By Anthony Paul, Senior Writer
IN BAGHDAD a couple of years ago, my interpreter introduced me to a young businessman, Mr Rustum Hammadi.
Mr Hammadi's handshake felt a little odd. The skin on his hand was rubbery, the fingers stiff. When he later told me his story, I understood why.
The young man had been running a Baghdad import-export business. When Washington imposed a punitive embargo on trade with Iraq, Saddam had ostentatiously retaliated by issuing a ban on the use of US dollars. Punishment would be swift and emphatic: Anyone caught breaking the new rule would have his or her forearm cut off.
But there were business deals under way that had been contracted in US dollars. Mr Hammadi made the mistake of assuming that he could let these go through.
Agents of Saddam's Mukhabarat (the intelligence organisation dedicated personally to Saddam) came calling. They took Mr Hammadi to a hospital, where a surgeon briskly removed his forearm.
A week or so later, as Iraqi trade began to suffer from the dollar ban, Saddam withdrew the edict.
Mr Hammadi was troubled by his bad luck, but that feeling came a poor second to a thought that bothered him: the whereabouts of his forearm. 'Someone close to you dies, and after a time you remember that person only now and then,' he told The Straits Times. 'But the loss of an arm? You live with that memory every minute of your day.'
So, after Saddam had been overthrown and it was safe to inquire, he went in search of the amputating surgeon. The doctor told him that all limbs amputated for punishment reasons were removed immediately from the hospital.
'They were delivered by courier straight to Saddam's desk,' said the doctor. 'The leader felt this was the only way he could be sure that his order had been carried out.'
Before I visited Iraq I had read, of course, of Saddam Hussein's brutality - the gassing of Kurds, the torture chambers, the mass graves near every police station. But the peculiar nature of the deposed ruler and his regime did not come home to me fully until I shook hands with Mr Hammadi.
Trainee journalists are taught that a well-written news story supplies a reader with answers to six basic questions: what, who, when, where, why and how.
Over the past few days, obituaries for the late ex-president have all retold the Saddam story. Briefly put, the pathologically cruel, ill-educated stepson of a landless peasant and petty thief ruled Iraq from 1979 until his overthrow by a US-led invasion in 2003. Following a controversial 14-month trial in an Iraqi court, he was hanged in Baghdad last weekend.
My brief summary covers the who, what, when and where essential to a crisp news report.
But what of the why and how of the Saddam years? Why did Iraq appear to need such a brutal ruler? And how did Saddam grab and then hold the job?
Perhaps the paranoia that caused severed limbs to be delivered to the leader's in-tray is a large part of both answers?
My Oxford Dictionary defines paranoia as 'an abnormal tendency to suspect and mistrust others'. Iraq's abnormal 86-year history makes such a tendency comprehensible, though, of course, not forgivable.
Immediately after World War I, the British, anxious to have a weak client state with oilfields on their sea routes to India, engineered control of part of the Persian Gulf coast of Turkey's collapsing Ottoman Empire and called the area Iraq 'the land along the river banks' (Tigris and Euphrates).
Britain drew the borders without taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country. Scribbling on an atlas, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill forced Sunnis and Shi'ites - two perennially warring Arab divisions of Islam - to join with non-Arab Kurds. 'Iraq was not merely an artificial creation,' said Sir John Keegan, Britain's foremost military historian. 'It was a monstrosity.'
During the British occupation, the British simplified their dealings with the locals by favouring with bureaucratic appointments the Sunni middle classes from Baghdad and Mosul. The clans from these two cities had provided the Ottoman army with its regional officer corps.
In the 1930s economic changes began to alter the army's composition, attracting Sunnis who, like Saddam's clan, were from smaller towns. One notable exodus was from Tikrit, Saddam's home town about 60km north of the capital.
Historian Amatzia Baram has identified one of the causes - the kalak, a small boat that Tikritis made from animal skins, had become obsolete. As kalak building declined, many young Tikritis began joining the army and internal security services.
Out of a series of army coups, a Tikriti army officer, Ahmed Hasan Al-Bakr, emerged as the country's president and leader of the ruling Baath Party. He was highly regarded - 'a typical regimental officer...able to use the language of military collegiality to create a certain bond with fellow officers', noted Mr Charles Tripp, a leading historian of modern Iraq.
Unfortunately for Iraq, Bakr was also Saddam's maternal uncle. He put his nephew in charge of internal security. Over the course of about a decade, during which many of Saddam's political rivals died violently or were exiled or imprisoned, Saddam became vice-president. Then in 1979, discreetly but with menaces, he demanded the presidency.
Bakr resigned, citing health grounds. Saddam took over. Three years later, on what was rumoured to be the eve of Bakr's return to politics, the ex-president died in mysterious circumstances.
Given the manner in which Saddam became Iraq's leader, it was not surprising that he paid a lot of attention to his personal security.
He had earlier created a presidential protection force - the Himaya - recruiting young Tikritis, mostly from his own tribe, the Albu-Nasir.
To them Saddam was 'Amna Al-Chebir' (Our Great Uncle). In return for privileges, they submitted to strict discipline: An oversight or neglect of duty could be punished with death.
Their career pinnacle was the Albu-Nasir-controlled Special Security Organisation (SSO), the most-feared internal security group. A junior SSO officer effectively outranked the most senior army general.
Historian Baram notes that an inordinately high percentage of military officers also had the surname Al-Nasiri, or were from Tikrit. Two successive air force commanders were Al-Nasiris.
At the time of the US-led invasion in 2003, the armed forces chief of staff, the air force commander and two or three of the five army group commanders and most of the elite Republican Guard's divisional commanders were all Tikritis.
Tikrit accounted for only about 30,000 of Iraq's population. 'Choosing the high command of the army and Republican Guard from such a small segment of a population of 23 million may be a dubious guarantee of quality and create much resentment in the army,' noted Professor Baram on the eve of the invasion, 'but it does guarantee political control'.
All political studies of Saddam's Iraq point to the state's ponderous bureaucracy. The small, Tikrit-based ruling group's need to spy on the populace was partly to blame for this.
The regime's massive, overlapping security services spied on everybody, including each other. Periodically, agents would approach SSO or military officers suggesting that they become collaborators in a plot to overthrow the regime. If the approach were not immediately reported, jail or execution would likely follow.
If the SSO and its ilk were Saddam's brutal stick, his patronage system was his carrot. Oil price rises after 1973 gave him vast sums to channel throughout society.
But not surprisingly, the disbursement of rewards, though it buttressed Saddam's rule, also generated resentment. Saddam's Iraq was run by what Dr Toby Dodge of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies historian called 'a coalition of guilt'.
'Resentment of the excluded is a constant feature of all types of Iraqi politics,' said Dr Dodge. 'On the national level the Shi'ites feel more excluded than the Sunni population. The Sunnis who are not Tikritis feel discriminated against. The Tikritis who are not Albu-Nasir are resentful...'
Add the resentment of citizens of any nation towards a foreign occupier - even, it seems, a liberator - that is perceived to have stayed too long and perhaps we begin to understand the currently ferocious boil-over in Iraq. The late president and his paranoia have much to answer for.
