[On April
9th, 2003 a group of both Iraqi civilians and U.S. military
forces together toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos
Square, a hugely symbolic moment that highlights the role statues can play in
our communal spaces and identities. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment
and four other statues, leading up to a weekend post on my own continuing
thoughts on Confederate statues like those in my
hometown.]
On the value of
recognizing US hypocrisies, and the need to get beyond them as well.
While the
situation and histories aren’t identical, many of the same things I said in
this post about US support for the 1980s Afghan rebels who went on to
become Al Qaeda could be said about US support for Saddam Hussein during the
same era as well. Hussein was the enemy of our enemy (the Iranian regime)
throughout the decade, and so it stands to reason in a realpolitik
kind of way that the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations would
support, fund, and arm
Hussein’s regime. But as that last hyperlinked article notes, the US
government was well aware Hussein’s worst excesses in the period and continued
to support him despite them. And indeed, the same could be said of his final
excess immediately preceding our abrupt shift toward his regime: April
Glaspie, an envoy of George H.W. Bush’s administration, apparently tacitly
supported Hussein’s potential invasion of Kuwait, which then became the
1991 invasion that prompted the hostile US response that culminated in the
first Gulf War and made Hussein into an enemy of the US from then on.
All of which
made the second Iraq War hugely complex and fraught, even if we leave aside
those little things like lies about weapons of mass destruction and false
connections of Iraq to the September 11th attacks and etc. And those
complexities provide a very different context for the April 9th
toppling of the Saddam statue that provided the impetus for this week’s series.
In a symbolic but also very real sense, the United States had helped raise that
statue, or at least helped build both a strong foundation and a perimeter fence
that together allowed it to stand more securely and powerfully for far longer
than might otherwise have been the case. From Trujillo
in the Dominican Republic and his many Latin American counterparts to Bin
Laden, Hussein, and many many others
around the world, helping create and prop up such dictators and extremists was
indeed one of the true hallmarks of US foreign policy throughout the 20th
century (particularly in the Cold War era, but not at all limited to that period
as the pre-World
War II histories of Trujillo’s DR make clear). To celebrate the statue (and
Saddam) falling without recognizing those histories is to reinforce
hypocritical divisions between US ideals (especially as a “beacon of freedom”
abroad and the like) and such troubling realities.
At the same
time, Saddam was (like most of those US-supported figures) a violent and brutal
dictator, a tyrant who created unfathomably terrifying and horrible conditions
for the vast majority of Iraqis throughout his reign. Those details make the US
support of him for so long even more awful, but also (or really because of all those
factors) shouldn’t be minimized or elided in the slightest. Similarly, the fact
that it was apparently Iraqis who instigated the toppling of the statue means
that if we analyze that moment primarily through the lens of US foreign
policies and hypocrisies, we’re just reinforcing a silencing of those rebellious
Iraqi voices and perspectives, not at all unlike what Saddam himself managed to
do so thoroughly for so long and with US aid. Obviously on an AmericanStudies
blog I tend to focus on the US side of my topics, and the US side of Saddam’s
histories and story is one we all need to better remember and engage to be
sure. But so for that matter is the Iraqi perspective/narrative of any and all
histories, one of many reasons I’m so proud of this work being
done by my former FSU graduate
student Ross Caputi and colleagues of his. Any story of the Saddam statue
has to start and end with those Iraqi perspectives and histories.
Next statue
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other statues you’d highlight and analyze?
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