What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

PART ONE Morbid Symptoms

Yet it is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility.

Norman Cohn, 1996

CHAPTER ONE An Iraqi Solzhenitsyn

When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already … What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’

Adolf Hitler, 1933

YOU’RE NOT meant to say it, but great men and women still matter. Even in the modern age when elitism is a sin and the media labour to show the famous are no better than they ought to be, people still need heroes and heroines.

The politically committed need them more than most. They are partisans whose passions can make them appear unhinged. The babble of the therapists and the daytime TV hosts about each of us being special in our own unique way cannot disguise the banal reality that, like everyone else, the politically committed are not especially good or intelligent. Self-doubt creeps in. Why should others believe them when they say their plans for society won’t end in the usual mess? Why should they believe themselves? Heroes make them feel comfortable. When they go to a meeting and hear a fine mind who knows more than they can ever know telling them that their cause is just, they are gladdened. When they turn on the television and see a brave woman abandoning her easy life to fight their battles, they know their battles are worth winning.

Until 2 August 1990, Kanan Makiya was a hero of the Left. We looked at him and felt good. It wasn’t just that he was eloquent, courteous and intelligent, Kanan Makiya stood out because he did what the Left was meant do. He exposed in horrendous detail the mechanics of a totalitarian state without a thought for the consequences. Complacent foreign ministers practising the debased art of ‘realism’ and the executives of companies growing fat on arms contracts didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Public opinion knew little and cared less about his cause. He wasn’t downhearted. He would be heard.

As befitted a Left that said it believed in universal principles, Kanan Makiya was born into a cosmopolitan family in 1949. His father, Mohamed Makiya, was a Shia Arab and one of the first Iraqis to qualify as an architect. Mohamed founded the University of Baghdad’s school of architecture and taught his students to create a new style for the Arab world by combining the motifs of his beloved Islamic tradition with the techniques of modernism. While he was studying at Liverpool University in 1941, he met Margaret Crawford, a history student and the daughter of a strict Derbyshire headmaster. To the horror of her conventional parents, they fell in love. When they said she must choose between him and them, she made matters worse by marrying Mohamed and moving to Iraq. Her family renounced her, and Kanan grew up without knowing his English relatives. Margaret was as much a part of the Left of the Forties as Kanan was of the Left of the 1968 generation. (If you were a nice Derbyshire girl from a good family, you had to be very left wing sixty years ago to defy your parents and run off with an Arab.) While they were students, she would take Mohamed away from his town planning classes to hear Bertrand Russell talk on philosophy and the socialist intellectual Harold Laski lecture on the new world which was coming.

The Makiyas were members of what people at that time called the ‘progressive middle class’ or the ‘intelligentsia’. They brought fresh ideas with them when they settled in Baghdad. Mohamed’s fusion of old and new styles began to make him a leader of Arab architecture. Margaret organized the first modern art exhibition in Baghdad. They had the self-confidence of a young and bright couple who see a future full of possibilities in front of them.

Kanan admired his parents and wanted a cosmopolitan education of his own. He won a place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and arrived in America as the protests against the Vietnam war were swelling. Family tradition and his own radical temperament made joining them an easy choice. From Prague to Los Angeles, the Left was in revolt in 1968, against war, oppression, racism and the creaking religious taboos that repressed human sexuality.

The attempted Arab invasion of Israel in 1967 had proved to be a spectacular miscalculation when the Six Day War ended in a stunning Israeli victory and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For Kanan, as for so many other Arabs of his generation, the Israeli subjugation of a large Palestinian population was a great radicalizing moment. He had no time for nationalism – Palestinian, Arab or Israeli – and embraced a Trotskyist variant of Marxism, which promised to provide answers for all the peoples of the world regardless of colour or creed.

At a teach-in on the plight of the Palestinians, Kanan met his future wife Afsaneh Najmabadi, an Iranian physicist. ‘He didn’t look like an Arab,’ Najmabadi told Lawrence Weschler, Makiya’s biographer. ‘He had incredibly bushy brown hair in those days, like a halo, and I thought he must be an American Jew, and was struck by the progressive stands he was advancing. I went up to him and introduced myself, and told him where I was from. He gave his name – Kanan Makiya – and said he was an Iraqi. “But Shia,” he immediately added to put me, an Iranian, at ease.’

Kanan was following the standard course for a leftist of his class and generation. His enemies were Iran and the other pro-American dictatorships of the Middle East, Israeli colonialism and, more broadly, ‘capitalism’. We remember the movements of 1968 he joined as a failed revolution. The student protests in Paris did not bring a change of government; and it was far from clear that any conceivable French government however socialist or anarchic could have satisfied the confused demonstrators. Soviet tanks flattened the attempt by the gallant Czechs to break the grip of communism. America’s war in Vietnam continued despite the protests, although to give the demonstrators their due they increased the pressure on Washington to pull out. Historians put the revolts of 1968 in the same box as the revolutions of 1848: failed uprisings that none the less had lasting and unintended consequences on culture and politics. The historians don’t quite get it right, however. One country had a successful revolution. Unfortunately, it was a fascist putsch.

In 1968 the Baath Party seized power in Iraq and forced Kanan Makiya to think about a subject very few leftish men and women of the time wanted to discuss: the possibility that fascism had not died in the Forties, but had lived on and flourished in the poor world.

Ominous forces were buffeting his father. The design dearest to his heart was a commission to build a university in the Shia city of Kufa. Shia businessmen had bought the land, while Mohamed and other Shia architects and builders had offered their services pro bono. Within months of the coup, the Baath Party nationalized the university. They did not intend to allow Shia students to have an independent education. Instead, the new development minister came up with a kitsch money-making scheme and ordered Mohamed to design a hideous resort on the site of ancient Babylon.

Mohamed told him, ‘This is crazy. You are asking me to turn Babylon into a tourist trap with a Ziggurat hotel. This is a crime against history! The man was my worst enemy at the time – he was the one who had ordered Kufa shut down – but he listened, and I managed to convince him. Later, they killed him’.

Iraq became dangerous for the Makiyas. While her husband was abroad on business, Margaret received word that the Baath Party had his name on a list of subversives. His crime was to be a member of a sinister conspiracy of Freemasons.

Er, Freemasons?

Her husband wasn’t a Freemason. Even if he had been, the charge would have made no sense. What kind of ideology believes that men who roll up their trouser legs and greet each other with funny handshakes are plotting to overthrow the state? She was mystified.

Margaret had taught English at Baghdad University for twenty-seven years. Half the Iraqi elite were her former pupils, and it didn’t take her long to find well-connected friends who knew what the new regime had against Mohamed. Their explanation was the strangest story she had heard. In the Fifties, a British colonel had served as a military adviser to the old Iraqi monarchy. He was a meticulous man who kept records of every trivial event in his life and stored them in his strong box. He fled when the army overthrew the monarchy in 1958, leaving his box behind. It sat in Baghdad for twelve years until the Baathists decided to look inside.

The commonplace has supernatural significance to the conspiratorial mind, and the Baathists found evidence of an abominable intrigue in the humdrum files of a middle-aged Englishman. The records showed that the colonel had been a Freemason. They also showed he had invited hundreds of Iraqis for drinks at his home over the years. Mohamed was a neighbour living in the old British quarter of Baghdad. He spoke excellent English and was a graduate of a British university. It should have surprised no one that the colonel had asked him to one of his many parties. The Baathists put two and two together and concluded that the box revealed a vast conspiracy of Freemasons and British imperialists against the Arab nation. Secret policemen were preparing to arrest Mohamed and 400 others named in the dusty files.

‘Don’t laugh, they’re serious,’ Margaret’s ex-pupils told her. ‘Get out now.’

The urgency in her informants’ voices was authentic, and Margaret realized that her husband was in mortal danger. Fortunately, he was abroad working on a project in Bahrain. She told him to stay there and used her connections to ship her family and their belongings out of the country

A Baath official requisitioned the Makiyas’ home.

Later, they killed him.

The Makiyas found asylum in Britain and Mohamed set up the architectural practice of Makiya Associates in London. Kanan worked for his father’s business while running campaigns to protect the Iraqi Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s campaigns of racial persecution that were heading towards genocide. Mohamed was a good businessman as well as an excellent architect, and Makiya Associates won contracts from many Middle Eastern countries, with the obvious exception of Iraq.

In 1980, however, his pariah status changed. By then Saddam had total control of the Baath Party and with it Iraq. He wanted glory. He wanted to destroy Iran and make himself the undisputed master of the region. The Conference of Non-Aligned Nations was to meet in Baghdad in 1982, and he wanted the poor world’s prime ministers and presidents to look on the works of his new city – and despair. Like many a totalitarian leader before him, he had a craving for triumphal architecture. Unfortunately, most of Iraq’s architects were unavailable for work. After ludicrous show trials of alleged ‘economic saboteurs’, they were either dead or among the millions of refugees who had fled abroad.

Desperate to find alternative talent, Saddam’s officials wrote to Makiya Associates to tempt Mohamed into reshaping Baghdad. Saddam was prepared to forget about his part in the global scheme of British Freemasons against the Arab nation, they told him, and shower him with lucrative commissions. Mohamed was wary, but few architects can resist the chance to follow Christopher Wren and Baron Haussmann and stamp their mark on their capital. ‘My mother was the one who was interested in politics,’ Kanan told me. ‘My father went along with her, but all that really mattered to him was architecture. He was an architect to his bones. He wanted to build.’

The Baathists could not have been more attentive when the exile returned. They waved away the customs officers at Baghdad airport and treated Mohamed as a VIP. A member of the Revolutionary Command Council gave an unctuous speech on how proud Iraqis were of Mohamed’s achievements.

‘He was a very nice man,’ Mohamed recalled.

‘Later, they killed him.’

Makiya Associates’ willingness to build for Saddam provoked Kanan into a savage argument with his father. ‘This is for history,’ Mohamed snapped. ‘It’s not for the people there now. It’s got nothing to do with them – they’ll be gone. This is for the future.’

Kanan couldn’t stand it. He hated the thought that by working for Makiya Associates he was helping Saddam create his city of the future. The Iranian Afsaneh Najmabadi, who was his wife by 1979, needed a break, too. Her world had stopped making sense.

The West’s support for dictators convinced leftists of Kanan Makiya and Afsaneh Najmabadi’s generation that its democracy was a laughable fraud. Nowhere was the contrast between idealistic rhetoric and sordid politics clearer than in Najmabadi’s native Iran. At the bidding of Britain, America had overthrown Iran’s popular government because it had threatened to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The West installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran and allowed him to reign as an autocrat whose love of grandiose uniforms and glittering medals would have been ridiculous had it not been combined with the cruel suppression of dissent.

To Kanan, Afsaneh and their friends it was natural to expect that an illegitimate monarch doing the bidding of the West would provoke a revolution. And in 1979 there was a revolution in Iran. It was as profound and shocking as the French and Russian revolutions. Its consequences were as far-reaching – you hear of them daily on the evening news. But it was a revolution of a kind the modern world had never seen. Instead of being led by workers demanding fair shares for all or middle-class radicals demanding human rights and democratic elections, Iran had an Islamist revolution led by priests determined to impose their god’s law on men and women (especially women).

Iranian leftists went along with them, somewhat stupidly as events were to turn out. Although they didn’t agree with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s belief that everything the human race needed to know was revealed in a seventh-century holy book, they reasoned that any revolution was better than none. The mania for Islam would pass, they thought. Religious exuberance was just a craze that flared up every now and again, then disappeared. All serious people knew that religion was hardly worth thinking about. Once the priests had discredited themselves, the scales would fall from the eyes of the masses and they would turn to the true faith of socialism. Everything the Left thought it knew stopped it from understanding that their socialism was dying, while militant religion was taking its place. Kanan stayed in London and watched from afar, but Afsaneh Najmabadi went back to fight with her comrades for a new Iran. The leaders of the Iranian left assured them that they could safely ignore the black-clad fanatics who were fanning out across the country. ‘We have criticised Islamic fanaticism – we are against the non-progressive ideas of the conservative elements,’ said Noureddin Kianouri, leader of the Marxist Tudeh Party, as he explained how he had weighted the options. ‘But for us, the positive side of Ayatollah Khomeini is so important that the so-called negative side means nothing.’

Later they arrested him along with tens of thousands of his comrades, paralysed his arms, broke his fingers and made him confess on television to being a Soviet spy. The ayatollahs crushed the Left, the liberals and the feminists, and imposed a religious tyranny far more terrible and far harder for women to endure than the Shah’s persecutions.

Afsaneh Najmabadi had been far more sceptical about the wisdom of leftists going along with holy misogynists, and had the good sense to leave and get back to Kanan in London. The news from Iran got no better on her return. In 1980 Saddam Hussein took advantage of the revolutionary chaos and began an unprovoked war to grab what Iranian oil fields he could. It turned into the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Across trenches reminiscent of Passchendaele, the Ayatollah Khomeini sent wave after wave of martyrs. Young men marched towards the Iraqi guns, apparently welcoming the chance of death and admission to paradise and all its gorgeous virgins. With tactics again reminiscent of Passchendaele, Saddam met them with poison gas.

The strains in the Makiya family were becoming intolerable. By working in his father’s London office on the plans for Saddam’s new capital, Kanan was by extension working for a fascistic dictator, who had launched a war of imperial aggression. His wife was seeing her hopes for a socialist Iran destroyed by reactionary clerical forces, while being reminded every morning that her husband was going to work for the tyrant of Iraq whose armies were slaughtering her fellow Iranians.

Something had to give, and to her relief Kanan resigned from Makiya Associates and determined to piece together what had happened to Iraq by talking to refugees.

London is the place to find them. Constables from the Metropolitan Police hear slogans in strange tongues when they shepherd demonstrators through the streets. City bankers who think themselves men of the world would hear stories to make them shudder if they bothered to talk to the migrant women who clean their floors. The scruffy pedant, who insists on dragging out a wearisome meeting at the London School of Economics, becomes a new head of a new state. The preacher in the inner-city mosque with the fancy-dress beard and hook for a hand seems a post-modern parody until the police arrest him for inciting terrorism.

London is a city of exiles: pay attention and you will hear the woes of the world.

‘The truth is that before 1980 Kanan hadn’t been all that involved in Iraq,’ Afsaneh Najmabadi told Weschler. ‘Lebanon and Palestine and, later, Iran were far to the fore in what we were struggling over. But then it was as if the Baath came to him. If his father had not been invited back to Iraq, Kanan would probably never have written that book. It was him being involved, even tangentially, in designing the Baath Party headquarters that actually got him thinking, seriously thinking about the Baath … There is a great irony here.’

Ms Najmabadi didn’t know it, but ‘ironic’ wouldn’t begin to cover the course of the next twenty-five years.

As an aperitif, the money Saddam Hussein was paying his father gave Kanan the time and space to ask very good and very simple questions: What do the Baathists believe? Where do they come from? Why do they kill so many people?

A private income aside, Kanan had one other advantage. He slowly grasped a truth about totalitarianism that Albert Camus, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Robert Conquest had grasped before him: the terror isn’t a side effect of the system; the terror is the system. Once a political or religious totalitarian movement has momentum, it has an irrational life and logic of its own which can’t be explained away. It kills because its ideology says it has to kill. The massacres will be worthwhile because when it exterminates the enemies of the proletariat or the master race or the one true religion, all the conflicts of the human condition will be resolved in an earthly paradise.

Because he was a Marxist, Makiya might never have recognized the obvious, and no one apart from a handful of friends would have read him. The Marxist tradition has created many mass murderers, but it is hopeless at explaining them. It is not that Marxists have bad consciences about the mounds of corpses – in my experience they rarely do; rather, Marxism assumes that rational economic interests and class conflicts move the world and cannot cope with the lusts for power, murder and martyrdom. A typical left-wing analysis of Iraq from the Eighties argued that ‘a bureaucratic bourgeoisie’ which depended on ‘the depletion of the state’s resources, whether by legal, quasi-legal or illegal means’ ruled the country. It was a parasitic class which increased its wealth by fostering ‘dependence on the multi-nationals’ and ‘the militarization of the economy’. The forgotten writer was not all wrong, Saddam Hussein, like all other totalitarian dictators, needed loot to reward his followers and equip his armies. Without it, he would never have survived. Yet you can only get so far in explaining Saddam Hussein or any of the other great criminals of the twentieth century by looking at the economies of their countries, their distribution of favours to clients and the national traumas and humiliations that allowed them to seize power. Once you have exhausted all comprehensible reasons for a great crime there remains a gap. The ‘root causes’ take you to its edge, but then wave goodbye and leave you peering into an unfathomable abyss. The famines Stalin, Mao and the Ethiopian colonels unleashed, Pol Pot’s extermination of anyone who could read or write, Hitler’s annihilation of the Jews, gypsies, gays and Slavs, Saddam’s regime of torture and genocide and the Islamist cult of death aren’t rationally explicable. You can cross over to the other side of the abyss only if you shrug off your reasonable liberal belief that every consequence has an understandable cause and accept that enthusiasm for the ideologies of absolute power isn’t always rationally explicable.

It took Makiya several years to realize he was looking through the wrong end of the telescope. He decided to call his exposure of Baathist Iraq Republic of Fear, and its first chapter was going to be on Iraq’s economy. As a good Marxist he believed that the ‘root causes’ of Saddam Hussein lay in the arrangement of classes and patterns of economic exploitation. The longer he researched, the lower down the book’s running order the chapter on economics fell. In the end, he binned it. His preconceptions were getting in the way.

Makiya also abandoned the pseudo-sophisticated journalist’s question, ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ He worked on the sensible assumption that despite ‘the proclivity of those in public office to propaganda, rhetoric, chicanery and lies, on the whole even they usually end up saying what they mean and meaning what they say’. He not only interviewed exiles, but also dug out the speeches of Saddam Hussein and the pamphlets of his supporters from obscure archives in London and New York and read them not as propaganda but as evidence of what his fellow Iraqis had to believe on pain of death.

He took on the Baath Party by paying it the compliment of taking what it said seriously.

A group of Arab nationalists founded the Baath (‘Renaissance’) Party in Damascus on 24 July 1943. Like the tightly organized totalitarian parties of inter-war Europe, it had a military structure which allowed it to operate as an underground army. It seized power in Syria in 1963, and remains in sole charge of the one-party state to this day. What happened to Syria was grim, but Makiya faced an organizational problem in describing the greater horror of what the Baath did to Iraq. To print all the available evidence of murder and bestiality would have turned Republic of Fear into an unmanageably large book that ran the risk of descending into the pornography of violence. With admirable restraint, he confined the snuff-movie side of Baathism to one relatively dry account of one small bout of extermination by Baathist forces written by a historian working from official sources. It read:

The Nationalist Guard’s Bureau of Special Investigation had alone killed 104 persons, the bodies of 42 of whom were found in 1963–64 buried in al Jazirah and al-Hawash districts. In the cellars of al-Nihayyah Palace, which the bureau used as its headquarters, were found all sorts of loathsome instruments of torture, including electric wires with pincers, pointed iron stakes on which prisoners were made to sit, and a machine which still bore traces of chopped-off fingers. Small heaps of bloodied clothes were scattered about, and there were pools on the floor and stains over the walls.

Those killings were in 1963, the year the Iraqi Baathists joined the Syrian Baathists in seizing power. The Iraqi army threw them out, but they returned in the successful putsch of 1968. By 1980, when Kanan’s father flew back to Iraq, Saddam Hussein had become the undisputed master of both party and state. By the time Americans and their allies overthrew him in 2003, the Baathists had murdered around 400,000 Iraqis in internal persecutions, while Saddam’s unprovoked wars against Iran and Kuwait led to the killing of a further one million or so. Baathists then joined with Islamists from al-Qaeda to form what delicate euphemists called the ‘insurgency’, and carried on murdering tens of thousands of Iraqis. The history of modern Iraq is of a systematic depredation and destruction of the human spirit that has lasted four decades. Future historians who decide to chart it are going to need strong stomachs.

The resemblances to European fascism and communism did not stop with the state-sponsored sadism of the all-powerful ruling party. The all-powerful party also had an all-encompassing totalitarian ideology. Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din, the Baath’s chief ideologues, were pan-Arabists who wanted a single state for all the Arabs of the Middle East. Theirs seemed a benign ambition at first glance, but nationalists always have the seeds of tyranny in them. They are just as likely to want to tyrannize their own people as their people’s enemies because their own people can let them down badly. The theory holds that the Arabs or the Germans or the Serbs are strong and brave, and ready by biological inheritance or cultural superiority to rule themselves and others. In practice, the people can be lazy and less than thrilled by the prospect of dying for the greater good of the nation. In these circumstances, their manifest destiny can be realized only if they obey orders.

Baathism allowed no room for malcontents who would contradict the party line. In a speech in 1977, Saddam Hussein told history teachers what the Baath expected of them:

Those researchers and historians who call themselves objective might very well be presenting different viewpoints and possibilities to explain one event … leaving it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions … The Baathist must never deal with history and all other intellectual and social questions in this way … They must take on the same specificity as our Baathist way; in other words, the writing of Arab history should be from our point of view with an emphasis on analysis and not realistic story telling.

The truth was what the Baathists said it was. Adults would have memories of different truths from before the Baathists took power, but the Baathists would be able to control their children and mould them into a new type of Arab, conditioned from infancy to obey. In Iraq’s case, indoctrination began at primary school where textbooks presented Saddam Hussein as Baba – ‘father’ – Saddam, an alternative object of love and loyalty to their parents. Spies watched to see if pupils participated in Baathist rallies and kept files on the political reliability of their mothers, fathers, grandparents and so on to cousins of the third degree.

The regime’s aim was to dissolve family bonds so children would be ready to turn against their parents. The wise Iraqi learned not to talk politics in front of the little ones. After the fall of Baghdad, the argument that Hind Aziz had with her 9-year-old daughter, Dalia, was typical of arguments all over the country. The child wanted to know why she was only now learning that Saddam was a killer.

‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’

‘I had to explain to her that if I did, she might have told her friends, and then Mummy would have been executed, Daddy would have been executed, and Grandpa would have been executed, too,’ the mother explained.

Her father showed an Australian journalist how deep the indoctrination had gone.

‘Who is your father, Dalia?’ he asked.

‘Baba Saddam,’ she replied, robotically.

Saddam’s punishment of parents wasn’t a corruption of power, a late degeneracy after years of dictatorship. It was a natural consequence of the original Baathist programme. Aflaq explained that the Baathists expected the people to devote themselves to the party like lovers to an impulsive mistress. Laying down the law to Arab intellectuals in 1959, he said: ‘The nationalism we are calling for is love before anything else. He who loves does not ask for reasons.’ Blind faith was in the genes, Aflaq believed, a natural part of the Arab Islamic culture.

As theology or history this may have been nonsense, but as a recipe for dictatorship Aflaq’s demand for unconditional love was bound to create a tyranny because Iraq was more diverse than any other Arab nation. If Iraq could function as a free society, it could do so only as a federal democracy. If the Baathists tried pan-Arab nationalism instead, they would have to answer the question, where are your Arabs? About one-fifth of Iraq’s population were not Arabs but Kurds and Turks. The majority of Iraq’s Arabs were Shia Muslims, estranged from the Sunni Arabs since the early days of Islam. Sunni Arabs were a mere 20 per cent of the population, so Sunni Arab nationalism would mean either an apartheid system, with the Sunnis as the ‘whites’, or a merciless dictatorship, which was what Iraq got for decades.