Political Science Quarterly
Issue 114, No. 1 (Spring 1999)

Saddam’s Word: Political Discourse in Iraq
by Ofra Bengio. New York, Oxford University Press, 1998.
Reviewed by F. Gregory Gause, III

 

Anyone who doubts the corrupting effects of totalitarianism on political language — if such a person could exist at the end of our century of totalitarianisms — should read this book. Bengio, a research fellow at the Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University, has compiled exhaustive evidence from the Iraqi sources to show how the Ba’thist regime in general and Saddam Hussein in particular have debased the political vocabulary of Iraq in ways almost comical (on subjects like “democracy” and “revolution”) but more often chilling (the glorification of violence, abject hero worship, the dehumanization of enemies and the corrupt use of religious imagery). She breaks no new theoretical ground in asserting the relationship between the degradation of politics and that of language, a theme well developed by students of fascism and communism and demonstrated in the case of Ba’thist Iraq in earlier works by Kanaan Makiyya. What she does is marshal overwhelming evidence of the phenomenon in modern Iraq. She also traces out the opportunistic shift in Saddam’s own rhetoric from the secular nationalism of the 1960’s and 1970’s to his increasing (and increasingly cynical) appropriation of Islamic rhetorical tropes and images in the 1980’s and 1990’s, as things started to go badly for his regime.

Bengio is less successful in establishing causal links between this degraded political vocabulary and political action, admittedly a much harder task. Did the constant drumbeat of Saddam’s propaganda actually work at convincing Iraqis of the indispensability of his leadership? At times Bengio suggests that it did, arguing that such “packaged expressions placed the individual mind under tutelage and eventually enslaved people” (p. 205) and that “such constant repetition of ancient themes had a cumulative effect on the way Iraqis conceived of their political experience” (p. 77). Yet these are merely assertions, as she can offer no evidence of what Iraqis really thought about politics and Saddam. She also admits that the widespread uprisings against the regime in 1991 call into question the effectiveness of over twenty years of its propaganda.

The author is also on slippery ground when she states that Saddam’s rhetorical excesses were more than simply justifications for his policies, that they drove him through some (unspecified) feedback mechanism to take the disastrous decisions he did in the 1990-91 Gulf War. She states that “those who initiate the use of this particular brand of language end up its prisoners. This view is fully borne out by the chain of events leading up to the Gulf War” (p. 206). But such a conclusion requires a detailed analysis of that chain of events, to establish that Saddam was a prisoner of his own rhetoric rather than a risk-taker responding to the threats and opportunities he perceived around him. Bengio does not provide that analysis.

This book leaves no doubt that totalitarianism’s corrupting effects on language are as severe in a non-European environment as they have been in the blood-stained experiments of European totalitarianism. It is less convincing when trying to argue that such language is as much a cause of the politics of those regimes as a consequence.

F. Gregory Gause, III
University of Vermont