chalabi, European culture was simply part of the human inheritance that he absorbed without compromising his Iraqi or Shia identity. For his allies, he was the living embodiment of the possibility of a new Iraq, even a new Middle East: proof that a viable alternative to the totalitarianism of the Ba’ath regime or the medieval recidivism of Shia and Sunni fundamentalism actually existed. But for Clwyd’s comrades on the Labour left this was suspicious company, a feeling only confirmed by her subsequent meeting with Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. Even before the Iraq war, INDICT had received negative coverage or been treated with passive indifference, a fact that dismayed Clwyd, who wrote: “we knew people in Iraq were being tortured and killed in large numbers and could not understand why others did not feel the same sense of outrage” (19). This feeling of anger and futility in the face of ongoing barbarity culminated in her stark declaration during the February 2003 parliamentary debate on UNSCR 1441: “I believe in regime change. I say that without hesitation, and I will support the government tonight because I think that they are doing a brave thing” (20). On the subject of Iraq, Clwyd had become Blair’s most committed ally.

There was a postscript for the Cynon Valley MP that capped all of the work she had done with the Iraqi opposition since the 1970s. In May 2003, a grateful Blair appointed her Special Envoy on Human Rights to Iraq and in this role she witnessed the excavation of the mass graves of Shia victims of Saddam in Al-Hillah. In later years evidence collected by INDICT was finally put to use in the Baghdad trials of Saddam and his captive inner circle, while the Free Prisoners Association, founded by widows of prisoners who had died in Saddam’s jails, would vindicate the work of CARDRI and INDICT and engage Clwyd long after the overthrow of the regime. In her 2017 memoir she summed up this work with a statement that she could have easily made in 1988: “I still keep an eye on the plight of the widows…even though there are other enormous geopolitical challenges and crises, someone must keep track of these things” (21). 

III: A leader of nations or nothing 

“Ann Clwyd was absolutely terrific and we needed to hear more of her” wrote Alistair Campbell in his diary following the February vote, which otherwise delivered a backbench rebuke to the Prime Minister (22). Iraq proved to be the definitive test of a foreign policy doctrine Blair had originally formulated against a background of amoral Conservative realpolitik that had reached a low point during the Bosnian war. The Prime Minister presented his ideas in full at the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999 with a speech titled ‘The Doctrine of the International Community’ — a text partly written by KCL Professor of War Studies Lawrence Freedman, who would later be appointed to the Iraq Inquiry by Sir John Chilcot. The speech was delivered in the shadow of Kosovo, but the implications were very different for Iraq. Blair, in his statement to parliament on 18th March, 2003, tried his best to separate them: “I have never put the justification for action as regime change. We have to act within the terms set out in Resolution 1441 — that is our legal base” (23). Nevertheless, the moral argument for regime change did come within the scope of the Chicago speech and was effectively covered for Blair by Clwyd. This is why she became important to him, particularly once the WMD argument had disintegrated.

To trace the arc of this journey in British politics it is useful to return to the Conservative Party’s policy towards Iraq in the late 1980s. This policy had its roots in the Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act of 1939, an emergency war measure that gave governments the power to control import and export licenses, and proved far too useful to be repealed. In 1984, at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe had set out guidelines that prohibited exports that would “significantly enhance the capability of either side to prolong or exacerbate the conflict” (24), but by the end of the war he had secretly revised his own guidelines in order to establish “a more liberal policy” towards exports to Iraq’s lucrative weapons market. Parliament was not informed (as it did not need to be under the existing 1939 act) because, as Howe recognised, “it could look very cynical if, soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales” (25). The “treatment of the Kurds” referred to by the British Foreign Secretary was the chemical weapons attack on Halabja, which had been dismissed to Clwyd’s face by FCO Minister William Waldergrave, who told her, “‘There is no proof.’” (“I told him bluntly to get it,” she writes, 26). Clwyd recalls with disgust seeing photographs of FCO Minister David Mellor shaking hands with members of the Iraqi regime at the Baghdad trade fair months after Halabja. Waldergrave succinctly clarified the cynicism of government policy in the aftermath of the execution of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Abu Ghraib prison: “the priority of Iraq in our policy should be very high: in commercial terms, comparable to South Africa…a few more Bazofts or another bout of internal repression would make this more difficult” (27).

From this point on the government relaxed restrictions on exports to Iraq that were clearly, if not openly, destined for Saddam’s weapons programmes. Trade Minister Alan Clark was accused of advising companies on how to tailor export licences to satisfy official guidelines and approving contracts on a “nod and wink” basis. When Customs took Matrix Churchill to court after intercepting a consignment of dual use machine tools destined for Iraq, the government used all the legal methods at its disposal to disguise complicity in the case. The trial finally collapsed when Clark admitted to being “economical…with the actualité” concerning his advice to Matrix Churchill and other implicated firms: “there was nothing misleading or dishonest to make a formal introductory comment that the Iraqis would be using current orders for general engineering purposes. All I didn’t say was, ‘and for making munitions…’” (28). Clwyd, one of the few opposition MPs who doggedly pursued the case in parliament, noted that Clark “summed up the arrogance of ministers when he dared to suggest that Labour MPs were a bit dim not to understand that, from 1987 onwards, they were being misled by the government and that we should have known Britain was selling arms to Iraq. We did suspect it, we did try to expose it, but he and his colleagues lied to cover it up” (29).

Blair would later be accused of many things, but arming Iraq was not among them. Blair, it is fair to say, was one of the more vigilant disarmers of Saddam — or, at least, he would have been, if Saddam had actually had any WMDs left to destroy. He was worrying about the dictator’s procurement as early as 1997, telling Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown,

I have seen some of the stuff on this. It really is pretty scary. He is very close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction. I don’t understand why the French and others don’t understand this. We cannot let him get away with it. (30)

Operation Desert Fox was launched in response to Saddam’s expulsion of UNSCOM inspectors in 1998 and set a number of precedents for Blair. In his own memoir he dismissed it as “a limited success…the general feeling was that Saddam had got away with it again” (31), but the operation was significant for different reasons. It was Blair’s first military intervention and demonstrated that he was prepared to confront Saddam directly. It also provided, in miniature, a model for the run up to the 2003 war. The reason for bombing Iraq was WMD rather than human rights but Blair did not even try to disguise his contempt for the dictator and his regime. Ignoring the advice of Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, he did not seek further UN authorisation, but acted on separate advice that Resolution 687 provided sufficient legal cover for action. To prepare public opinion for the bombing campaign Blair and Campbell produced a briefing note for MPs titled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, a tactic they would revive to disastrous effect in 2003. Chirac, already pursuing French commercial interests and seeking the end of sanctions, was furiously opposed, as he would be later on. And, in his speeches to parliament, Blair was uncompromising, refining the rhetoric he would later recycle and expand:

Our quarrel is not with the Iraqi people….our quarrel is with [Saddam] alone and the evil regime he represents. There is no realistic alternative to military force. We are taking military action with real regret, but also with real determination. We have exhausted all other avenues. We act because we must. (32)

The American alliance was a priority for Blair in 1998 and 2003, and it may well have played a part in the decisions of any Tory administration that had been in place at the same time. Nevertheless, Blair’s policy towards Iraq directly repudiated the cynicism of the Thatcher and Major administrations. Characters that appeared in the Scott Report into Arms to Iraq — like Howe, Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind — also played a role in the sacrifice of Bosnia to geopolitical calculation: again, the practical result was British complicity in the cover-up of genocide. Blair’s Chicago speech was an attempt to define an ethic of intervention that would bury this school of realism forever. It had been morally repugnant but also strategically damaging: Major’s Balkans policy had led to fracture with Clinton, who detested Britain’s pro-Serb stance. Blair would eventually irritate Clinton for the opposite reason: the Chicago speech was delivered at the precise moment Blair was pushing for military intervention against Milosevic and Clinton was vacillating. From this perspective it looked like a very public form of moral blackmail. In fact, Blair’s speech was shaped by the immediate political priorities of Kosovo but its scope was far broader. In some ways it suffered from being too broad — while superficially detailed, the doctrine sketched out was largely untested and full of holes, qualifications and contradictions. But for Blair personally, it was a key political moment.

Blair’s first significant foreign policy speech was in some ways as ambitious as Chicago: in Manchester in April 1997 he had called for the eastwards expansion of the EU, reform of the UN, and a larger British role in NATO, proclaiming, “we are a leader of nations or nothing” (33). Two years and two military campaigns later, he was now attempting to define a new foreign policy ethic and era, not just for Britain but for the entire world. “We have to establish a new framework,” he declared: 

No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer. (34) 

Blair began with the premise that the age of power politics had been superseded by globalisation: the Chicago speech was, in part, a funeral oration for the Westphalian system of state sovereignty and non-interference. Underpinning this was the assumption that Western liberal democratic values are universal values that transcend religion, culture, tradition and ethnicity. In this sense, Blair’s speech was not only against protectionism and isolationism, but also against relativism. This is the point at which Blair’s version of humanitarian intervention overlapped with the moral interventionism of the American neoconservatives. Echoing Blair, Paul Wolfowitz reaffirmed the point in a 2005 interview, as Iraq was unravelling: 

The contradiction is to say that allowing people to choose their government freely is to impose our ideas on them. There was a wonderful moment at a conference here in Washington where someone said it’s arrogant of us to impose our values on the Arab world, and an Arab got up and said it’s arrogant of you to say these are your values because they are universal values. (35)

In many ways the Iraq War was an application of the principles outlined in the Chicago speech and they did not survive the experience intact. Conservative critics of Blair’s doctrine proved to be correct in one crucial aspect: the abstract principles of human rights and democracy could not account for or contain religious, national and ethnic rivalries. In 2003, specifically because of Iraq, the international community was so fractured that it barely existed, as Russia, Germany and France positioned themselves in hostile opposition to Britain and America. Later on, the disintegration of Iraq would expose the limits of both American neoconservatism and liberal interventionism by opening a new era of raw power politics stripped of all progressive and democratic illusions. 

IV: The theatre of power

In the introduction to his 1964 account of his travels among the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq, Wilfred Thesiger made a gloomy prediction: “soon the Marshes will probably be drained; when this happens, a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years will disappear” (36). Thesiger was not an Orientalist in the style of Bell and Lawrence, but an English explorer in the Victorian mold. In The Marsh Arabs he complained that during his travels in Iraqi Kurdistan he kept coming up against national borders he could not traverse. Travelling through Iraqi towns and cities he was bored and dissatisfied with the urban Arabs who, he felt, were “ashamed of their background and anxious to forget it. A suburbia covering the length and breadth of Iraq was the Utopia of which they dreamed” (37). Like Bell, Thesiger sought escape from “drab modernity” and found it in the Arabian desert and, between 1951-8, among the Arabs of the Iraqi marshes. This small, self-enclosed tribal world in which he tried to forget his own background was, indeed, ancient and fragile: a pastoral existence defined by flood water and reed beds, wildfowl and pig hunting and the milking of buffalo. For the tribes who welcomed him, Thesiger retained the residual authority of the English and was used as a doctor and surgeon despite his lack of formal medical training. “In Iraq, at that time,” he noted,

the British still had a considerable legacy of good will, the result of our close association with the county between the two world wars when Englishmen worked there as administrative officers and advisers. Many of the older inhabitants continued to feel respect and affection for individuals. Tribesmen were, on the whole, too courteous to embarrass a quest, but I was sometimes bitterly attacked by townsmen of Government officials over British policy — Palestine or Suez, for example. On such occasions, the mention of an Englishman they had known could turn bitterness to friendly reminiscence. (38)

During the First World War the shelter provided by the marshes allowed the tribes to attack and loot both British and Turkish forces with relative impunity. During the mandate they were largely left alone and their link to Iraqi nationalism and to the ruling administrations of Baghdad remained tenuous. Despised by the urban Iraqis and desert Arabs alike, the Marsh Arabs maintained their own society and used their natural environment for protection as well as insurrection. “The Marshes themselves,” wrote Thesiger, “with their baffling maze of reed beds where men could only move by boat, must have afforded a refuge to remnants of defeated people, and been a centre for lawlessness and rebellion, from earliest times” (39). 

In the end, Thesiger’s prediction did not come true until the 1990s, when Saddam drained the marshes in response to the 1991 Shia revolt that had been encouraged by the Bush administration. Saddam had a pressing strategic aim here: following defeat in the uprising, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and their paramilitary unit Badr Corps used the thick cover of the reeds to regroup and organise the next phase of their campaign against the regime. “Accordingly,” wrote SCIRI representative Hamid al-Bayati in his 2011 memoir From Dictatorship to Democracy, “Saddam began to target the Marshes with planes, tanks and artillery” (40) and commenced work on a vast project to divide the major wetlands and divert the River Euphrates with enormous dams, barriers and dykes. This was a double assault of heavy weaponry and civil engineering designed to destroy the environment of the marshes and the rebellious tribes that populated them. As the SCIRI spokesman based in London and a board member of INDICT, al-Bayati had the desperate task of publicising this carnage in Europe and found allies in Foreign Office mandarin Julian Walker, Conservative MP Emma Nicholson and Ann Clwyd. But this was not a popular cause in 1995 and the plight of the Marsh Arabs gained no traction. Saddam succeeded in destroying a unique part of Iraq’s natural landscape and cultural heritage in a combined programme of genocide and ecocide that attracted no significant international response. 

This was the environment in which Rory Stewart arrived in August 2003 as a provincial administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Amara and Nasiriyah. Stewart was one of five British civilians appointed by the Foreign Office to support coalition troops and American officials in the immediate post-Saddam period. But he was no zealot for regime change, writing in his 2006 memoir Occupational Hazards:

Ten years in the Islamic world and in other places that had recently emerged from conflict had left me very suspicious of theories produced in seminars in Western capitals and of foreigners in a hurry. The best kind of international development seemed to be done by people who directly absorbed themselves in rural culture and politics, focused on traditional structures, and understood that change would often be slow. I believed that politicians often misled others and themselves when they started wars and that there were dubious reasons for our invasions of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. (41)

Once in post, Stewart quickly learned that Iraqi civil society had been destroyed by the lethal combination of Saddam and UN sanctions. The post-Ba’ath vacuum was filled by what had always existed underneath the political superstructure: tribal allegiance, foreign agents and religious movements. The liberal middle class professionals that the CPA assumed, or hoped, would emerge to lead reconstruction had either voluntarily vanished from the scene or been intimidated into silence. This was a constituency without power in the new Iraq: there was no mass liberal party, no liberal movement and, more importantly, no liberal militia. What actually emerged from the wreckage of tyranny, sanctions and war was not liberal or secular or democratic. In Maysan, Stewart had to contend with a local tribal warlord, Iranian-backed Shia militias and a branch of the Sadrist movement, a triangle of enmity that sidelined all other constituencies and kept the province on the brink of civil war. And this wasn’t unique to Maysan: similar struggles and rivalries were emerging all over Iraq.

As the messy transitional administration under Jay Garner moved into full CPA occupation under Paul Bremer, all of these local rivalries and conflicts intensified and accelerated, feeding a national insurgency. By the autumn of 2003 the CPA was no longer a resource to be exploited but an occupying power to be resisted. This was compounded by the strategic chaos of the occupation. CPA civilians and military personnel tripped over each other constantly, unable to clarify or distentagle their respective duties or areas of responsibility. The CPA in Baghdad devised ambitious nation building schemes that included “programmes on human rights, the free market, feminism, federalism, and constitutional reform” when, as Stewart put it, “people in Maysan talked about almost none of these things. They talked about security” (42). After a year of occupation, “Coalition governors were inventing different political structures in different provinces because Baghdad had not yet defined the legal powers or budgets for local officials” (43). Perhaps most importantly, in the end, “we could not define the conditions under which we were prepared to kill Iraqis or have our own soldiers killed” (44), which sounds harsh, but proved fundamental. Once the governor of Amara realised that the British would not give him the level of protection they gave themselves, Stewart writes, “almost any hope of cooperation was lost” (45).

The point, after all, was power. The financial and military power of the CPA was defeated by the complexity of Iraqi society and by the confusion of an occupying mission that could produce both gender quotas on local elected bodies and the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Stewart would often be forced to project an authority that he did not really feel like he possessed: 

In an ad-hoc organisation in a war zone, most power is the theatre of power. It is not enough to do things, you must be seen to do things. I needed to promise change to give Iraqis some belief in us and in the future. I needed to claim authority and bluff people into falling in step. (46)

The problem was the Iraqis saw right through this and treated Stewart’s “theatre of power” precisely as that: theatre. The occupiers were seen as a source of money to be tapped and, potentially, a way to neutralise or eliminate rivals and enemies. But the real source of authority lay in local constituencies and external backers, a shadow power structure that the CPA could do nothing to influence or defeat. In the south, the SCIRI and Badr brigades and their affiliates and proxies extended Iranian influence into the province, using elections to take control of the regional security apparatus and infiltrate the police forces, as they would do across Iraq. Their main Shia rival was the Sadrist movement, whose local proxies stoked anti-Coalition insurrections and whose constituency grew exponentially during the occupation. As Stewart details, the Sadrists were a new and expanding element in Iraqi and Shia society: a populist movement that appealed to the young and the poor in rural backwaters and city slums and found apotheosis in the fiery sermons of Friday prayers. These were two components of the coming civil war that was, in 2003, merely a threat on the lips of petitioners who did not get what they wanted from CPA officials. As Stewart records, he and his colleagues in the CPA and British army were helpless to contain or control any of this. Even if it was possible, they did not have the real power to do so, because the occupation could not clarify its own purpose or limits. Their authority was an empty performance that was soon exposed.

There is one coda to this story of the marshes. In the aftermath of the war, international aid agencies poured money into projects to reflood the Marshlands. As Stewart travelled around the province he noted the effects of Saddam’s ecological destruction: the near-extinction of the buffalo, the depleted fish stocks and bird flocks, ruined huts and broken islands. In Maysan, the Beni Hashim tribe that had been dispossessed and dispersed into the desert and the Shia ghettos and slums of Basra and Baghdad by Saddam was finally able to return to the Marshes, although many didn’t. Slowly the wetlands recovered and some of the old communities resettled. But this was only partial: a mere fraction of the population and a sample of the biodiversity that had existed before Saddam’s original campaign of destruction. 

V: Strategic failure

In 2006, after completing a tour with the International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan, Emma Sky spent some time with Stewart in a compound in Kabul working at his Turquoise Mountain Foundation. “I first met Rory in Iraq, after he had walked across Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban,” Sky recalled in her 2015 memoir The Unravelling: 

He was so scarred by his experience of working with the Coalition Provisional Authority that he had come to believe that grandiose nation-building schemes could never succeed in societies such as Iraq and Afghanistan. He was now focused on helping to restore historic parts of Kabul and to resuscitate Afghan traditions of arts and crafts. (47)

Stewart was familiar with the culture and the divisions of the British army: his father was a decorated soldier and senior SIS officer and Stewart had joined the Black Watch during his gap year. Yet his memoir reveals tensions between the CPA civilians and the military in Maysan and Nasiriyah: relationships with the colonels and majors he dealt with often seemed strained, even hostile. In contrast, Sky — the liberal, anti-war NGO veteran and British Council project manager who worked in the Occupied Territories before 2001 — would eventually form a close bond with the two most powerful generals in the U.S. army, Petraeus and Odierno. 

Unlike Stewart, Sky had unambiguously opposed the invasion of Iraq before she volunteered to join the CPA. She was eventually sent to Kirkuk in the role of Governorate Coordinator and worked so effectively with Colonel Bill Mayville of the 173rd Airborne Brigade that General Ray Odierno would later ask her to return to Iraq to be his political adviser. Sky was fully aware of her unique, even strange, position: the self-declared “peacenik” who had volunteered to be a human shield during the Gulf War was now the closest political confidant of a general notorious for his aggressive combat methods in Fallujah. Odierno had featured heavily in Tom Ricks’ 2006 best seller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, which, Sky commented, “was particularly harsh…accusing him of causing the insurgency through his harsh tactics of breaking down doors and mass arrests. The allegations had hurt. It was an exaggerated portrayal which had tarnished his reputation” (48). Sky, on the other hand, remained loyal to the generals she worked for and was impressed by their soldiers. She would later contrast the performance of the American army in Iraq with the British, candidly telling Foreign Minister David Miliband: 

in the mid ranks of the U.S. military the criticisms that Brits had made about the Americans in the early years had rankled. The British military had been very arrogant, believing they knew the ultimate truth about counterinsurgency from Malaya and Northern Ireland. Every situation, however, was different. And the American military had proved themselves faster learners than the Brits. (49)

As Sky knew, reports being sent from Basra to London were politically censored, creating a false sense of optimism in Whitehall. This optimism had been abruptly dispelled by the global publication of a photograph of British soldiers jumping from their Warrior jeep, consumed by flames, following a stand-off with Sadrists at Jamait police station in September 2005. Blair was shocked, but he should not have been. A month before Jamait, the American journalist Steven Vincent had been kidnapped and executed in Basra after uncovering links between the Iraqi police, Shia militias, Iranian agents and oil smugglers, a network that the British had both enabled and ignored. “The fact that the British are in effect strengthening the hand of Shiite organizations is not lost on Basra’s residents,” Vincent wrote in his July 31 New York Times op-ed, the final article he would live to see published:

Fearing to appear like colonial occupiers, they avoid any hint of ideological indoctrination: in my time with them, not once did I see an instructor explain such basics of democracy as the politically neutral role of the police in a civil society. Nor did I see anyone question the alarming number of religious posters on the walls of Basran police stations. When I asked British troops if the security sector reform strategy included measures to encourage cadets to identify with the national government rather than their neighborhood mosque, I received polite shrugs: not our job, mate. (50) 

The fear of appearing to be colonial occupiers was deep-rooted and historical, but history could also make this look like dissembling: Sir Mark Sykes had also told the Iraqis that the British were “liberators” rather than occupiers in 1917. The return to Basra was full of historical echoes that were consciously downplayed by British diplomats and the army without, however, being lost on the Iraqis. To pick just one example: from 2006-7 the British ambassador to Iraq was Dominic Asquith, whose great-grandfather had sent the first British troops to Basra in 1914. Once a month Sky and Odierno would dine in his embassy villa and Sky enjoyed his company:

He was tall and handsome, with the most wonderful manners and dry wit…I loved those evenings. They were our monthly treat. We would fly in from some trip to the battlefield, dirty and tired. But in the ambassador’s residence we relaxed on comfortable chairs, surrounded by paintings and photos and various artefacts of culture and life away from war. I always started with gin and tonic before proceeding to red wine…we were served a three-course meal, seated around a table that had once belonged to Gertrude Bell. Never had food tasted so good. We ate off china with metal cutlery, a welcome change from plastic and Styrofoam. (51)

Meanwhile, outside of Asquith’s diplomatic sanctuary with its fading traces of past imperial elegance, the British mission in the south of Iraq was falling apart. American irritation at British arrogance eventually turned to open contempt as the south spiralled into chaos. This feeling was shared by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who tried to confront the southern  Sadrists himself in his abortive Charge of the Knights raid, an operation that simply exposed how unprepared the British were for offensive combat and how dependent the Iraqis were on U.S. military support. The illogicality and profound failure of British strategy was summarised by a soldier in Basra Palace, in a lament that could have been scripted by Joseph Heller: “It’s going round in circles. People are getting killed for us to resupply ourselves, and if we weren’t resupplying ourselves, people wouldn’t be getting killed” (52). The British mission was finally terminated in 2009 with the evacuation of Basra Airport under a heavy barrage of Sadrist rockets. Blair redeployed a demoralised and under-equipped army to fight an equally disastrous campaign in Afghanistan, but to the Americans it looked like the British were running away from Iraq. The Americans were correct. Both the British military and politicians, including Blair, felt defeated and exhausted by Basra, and carried this palpable sense of humiliation and fatigue into Helmand, where the British mission had to be rescued once again by the Americans. As Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E Trainer wrote in their chronicle of post-war Iraq:

The British military had begun the war as the reputed masters of counterinsurgency…by the end of the Basra fight that reputation was in tatters. The British had ceded control of one of Iraq’s major cities and lost the trust of the Iraqi prime minister. (53)

For Sky the disintegration of Basra province was on the periphery of her work with Odierno in Anbar and Baghdad. In fact, Sky’s memoir reveals her distance and alienation from British institutions inside and outside Iraq: she remarks that her colleagues at the British Council took no interest in her work in Iraq; that both Blair and Miliband had no idea who she was or why she was working for the U.S. army; and her comments on the comparative cultures of the U.S. and British military are much more complimentary to her American employers. Her final judgement of the British in Basra is succinct: “it had not been the most glorious chapter in British history” (54). Nevertheless, she was no American lackey and maintained her position that the Iraq War was a strategic failure of historical distinction. By the time she returned to Kurdistan in 2012 the outcome was clear: the Iraq War had been won by Iran. The key moment turned out to be the 2010 election, which Ayad Allawi’s party won with a slim majority but was effectively handed to Maliki by Obama and Biden who, like the British before them, simply wanted to get America out of Iraq as quickly as possible. This proved to be the final victory for Iranian Quds Force Commander General Suleimani who could now fully penetrate Iraqi political space without any resistance. By the time that Sistani issued a fatwa calling on all Shia to join the Iraqi security forces to fight ISIS, Suleimani was in effective command of those forces and able to personally direct the offensive from inside Iraq. 

The truth is that neither the British nor the Obama administration were prepared to challenge the Iranians in Iraq, despite the clear Iranian effort to kill coalition soldiers and ensure that the Iraqi state remained within the Shia rather than the Arab orbit. As early as May 2004, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw intervened to stop a CIA initiative to attack Iranian agents and training camps in Iraq because the FCO did not want to jeopardise negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, a pattern repeated on a grander scale by the Obama administration. The extent of the Iranian triumph was so great that Sky faced accusations of a secret deal between Iran and America and in Kirkuk a local Sunni Sheikh told her, “They handed Iraq to Iran on a silver platter” (55). But there was no deal. In Kirkuk in 2003-4 Sky had caught a fleeting glimpse of “a city of four ethnicities who speak each other’s languages and love each other’s cultures” (56) — a rich patchwork of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and Turkmen who might, one day, coexist in a secure country called Iraq. But at the same time, to Sky’s frustration, the Kurds relentlessly pursued Kirkuk as their own, seeking to reverse the Arabisation of the city that had been engineered by Saddam and secure its oil as the foundation of a future independent Kurdistan. Pluralism collapsed into ethnic and sectarian rivalry as group identities were politicised and fatally embedded in an electoral system that the Americans designed. This gave Iran — one of the great sectarian actors in the region — the perfect opportunity to divide and rule Iraq, and they took it.

VI: British ghosts

We were surrounded by half-forgotten history.
Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards

Gertrude Bell spent her last days in Baghdad — the last days of her life — collecting and cataloging historical artifacts for her Archaeological Museum. Following the coronation of King Faisal and the dissolution of the British administration, Bell found herself isolated and increasingly adrift in the new Iraqi capital. She had helped to shape and found the modern Iraqi state, but the course of its development had not quite gone the way she wanted and she no longer had any influence over events. Her friends were leaving the city and, back in England, the family business had been fatally damaged by the coal strike. On June 16, 1926, King Faisal opened the first room of the museum and Bell wrote in her diary: 

Except for the museum, I am not enjoying life at all. One has the sharp sense of being near the end of things with no certainty as to what, if anything, one will do next. It is also very dull, but for the work. I don’t know what to with myself of an afternoon…It is a very lonely business living here right now. (57)

Bell’s focus on the museum consumed her and she spent all of her time and energy fixing up the building that was given to her and arranging all of her antiquities. When her father implored her to return home, she refused:

I do understand that things are looking very discouraging and I am dreadfully sorry and unhappy about you. But I don’t see for the moment what I can do. You see I have undertaken this very grave responsibility of the museum…(58)

In reality, the responsibility was self-imposed: the museum was the result of her own archaeological discoveries and her commitment to preserve the rich history of Mesopotamia for the new citizens of Iraq, a gift to the country that she truly loved. It was also a way to stave off her own sense of despair, grief and depression, until the point it no longer could. Bell died on July 11, 1926, after taking an overdose of sedatives. Her death was noted across the British empire and also among the tribes of Iraq, who flocked to Baghdad and lined the streets as her cortege travelled to the Anglican cemetery, her coffin decorated with the Union Jack and the new flag of Iraq that she had helped to design. 

Nearly eighty years later the descendant of Bell’s museum was looted by organised gangs who stole artifacts from the heart of her collection. The U.S. army failed to secure the building and it was left to returning museum staff to fend off the looters for four days. This was a significant and symbolic event: a presage of the anarchy and corruption to come. Rumsfeld’s infamous response to the looting exposed the vacuum at the heart of post-war planning in a manner that chilled both opponents and supporters of the war alike: “Freedom’s untidy,” he said, “stuff happens.” With this event, Bell’s archaeological legacy evaporated; her geographic legacy also seemed to be finished in 2015 when ISIS erased the borders she had drawn in the 1920s. In the early years of the monarchy, Bell had been friendly with Iraq’s Education Minister Abdul Hussein Chalabi and she often visited and enjoyed the gardens of Chalabi’s residence, The Deer Palace. In 2006, Abdul Hussein’s great granddaughter (and Ahmad’s daughter) Tamara tracked down Bell’s rarely visited, half-forgotten grave in “a barren spot” of the Anglican cemetery; having developed a fascination with the old family friend and looking at the withered flowers and dusty ground of the memorial, she decided to restore and maintain it. For Tamara, Bell’s grave stood for something more than one life: it represented the lost world of her family and an entire generation of exiles, “buried underground and in memories, almost as if it never existed” (59). But for anybody British who knew or cared about it, Bell’s grave was simply a relic from an expired empire.

The ghosts of British lives haunted the land: the traces of their lives and deaths strewn across Iraq, in graves, plaques, buildings and some living memories. In Maysan in 2003, Stewart met a man who remembered a day of duck shooting with Thesiger in 1953; he also noted the lingering memory of Colonel Leachmen, the Amara-based British political officer whose murder in Fallujah remained the great symbol of the 1920 uprising. Amara cemetery, which Stewart visited, was filled with the bones of British and Indian soldiers who had been killed during the siege of Kut in 1915-6. During the 2006 civil war, when other reporters were too afraid to leave the Green Zone, Dexter Filkins visited the British war cemetery in Baghdad; he found it derelict, with tombstones “toppled and crumbling” and grass growing up to his chest. “When an American died in this war,” he wrote,

he was flown home in a black bag, zippered at the top; the British, killed long ago, were buried across the realm from here to Trincomalee. There hadn’t been any refrigeration then, and the ships had been too slow. The British were buried where they fell. (60)

Symbols of lost power and responsibility surrounded British personnel in Iraq in 2003, but the imperial legacy was almost completely disavowed. Power and responsibility now belonged to America, a nation still changing the course of world history; the British played only minor roles as participants and spectators in an American and Iraqi narrative. Stewart and Sky would often hear praise for their imperial predecessors but only ever offered as a way to criticise their American successors and therefore serve to highlight the historic transfer of power. In the era of the CPA, the original British occupiers were lauded for their diplomacy and their knowledge of the tribes (which itself owed much to Bell’s 1920 masterpiece Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia), while the existing British occupiers tended to be treated as conduits for American money and influence. In contrast to the approach of earlier British imperialists, Bremer and his advisers had no desire to perpetuate the ancient tribal divisions of Mesopotamia and wanted to construct a modern, secular democratic nation out of the wreckage of dictatorship. The tragedy was that their method of achieving this — minority representation — had the effect of hard-wiring sectarianism into the new political institutions that they created. As Sky wrote later: “the focus on subnational identities was at the expense of building an inclusive Iraqi identity. No one at the time seemed to have any foreboding of the disaster this would bring upon the country” (61).

For many reasons, the relationship between the Iraqis and the British had been complicated. As Elie Kedourie noted — in a book written in the shadow of brutal Ba’ath reprisals after the first Gulf War — it was the British who were ultimately responsible for the descent of Iraq into factional bloodshed and military dictatorship, precisely because of the sectarian political settlement they had designed and upheld:

The newly-invented polity was…fragmented from the very beginning. The original fault lines have become, if anything, more pronounced with every change of regime. The Kurdish and Shi’a uprisings in the aftermath of the Iraqi defeat at the hands of the U.S. in 1991 eloquently show the abiding disaffection of the majority of the population towards rule from Baghdad. (62) 

Kedouri argued that an Iraqi state headed by a foreign King and governed by urban Sunni officers and officials “could not, parliament or no parliament, be governed constitutionally or within the rule of law” (63). The state established by Churchill, Cox and Bell therefore contained the seeds of its own destruction and the descent of Iraqi nationalism into genocide and totalitarianism also had its roots in British policy. Because Iraq was never fully annexed by the empire, British power was wielded in back rooms and through proxies, which simply created a different kind of resentment that festered and then exploded. Inspired by fascism and Nazism, Iraqi nationalism was, from birth, authoritarian, militaristic, antisemitic and anti-British. In her memoir, Tamara Chalabi describes the darkness and brutality that consumed Baghdad during the Second World War, inspired by Hitler who briefly courted the Iraqi nationalists. This set the scene for the execution of the royal family in 1958, the destruction of constitutional government and the slow suffocation of the Jewish community of Baghdad. In each case, British power and anybody associated with it was the target of violence and revolution. 

The interesting thing about the British engagement with Iraq during the Ba’ath era was how ahistorical it was. Modern Iraq was a British creation but all sense of ownership or responsibility had long vanished. Ann Clwyd’s campaigns on behalf of the Kurds and the Iraqi exiles were conducted in the context of international human rights, but without any real sense of the link between British imperial history and the tragic progress of Iraqi nationalism. Conservative trade policy with Iraq in the late 1980s was not even an attempt to revive old historical ties, it was simply a very modern, very grubby tale of cynicism and avarice. The Gulf War, Desert Fox and the Iraq War all occurred within a context defined by America and any British policy in Iraq was therefore almost identical to that of the U.S. Blair understood this to be the existential basis of British foreign policy and acted accordingly. The British occupation of Basra turned into a transactional commitment that, ultimately, proved too costly. The echoes of Britain’s past were nothing more than a liability during this mission: a source of tension, a provocation, a reproach. But they also taunted the British, cruelly exposing decline and fall relative to new global powers and forces, so they were best ignored. The British story in Iraq ended, finally, with Blair’s own epitaph, delivered in the form of the Chilcot Report.

As David Fromkin wrote in his account of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, “the shadows that accompanied the British rulers wherever they went in the Middle East were in fact their own” (64). This remained as true in 2003 as it had been in 1916.

1. Quoted in Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia (Phoenix Giant, 1999), p.296
2. Quoted in Wallach, p.295
3. Gertrude Bell, A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of the Queen of the Desert, ed. Georgina Howell (Penguin, 2015), p.165
4. Quoted in Wallach, p.154
5. Quoted in David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: the Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (Holt, 1989), p.453
6. Quoted in Fromkin, p.503
7. Tamara Chalabi,  Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family (HarperPress, 2011), p.274
8. Ann Clwyd, ‘See men shredded, then say you don’t back war’, The Times, March 18, 2003
9. Ann Clwyd, Rebel With a Cause (Biteback, 2017), p.274
10. Ibid., p.264
11. Ibid., p.255
12. Ibid., p.274
13. Ibid., p.241
14. Quoted in Richard Bonin, Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi and the Selling of the Iraq War (Anchor Books, 2011), p.114
15. Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking With Destiny (Allen Lane, 2018), p.283
16. Clwyd, p.248
17. Quoted in Bonin, p.81. 
18. Clwyd, p.255
19. Ibid., p.261
20. See Hansard: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030226/debtext/30226-22.htm
21. Clwyd, p.279
22. Alistair Campbell, The Alastair Campbell Diaries, Volume 4: The Burden of Power — Countdown to Iraq (Arrow, 2013), p.469
23. Quoted in Tony Blair, A Journey (Arrow, 2011), p.439
24. Quoted in Richard Norton-Taylor, Mark Lloyd and Stephen Cook, Knee Deep in Dishonour: the Scott Report and its Aftermath (Gollancz, 1996), p.48
25. Quoted in Norton-Taylor et al., p.19
26. Clwyd, p.227
27. Quoted in Norton-Taylor et al., p.13
28. Ibid., pps.140-1
29. Clwyd, pps. 175-6
30. Quoted in Anthony Seldon, Blair (The Free Press, 2005), p.387
31. Blair, p.222
32. See BBC News, Texts and Transcripts, December 17, 1998: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/crisis_in_the_gulf/texts_and_transcripts/236932.stm
33. Steve Boggan, ‘Election 97: Patriotic Blair sets out global vision’, Independent, April 21, 1997: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/election-97-patriotic-blair-sets-out-global-vision-1268592.html
34. Tony Blair, ‘The Doctrine of the International Community’ in The Neocon Reader, ed. Irwin Stelzer (Grove Atlantic, 2004), p.112
35. Radek Sikorski, ‘Interview with Paul Wolfowitz’, Prospect, December 2004
36. Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs (Penguin, 1964), p.14
37. Ibid., p.59
38. Ibid., p.61
39. Ibid., p.99
40. Hamid al-Bayati, From Dictatorship to Democracy: An Insider’s Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p.30
41. Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards (Picador, 2007), p.8
42. Ibid., p.82
43. Ibid., p.276
44. Ibid., p.296
45. Ibid., p.297
46. Ibid., p.35
47. Emma Sky, The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (Atlantic, 2015), p.136
48. Ibid., p.148
49. Ibid., p.281
50. Steve Vincent, ‘Switched Off in Basra’, New York Times, July 31 2005: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/opinion/switched-off-in-basra.html
51. Sky, p.167
52. Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Endgame: the Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, From George W. Bush to Barack Obama (Vintage, 2013), p.466
53. Gordon and Trainor, p.481
54. Sky, p.281
55. Ibid., p.352
56. Ibid., p.70
57. Bell, p.248
58. Ibid., p.249
59. Chalabi, p.185
60. Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (Vintage, 2009), pps. 332-3
61. Sky, p.50
62. Elie Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1992), p.31
63. Kedourie, p.32
64. Fromkin, p.468

During his lifetime, Balzac’s debts were as famous as his novels and more widely discussed than his love affairs. Money was the great unifying subject of La Comédie humaine and the legal and moral dimensions of debt were an important subcategory that he treated with great care and attention. In his novel Les Souffrances de l’inventeur — the third book of Illusions perdues — the provincial printer David Sechard is financially ruined by three promissory notes forged by his brother-in-law Lucien de Rubempré, a poet and journalist driven to desperation by the carnivorous world of literary Paris. The book details various aspects of debt collection: the extortionate fees added by creditors and their lawyers to increase the sum total owed; the character and methods of their ruthless bailiffs; the lengths taken and tricks required by debtors to avoid losing their possessions and even their liberty. This was a subject, like most others, that Balzac knew a lot about, in this case through personal experience. Balzac owed money to practically everybody he knew: friends, family members, bankers and other writers; his greatest money lenders included Baron James de Rothschild, his Polish lover Eveline Hanska and his own mother (who he also accused of ruining his life). For Balzac, borrowing and owing money was an expression of love and friendship, but to his friends and lovers it was a consistent source of irritation and despair. In 1838, Théophile Gautier noticed a black-bound book on Balzac’s shelf titled Comptes melancoliques and asked what it was. “You can keep it,” Balzac replied, “It’s an unpublished work, but it has its value” (1): the book was a record of unpaid bills and summonses. Returning from one of his periodic trips to Italy, where he was consistently and gratifyingly fêted by local aristocracy, he visited his financial advisers in Paris to review the situation: each one told him that his best course of action was to flee the city immediately, which he did. Balzac’s debts multiplied throughout his life, pushing him to artistic immortality and an early grave: the ferocious creative energy that produced La Comédie humaine and destroyed his health was generated by the desperate need to pay off his creditors as much as any of his other motivations (although he rarely paid them anyway). Whether consciously or not, owing large sums of money to lots of people gave Balzac focus by providing an immediate material need for his prodigious, coffee-fueled writing bouts. 

As Balzac shows us in Illusions perdues, debt was the common lot of the Parisian writer without independent means during the venal and materialistic years of the second Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. For the parasitic hacks of the petits journaux, popular commercial novelists and playwrights like Eugene Sue and contemporary masters like Victor Hugo, spending money was the only way to establish a career as any kind of writer in Paris. As the publisher Dauriat explains bluntly to Lucien when negotiating the purchase of his first book of poems Les Marguerites, “fame costs twelve thousand francs in reviews and three thousand francs in dinners” (2). This was partly reality, and partly a philosophy, and one that Balzac practiced fully: he borrowed money he did not have, to spend money that he had not yet earned in order to increase his prospects of artistic and commercial success through expensive social climbing, thereby earning the money he needed to pay back his creditors. As Eugène de Rastignac tells Raphaël de Valentin in La Peau de chagrin, “When a man spends his time squandering his fortune, he’s very often on to a good thing: he is investing his capital in friends, pleasure, protectors and acquaintances” (3). The problem was that Balzac’s extravagant instincts always outran his earning capacity and his speculations invariably led to losses and ruin, often through bad luck and unfortunate timing rather than any inherent flaw in his schemes. (It is striking that his fictional speculators such as Baron de Nucingen invariably made better financial decisions than Balzac ever did in his own life, but also how often his real life ventures led to success for others at a later stage.)

Balzac always tried to make a distinction between purely commercial hack work written to pay the bills, and serious artistic production — a distinction marked in his own life by the early medieval romance and Gothic horror stories published under the pseudonyms Lord R’Hoone and Horace de Saint Aubin and the novels published under his own name, starting with Les Chouans in 1829. The two worlds of commerce and art are segregated morally and aesthetically in Illusions perdues by the dramatic contrast drawn between the cynical journalistic milieu of Etienne Lousteau and the ascetic circle of Daniel D’Arthez and the ‘Cenacle’. But for Balzac this distinction was never so clear in practice: all of his work, including his greatest novels, was driven by commercial considerations and pressing financial needs. When Balzac described himself as “a natural accountant” to Eve Hanska she responded with justifiable scorn, having just seen a large chunk of her own money squandered on his railway investments and his purchase and lavish decoration of a house on the Champs-Élysées that she did not ask for or want, but in one way he was correct: he could exactly calibrate the material return on writing words and paid extremely close attention to his own earning potential. The journalists and publishers of Un Grand homme de province à Paris — the second volume of Illusions perdues — quantify books and magazine columns, lines and words, in precise remunerative and temporal detail, in exactly the same way that Balzac did in his own life. When Lucien first enters the offices of a Paris newspaper he watches an unnamed writer register a complaint to the editor about his pay: “Look here, Giroudeau…my count is eleven columns, and at five francs each that makes fifty-five francs. I’ve only had forty, therefore you still owe me fifteen francs…” (4). Later, the literary shark Finot offers Lousteau a position on a liberal newspaper he has just gained control of in the following terms: “You’ll get paid for all the articles at a rate of five francs a column: in this way you can reap a bonus of fifteen francs a day by only paying three francs a column and by saving on unpaid articles” (5). Lousteau also schools Lucien in the critics’ art of selling complementary theatre seats and review copies of books for extra spending money, a practice close to the heart of all freelance critics. Because of the precarious and highly competitive position of the professional writer, each word is measured in money, energy and time, and life is a desperate scramble for new sources of income, however small.

In Balzac’s own life as well as the corrupt world of Lousteau, a mercenary attitude to creation was necessary for success if not survival — but where Balzac resembled D’Arthez is that he was also willing to work for it. As early as 1819, before he had written a novel and when he was planning his abortive verse drama Cromwell, Balzac could already reason: “a tragedy is normally supposed to contain 2000 lines. That means having between 8 and 10,000 thoughts, without counting all the other thoughts needed for the ideas, the plan, the characters, the customs of the time…” (6). A list of projects scribbled on a note from 1822 is headed, “ORDER OF THE DAY. Make 3000 francs or it’s Dishonour, Destitution and Co.” (7). Despite his veneration of D’Arthez, Balzac himself could be stung by the misplaced purism of part of the Parisian literary elite:

He felt it to be hypocrisy when a writer like Astolphe de Custine, whose inherited fortune permitted him to disdain the one he might have gained by his pen, spoke in praise of asceticism and the pride of Rousseau as opposed to the writers who commercialised their talents. Balzac replied that Rousseau’s Confessions contain a lengthy account of the negotiations which finally brought him an income of 600 francs, and that Racine, like Moliere and Boileau, had not been above accepting royal patronage. A writer in 1837, if he wished to earn a living, was obliged to take account of popular taste and the bookseller’s convenience. (8)

The world of writers is divided by the high ideals of art and the low reality of making a living and this divide spawns hypocrisy, duplicity, treachery and corruption. Un Grand homme de province à Paris is an unsparing exposé of “the writing racket”: “how publishers pull their strings and how literary reputations are concocted…the play of wheels within wheels in Parisian life, the machinery behind it all” (9). In Balzac’s world money determines human agency, and the composition of the first volume of Illusions perdues — titled Les Deux poètes and published in 1837 — was a good example of the material demands of the book trade that Balzac describes. In 1836, the publisher Madame Bechet filed an injunction that required him to deliver the final two volumes he owed her within twenty-four days, or face a fine of fifty francs for each day’s delay. In response, Balzac left Paris and wrote Les Deux poètes — a rich portrait of the social mores, class relations, provincial bigotry and romantic dreams of the inhabitants of Angoulême, all drawn in precise historic and geographical detail — within twenty days. As Balzac’s biographer Andre Maurois wrote, “he had never written anything better. Misfortune lent an edge to his gifts…” (10).

If the first volume of Illusions perdues, completed in such circumstances, was fueled by “bitter melancholy” then the second volume seemed to be driven by deeper furies: the romantic illusions of poetry and the literary life, shared by Lucien and his mentor and lover Madame de Bargeton in the provincial isolation of Angoulême, are systematically dismantled by the hard, materialistic reality of Paris. But this ruthless destruction of illusions is experienced not just by Lucien, but also any reader who shares his idealised assumptions: literature is reduced to a product and writing is exposed as a trade that, on its wilder fringes, shares overlaps with the criminal underworld (as Lousteau demonstrates, to Lucien’s horror, blackmail is an important weapon in a journalist’s arsenal). Balzac takes care to describe the different types of publishers active in Paris in the 1820s but they are all united by their lack of scruples and hostility to any work that does not sell: poetry, in particular, is treated with mockery and disdain because, just like now, hardly anybody buys it. Lucien’s illusions about the material, rather than aesthetic, worth of his debut volume Les Marguerites do not last beyond his first exposure to the publishers of the Galeries de Bois, who also operate as booksellers and wholesalers: “‘I shouldn’t have gone there,’ he told himself; but he was nonetheless struck by the brutally materialistic aspect that literature could assume” (11). (It is worth noting here that Lucien’s sonnets were actually written by and purchased from Charles Laissally and Théophile Gautier for unattributed use in the novel.) Publishers are “speculators in literature” and, like newspaper editors, exploit their considerable positions of power over writers. The worth of literature is defined by the volumes sold, and by this calculation poetry has no value at all. 

The reality of power in the literary marketplace and its relation to both money and social prestige is the key to Balzac’s savage portrayal of the trade of journalism, to which Lucien succumbs and which totally corrupts him. Balzac’s enmity for the press is ferocious (“an inferno, a bottomless pit of iniquity, falsehood and treachery,” 12) and so it is worth remembering that all of the corrupt and cynical practices and attitudes he portrays are ones that he had himself used and held as a newspaper critic. The fact that by the time he came to write Un grand homme de province à Paris he had also been the victim of a coordinated critical assault partly explains the fury of his exposé. The book was a brave and reckless attack on the press from which Balzac suffered for the rest of his life. However, like Milton, who he read carefully, Balzac could not contain the allure of evil. In Paris Lucien is caught between two mentors, D’Arthez and his “system of resigned poverty” and dedication to art, and Lousteau’s “militant doctrine” of money, intrigue, immediate gratification and temporary fame. The austere scribe in his dank garret is no competition for Lousteau’s dark energy and dangerous wit and Lucien is easy prey. The journalist’s Satanic soliloquy in the Luxembourg Gardens, directly inspired by Lucien’s guileless recital of his sonnets, is the triumphant, bleak, black heart of the novel, a tour de force of applied cynicism and ferocious materialism. “I soon discovered the hard facts of the writer’s trade, the difficulty of getting into print and the brutal reality of poverty,” Lousteau begins, “underneath your beautiful dream-world is the turmoil of men, passions and needs” (13). Literature is a world of “systematic warfare” and “ignoble conflicts”, where success and failure is decided “behind the scenes”; for Lousteau, as for Lucien, the effort is impossible to sustain without the material benefits of journalism, a system of conditional alliance, commercial opportunism, bribery, plagiarism and targeted polemic. Lousteau, like Lucien, has followed the flight from the provinces to the capital in search of literary fame, only to “fall into the pit of misery, the mire of journalism, the morass of the book-trade.” In the face of such disappointment, journalism becomes a method of survival and a weapon to be used: “at this trade,” Lousteau explains, “as a hired assassin of ideas, industrial, literary and dramatic reputations — I make fifty francs a week.” Fame costs money, but also depends on the courage to take chances and the ability to create luck: 

outside the literary world…there’s not a single person who knows what a fearful Odyssey one has to pass through in order to acquire what one must call, according to the diversity of talents, popularity, vogue, reputation, renown, celebrity, public favour, the successive rungs of the ladder leading to fame…the attainment of this brilliant zenith depends on so many and so rapidly varying chances that no example has occurred of any two men reaching it by the same route. 

The force of this exposition came from Balzac’s own bitter struggle for success and its truth can be confirmed by any writer working today who is prepared to be honest about their own success or their failure.

What Balzac registers in the characters of Lousteau and the other editors and critics he creates in Illusions perdues (Finot, Blondet, Lucien himself) is the simple power of the press to make or destroy reputations, whether among the aristocrats of the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the playwrights and actresses of the Parisian stages. This power is both seductive and absolute so long as you do not become its target, from which few are safe. Lousteau illustrates this power and its attractions to Lucien, as the poet prepares to write his first theatre review and seal the stage reputation of his future lover, Coralie:

Be hard and witty for a month or two, you’ll be swamped with invitations and actresses’ parties; you’ll be courted by their lovers…At five o’clock this evening, at the Luxembourg, you didn’t know what to do with yourself: now you’re about to become one of the hundred privileged persons who foist their opinions on the French public. In three days’ time, if we succeed, by printing thirty bon mots at the rate of three per diem you can make a man curse the day he was born; you can draw a regular income — in sensual pleasure — from all the actresses in your theatre; you can make a good play fall flat and send the whole of Paris flocking to a bad one. (14)

For Lucien, like Balzac and like any writer, the temptations and satisfactions are multiple and overlapping: they include desire, revenge, influence, intrigue and fame, with money and art somewhere on the list too. Lucien is quickly seduced by the well-dressed, hard-drinking, fast-spending, sharp-witted journalists of the theatre boxes, admiring and then emulating “the damascene armour of their vices and the glittering helmet of their cold analysis…the atrocious power they wielded” (15).

The practice of journalism in Restoration Paris is unavoidably and enjoyably corrupting: writing, for Lousteau, Finot, Blondet and Lucien, serves political ends that exist apart from principles. Opinions are formulated in line with immediate circumstances, as Finot declares when launching his liberal magazine: “although my opinions are undergoing a necessary transformation so that I can take over the editorship of the Review of whose destinies you are aware, my convictions remain the same…Circumstances vary, principles don’t change” (16). In this atmosphere, art is also closely linked, and even subordinated, to politics: Balzac takes care to elucidate the connections between the literary movements and political parties of the Restoration era. During Finot’s magazine launch, Lousteau even drags Lucien’s sonnets into the conflict, exploiting their aesthetic properties as a political weapon: 

We want to be useful to our new comrade. Lucien has two books to publish: a collection of sonnets and a novel. The power of the paragraph must make him a great poet within three months! We’ll use his Marguerites in order to decry Odes, Ballads and Meditations, in fact all Romantic poetry. (17)

In the 1820s — the time period of Illusions perdues — French literary romanticism was influenced by Walter Scott and medievalism and aligned with the Catholicism and monarchism of the Bourbon restoration. Louis XVIII was a patron of poetry and helped establish the career of Victor Hugo by giving him a pension of 1000 francs. For the arts, the atmosphere of Restoration France was a relief after the austere and censored years of the Empire. In this context, then, liberalism and republicanism stood in opposition to romanticism, a situation that would reverse in the years preceding the revolution of 1830 and the July Monarchy. After Lucien has recited his first sonnet in the Luxembourg Gardens, Lousteau’s immediate response is: “Are you a classicist or a romantic?” The significance of this question has to be explained to Lucien:

My friend you are coming into the thick of a fierce battle and must make a prompt decision. Literature is primarily divided into several zones; but our great men are divided into two camps. The royalists are romantics, the liberals are classicists. Divergence in literary opinion is added to divergence in political opinion: hence war between fading and budding reputations, a war in which no weapons are barred: ink spilt in torrents, cutting epigrams, stinging calumnies, unrestrained abuse…If you stand aloof you will stand alone. Which side will you take? (18)

Lucien’s answer is the correct one and reveals his future development before he has even taken one first step in that direction: “Which is the stronger party?” Political and aesthetic territory is clearly demarcated and determines the decisions made about literary success and failure. Book reviews do not describe the relative worth of the work: they are used as the starting point for a political polemic, and aesthetic merit is therefore decided by political utility. There is, of course, no guarantee that the reviewer even shares the political opinions that he is espousing in order to make or break a reputation. This, then, is the art of criticism that Lucien, under Lousteau’s tutelage, masters. 

If art is subordinated to politics then the literary world is also a world of political alliance and rivalry. As Lousteau tells Lucien early on, success requires influential friends and powerful allies: networking is key. “Today, in order to succeed, one needs to be in with such people. It’s all a matter of chance, you see. The most dangerous thing is to churn out wit all alone in the corner” (19). Lucien’s career is destroyed when he switches literary and political allegiance too abruptly: he does not prepare the ground in order to retain the subterranean loyalty of his former allies and so finds himself isolated. Balzac draws a sharp distinction between the conditional and parasitic alliances between journalists and the true bond of friendship and mutual esteem that exists between artists, idealised in Balzac’s group portrait of the Cenacle. The world of journalism is defined by competition and riven by jealousy, and Balzac, a keen observer of human types, has a lot to say about the special quality of envy that exists between writers. When Lucien recites one of his better sonnets, he is chilled by Lousteau’s “inscrutable calm”:

Had he had more experience of literary life, he would have known that, with writers, silence and curtness in such circumstances betoken the jealousy aroused by a fine work, just as their admiration denotes the pleasure they feel on listening to a mediocre work which confirms them in their self-esteem. (20)

Lousteau enlightens Lucien to the behaviour that results from this professional rivalry: “believe me, the author in fashion is harder and more insolent towards newcomers than the most brutal publisher: the one shows you out, the other tramples on you” (21). Vanity is also key to the psychology of writers: “no words, no description can depict the fury of writers when their amour-propre is wounded, nor the energy they can tap when they feel the prick of the poisoned darts of mockery” (22). In 1825, Balzac’s friend Jean Thomassy had written to warn him that “the whole-time man of letters is always tainted with envy; whereas those with other resources are only light-heartedly envious, having achieved other things” (23). When Balzac received this letter he had already reached the point of exhaustion and disgust with the machinations and intrigues of literary Paris. He knew the savage resentment that talent and success bred in this milieu having experienced an intense critical backlash caused by the jealousy of his contemporaries. His friends tried very hard to destroy him. Lucien, who matches good looks with a flair for elegant polemic, has an immediate impact with his first theatre review to a degree that sets up his downfall, as Balzac hints early on:

Looking at Lousteau, he thought: ‘There’s a friend!’ without suspecting that Lousteau already feared him as a dangerous rival. Lucien had made the mistake of expending too much wit: a dull article would have served him admirably. Blondet counterbalanced the envy that was gnawing at Lousteau by telling Finot that one had to surrender to such forceful talent. This verdict determined Lousteau’s conduct: he resolved to remain friendly with Lucien and come to an understanding with Finot in order to exploit so dangerous a newcomer by keeping him in a state of need. (24)

Thus begins Lucien’s sensual corruption and descent into debt, partly orchestrated by his friends and rivals in order to neutralise him and destroy him if necessary (it proves necessary). 

This network of alliance and rivalry underpins the rise and fall of reputations. Critical reviews are not to be taken at face value: in Balzac’s Paris they do not necessarily describe or evaluate a work of art, but serve a function in a social and professional matrix. Balzac knew this because he was part of it: he had written many rave reviews about his own books under pseudonyms in journals that were friendly to him. He had also seen his best novels consistently attacked by his rivals despite, and usually because of, his success and fame across Europe. According to Balzac, the literary world of the 1820s was a world of fabricated reviews, paid applause, reputational sabotage and professional treachery. In this environment, it was necessary for a writer to trade in duality and duplicity in order to succeed. Artistic principles and professional integrity are among the illusions that Lucien loses. The work of journalism is the creation of illusion: opinions do not reflect real convictions but temporary tactical positions that remain invisible to the readers. In Restoration Paris, journalists and writers were closely tied to the theatre and the underworld of prostitution and in Balzac’s novel theatre and prostitution also function as metaphors for writers and writing. Lucien, unable to resist the pleasures of the theatre, its actresses and artists, as well as the aristocrats who form the theatre-going elite, glimpses the unreality of this world on his first visit backstage with Lousteau: 

The magic of the scenery, the spectacle of pretty women filling the boxes, the blazing lights, the resplendent enchantment of back-cloths and new costumes gave place to coldness, desolation, darkness, emptiness. Everything looked hideous. Lucien’s surprise was indescribable. (25) 

It is in the end no more alluring than the garret, but more likely to lead to defeat and decadence and destitution. The young, hungry writer, dazzled by his own power, fueled by vanity and the need to pay for his place in the dance, is unable to see the reality or the danger of his position.

Reading Illusions perdues now it is easy to see it simply as a cautionary tale of a writer trying to make it in the big city, or to defuse it in the way that contemporary critics did as “a satirical view of the Parisian book trade” — or, perhaps worst of all, to enervate it using the jargon of critical theory as a “reflexive novel” (26). I mean, it is all of these things, but the energy and relevance of the book resides in its violently offensive qualities and Balzac’s willingness to expose the vanities and delusions of his own world. This is fissile material because the rivalries, motivations and the conditions of writing and publishing that Balzac describes still exist, but with updated variations and innovations. Balzac’s social networking among the literary and aristocratic elites of Paris, the control he attempted to maintain over his own image, the money he spent on champagne, tailored clothes and elaborate canes “of gold or rhinoceros-horn gleaming with precious stones” (27) foreshadow the marketing demands made of writers today: the need to publicise yourself on social media, to develop and protect your brand on behalf of publishing agents, in order to secure future work. Writers become prisoners of their own profile, a situation intensified and limited by the very social media platforms they depend upon for success. In the same way that Lucien discovers, too late, that he is not really free to write what he thinks, writers today find themselves captured by the social and rhetorical limits and expectations of their niche audience. They must be careful what they write or say on all occasions and across all platforms to avoid losing their constituency of readers and allies and, indeed, prospects of work. At the same time they also need to provide a consistent  stream of topical commentary, however unnecessary or perfunctory, in order to maintain visibility. Ideas and opinions, in this context, do not really exist for their own sake, but to advertise and protect the position of a writer within a social and professional network, just like Restoration Paris. Finally, payment remains precarious, as writers are exploited and corrupted like Lucien was in 1821, while being forced to find income streams anywhere they can like Balzac throughout his own career. Over this whole pitiless landscape hover the grey clouds of publishing schedules, author portfolios and corporate KPIs. 

So Balzac was not sitting in splendid isolation composing a philosophical construction: Un Grand homme de province à Paris was not La Peau de chagrin, it was a declaration of total war on the literary elite of Paris and the nascent world of commercial publishing, gestating in the 1820s and still present now. Balzac took the material reality of professional writing apart piece by piece — from the production of paper to the economics of printing to the critical stratagems that make or break careers, and everything in between — laying it all out for his readers to look upon and, presumably, recoil from. This was not a literary experiment, or a joke: it had serious implications for him, both personally and professionally. Aside from the fact that he didn’t really write very good plays, Balzac did not stand a chance on the Parisian stage after Illusions perdues: the critics not only demolished him in their theatre reviews, but, in the manner outlined in his book, they paid for hostile audiences. “They want to scalp me,” he commented after The Princess of Modena opened to a carefully arranged empty house, “and I want to drink out of their skulls” (28).

The novel, then, both portrayed and embodied the mixed motivations of writers and writing: in the case of Balzac and his cast of hacks and geniuses in Illusions perdues this included the pursuit of money and fame, basic creative and erotic needs, the desire to dominate society and catalogue all its aspects, and the hunger for revenge. Here, vengeance overwhelmed material self-interest as he laid waste to the reputations of an entire class of Parisian writers. In this way, Illusions perdues displays the same reckless, spiteful, self-destructive aggression later seen in Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 memoir Making It. Like Balzac, Podhoretz had the bad taste to reveal the dirty secrets of his contemporaries: in this case, the fact that American writers in the 1960s, despite their bohemian pretensions, pursued wealth and prestige as ruthlessly as the despised business classes, but were just more hypocritical about it. For his intellectual honesty and Brooklyn brashness, Podhoretz was ostracised by the New York literary elites and the reviews of Making It effectively ended his career as a fêted liberal intellectual, in the same way Balzac faced the injured pride and petulant rage of the Parisian critics for the rest of his life. But the attraction of Balzac’s and Podhoretz’s ugly books was that they ruthlessly stripped away hypocritical illusions by exposing the material relations and personal ambitions that underpin the world of writers and writing. To this end they functioned as valuable correctives to the colossal self-regard of the literary world. 

1. Quoted in André Maurois, Prometheus: The Life of Balzac, trans. Norman Denny (Pelican, 1971), p.404
2. Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, trans. Herbert J. Hunt (Penguin, 1971), p.275
3. Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. Herbet J. Hunt (Penguin, 1977), pp.118-19
4. Lost Illusions, pp.231-2
5. Ibid., p.287
6. Quoted in Graham Robb, Balzac (Picador, 1994), p.58
7. Quoted in Robb, p.90
8. Maurois, p.409
9. Lost Illusions, p.409
10. Maurois, p.336
11. Lost Illusions, p.202
12. Ibid., p.229
13. Ibid., p.245
14. Ibid., p.290
15. Ibid., pp.317-18
16. Ibid., p.346
17. Ibid., p.348
18. Ibid., p.240
19. Ibid., p.277
20. Ibid., p.242
21. Ibid., p.250
22. Ibid., p.440
23. Quoted in Maurois, p.128
24. Lost Illusions, pp.311-12
25. Ibid., p.300
26. See Sotirios Paraschas, ‘Illusions perdues: Writers, Artists and the Reflexive Novel’ in The Cambridge Companion to Balzac (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
27. Maurois, p.305
28. Quoted in Maurois, p.490