My history lessons at school with Saddam Hussein

A biography of a tyrant brings back memories for Peter Clarke and serves to remind how the West helped mould Iraq Saddam Hussein was called a "modern Hitler" by George Bush as he marshalled the coalition that was Desert Storm 10 years ago. President Bush was as wrong at the beginning of the war as he was at the end when he decided not to bring the Iraqi regime down. Stalin is by far the better comparison.

This harrowing biography of the brute who rules Iraq succeeds when it manages to remain dispassionate and calm. Whatever the body count or the techniques for dismembering dissidents and rivals, Said Aburish keeps his equilibrium. The horror is the greater when there is no criticism.

On a personal note, the scales fell from my eyes. I can remember the young Saddam Hussein: we were school contemporaries. My father was a signals officer - a major in the Royal Signals, to be exact - in Iraq, Jordan and Suez. from 1952-58. His first secondment was to Iraq, at that time in "the British sphere of influence". I was sent to the same school, at the same time, as the Great Bandit himself - to Prince Abdullah Academy, as it was then.

The memories are hazing, of course. But enough remains to make this biography, for me, a tantalising retrospective. I do recall that "Babu" was much bigger than the rest of us: the biography reveals that he actually joined up with his studies five years later than usual, which explains a lot.

The boy I hold in my memory was no more, or less, of a mixed bag than any schoolyard contemporary we might summon out of our past. He was handsome, and seemed studious; furtive but also jovial. True, he was a bit of a bully. He could spit further than the rest of us - but he was by far the best reader amongst us. He could devour books. He was highly intelligent then. He seems to be still.

So how can a boy I recall as agreeable, if irascible, turn into the morally deformed parody of evil?

Aburish blames the British for his nation's plight. We have all forgotten that Iraq is a British creation, with the connivance of the French. We ran its government as a client state with a puppet king. Iraq was never shown as pink on the map. It escaped formal incorporation into the empire. In every other sense it was our plaything. After the first world war it was effectively a British mandate run on what now seems to be a model of ineptitude.

If you read the memoirs of British politicians at the time, Iraq barely features as a footnote. It tumbled into our "sphere of influence" without any coherent plan or purpose. Who now can remember we had RAF and Army bases in the country and that the king and his ministers did entirely as "advised" by the British resident?

The central view of the Foreign Office was that compliant and obliging under-kings or a whirligig of generals must keep the diverse people of Iraq subject. The paramount policy was to ensure Iraqi oilfields feeding Western markets. In the generations of torture and waste it seems not to have occured to any diplomats or oil experts that the Arabs needed their oil income. They were not going to stop selling oil to us. The Russians had no money to compete. The fantasy the oil might dry up was never tested by common sense.

Although every hand played by Britain over the last century seems to have been malign and treacherous it was peopled by many who enjoyed Baghdad and the country. My father was one. From his impressive study, my father, who was the embodiment of kindness, was a servant of corrupt and silly men. For myself, I remember only sunshine and football. My maleficent contemporary evidently only knew beatings and degradation. The demeaning of his childhood spirit is now revenged on his nation and its neighbours.

This book never sets out to be a manifesto of conservative virtue - but that is what it turns out to be. The history of Iraq is an inventory of institutional failure. There is no shared authority accepted by consent. There is no law. All they have is administrative fiat which fails any of the canons of the rule of law. Occasionally the savagery of Islamic Law is allowed its writ - but that is often no more than the punishment of the innocent. Iraq does not allow a free market. Smuggling is the only authorised trade and that is done with official connivance.

This book could serve as a textbook of civic virtues. Whatever Iraq has, humanity needs the opposite - legitimacy, law and markets. Above all, they need a bloodless mechanism to change their rulers. We all talk mushy nonsense about democracy. Its only real importance is Karl Popper's sense - the right to dismiss a government. Our politicians may be a blend of rogues and fools. But how much happier we should be with our dumb herbivores than the terrifying raptors of Baghdad politics.

The Ba-athist pan-Arab Party is a pidgin ideology that makes no sense. First it emulated the model of Prussian miltary discipline. This was warped into an emulation of Fascism. Then - and this was Saddam Hussein's personal contribution - it was inspired by Stalin. Ba-athist origins were in Arab pride first against the Ottomans and then against the British. It was born of a search for dignity.

Of course, it has done nothing but demean the Arabs. It is easy to understand how Socialism, with an Arab gloss, seemed the way forward a generation ago. The USSR seemed triumphant and vindicated. It seemed an ally against the tiresome European capitalists, especially the oil companies. Now, loyalty to Russia looks merely comical.

Saddam Hussein, the cheery fellow of my memory, seems to have no moral sensibility at all. Yet the face of raw evil is perhaps the devil in us all. If we are not restrained by conventions, traditions or rules we are all capable of grotesque cruelties. Count yourself lucky not to be born a Kurd. To be stateless and squeezed between Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq is the shortest of short straws. Like his hero Stalin, Saddam tried mass deportations of populations. There is scarcely a cruelty he has not tested out on the Kurds. Add the stupidity and rivalry of the Kurdish leaders and you have a story almost too doleful to read.

I think Aburish's deeper charge is correct: Stalin was the great hero the Iraqis have been sacrificed upon. It seems fanciful and silly but the analogy works. Like Stalin, Saddam was brought up by a domineering mother, the father having died. His youth was in the depth of provincial obscurity but claimed metropolitan roots. He worked his way up from petty gangster into henchman and contract killer for the party leadership. Then, like Stalin, he seized the leadership and holds it still. Where Stalin used the camouflage of Marxist-Leninism, Saddam Hussein uses Ba-Athist Arab nationalism, laced with Socialism and Islam.

Had Saddam Hussein not annexed Kuwait in 1990, would we have heard of him? He would still be the pirate leader of a broken nation - but the West accommodates many evil regimes in its "ethical" foreign policy. For a decade Saddam was sponsored, nourished and endorsed by the West, in particular by the US, in his role as a proxy fighter against the Iranians.

The lesson of this distressing essay is that there is no such thing as morality or ethics in international affairs. It is a delusion to think powers do anything other than pursue their interpretation of their interests. What is bizarre is to see how foolishly they comprehend their interests. If Iraq's two mineral resources, oil and sulphur, had never been discovered it would have been a happier 20th Century for the Iraqis.

We think of Saddam Hussein as the embodiment of tyranny. Indeed, he is. Yet we need to understand the degree to which the West nurtured and trained him. Aburish details how he was wooed by the CIA, who funded his first coup in 1963, and the second successful one in 1968. The US and UK knew of his genocide programmes but averted their eyes. After the Iranian Revolution, Washington regarded the Baghdad gangsters as valuable allies. For 20 years he enjoyed his licence to kill. The complicity of the West in the utter horror of Iraq is shameful.

I ended the book with a completely politically incorrect view. There are many nations around the globe where the regimes are so grim, the only solution is to impose civilisation from outside. Fashion would not permit a rebuilding of a British or French or even less an American empire. But I wonder if we could not assemble international forces empowered to redeem the territories where terror reigns?

The Sudan performs a good imitation of Hell. The Congo is a recurring blood bath. Burma, so beautiful and prosperous 50 years ago, has relapsed into barbarity. East Timor was obliterated by its "government". If pity is to be the base of policy, there are plenty of candidates to be brought under UN, or perhaps EU, control. Kosovo has become an EU protectorate: Timor is a UN one.

If Saddam Hussein were to die, the cycle of torment for Iraq would not be lifted. Since Desert Storm we have devised a policy that guarantees the preservation of the tyrant while punishing the Iraqi people with sanctions. George Bush and John Major emerge as complete boobies - kind men, but with no comprehension of the megalomaniac in Baghdad. The echo of Yalta where Churchill and Roosevelt barely comprehended Stalin's system is convincing.

There have been several attempts at a biography of Saddam Hussein. This is by far the best. Perhaps truth is a weapon that should be deployed more often.

Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge by Said K Aburish (Bloomsbury, #20)

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