REVISITING SADDAM HUSSEIN&apos;S POLITICAL LANGUAGE: THE SOURCES AND ROLES OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES

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REVISITING SADDAM HUSSEIN'S POLITICAL LANGUAGE: THE SOURCES AND ROLES OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES

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Author(s): Matthew Gray

Publication date (Print): 1 January 2010

Journal: Arab Studies Quarterly

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Journal ID (doi): 10.2307/j50005550

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Publication date (Print): 1 January 2010

Volume: 32

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Notes

Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
Amatzia Baram, "The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Decision-making in Baghdad," in Amatzia Baram and Barry Rubin, eds., Iraq s Road to War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993); John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, Saddam's War: The Origins of the Conflict and the International Response (London: Faber and Faber, 1991); Committee Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CARDRI), Saddam 's Iraq: Revolution or Reaction? (London: Zed Books, 1989).
Jeffrey Record, Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War (McLean, VA: Brassey's Inc., 1993). Robert Springborg, "Origins of the Gulf Crisis," Australian Journal of International Affairs 44:3 (December 1990), 221-235.
Samir al-Khalil (pseudonym for Kanan Makiya), Republic of Fear: Saddam's Iraq (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989); Ofra Bengio, Saddam s Word: Political Discourse in Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jerry M. Long, Saddam 's War of Words: Politics, Religion, and the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).
Svetlana Boym, "Conspiracy Theories and Literary Ethics: Umberto Eco, Danila Kiš and The Protocols ofZion ," Comparative Literature 51:2 (Spring 1999), 97.
Shane Miller, "Conspiracy Theories: Public Arguments as Coded Social Critiques. A Rhetorical Analysis of the TWA Flight 800 Conspiracy Theories," Argumentation and Advocacy 39:1 (Summer 2002), 41.
Ibid., 41.
Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985).
Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: Free Press, 1997). Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 5, 27.
Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 3-4.
The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7-16.
David C. Schwartz, Political Alienation and Political Behaviour (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1973), 3.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially 21-24.
Bengio, Saddam's Word.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 10.
Long, Saddam 's War of Words.
Ibid., 5.
US News and World Report, Triumph Without Victory: The History of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Times Books, 1992), 20-22, 132-133; al-Khalil, Republic of Fear, 17-18, 55-58, 100-101; Baram, "The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait," 11-12.
Long, Saddam 's War of Words, 20, 30.
Ibid.
Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear, 110-117 and especially 115-116.
Samir al-Khalil (pseudonym for Kanan Makiya), The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (London: André Deutsch, 1991).
Michael A. Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf: A History of America's Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf 1833-1992 (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 112-149.
Bulloch and Morris, Saddam's War, 100-101.
Ibid., 1 3 and 22; Dilip Hiro, From Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War (London: Paladin, 1992), 83-84. Hiro, From Desert Shield to Desert Storm, 113.
Long, Saddam 's War of Words, 20.
Bulloch and Morris, Saddam's War, 143.
ibid., 8 and 24, Long, Saddam's War of Words, 10-11 and 190.
Gerald Butt, A Rock and a Hard Place: Origins of Arab-Western Conflict in the Middle East (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 43-44.
Saddam Hussein, speech on Baghdad television, August 10, 1990, reprinted in The New York Times, August 11, 1990, quoted in Long, Saddam 's War of Words, 30.
Saddam Hussein, speech on Baghdad radio, February 21, 1991, reprinted in Ian Bickerton and Michael Pearson et al., 43 Days: The Gulf War (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1991), 233.
Joe Barnes and Amy Myers Jaffe, "The Persian Gulf and the Geopolitics of Oil," Survival 48:1 (Spring 2006), 148. Ken Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1993), 191-204.
Hiro, From Desert Shield to Desert Storm, 113.
Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice (London: Macmillan, 1998), Jane Adas, "Iraq Sanctions Challenge," The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs XVII:4 (June 1998), 113.
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: The Fourth Estate, 2005), 866-868.
"Husseins TV Ansprache, ausgestrahlt am 20. März, 2003" ("Hussein's TV Speech, Broadcast on 20 March 2003"), Rhetorikxh, n.p., www.rhetorik.ch/Aktuell/husseinkriegsrede/hussein.html (accessed September 15, 2007).
Pipes, The Hidden Hand, 325.
Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 15, quoted in ibid., 325.
Gareth Stansfield, Iraq: People, History, Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), especially 26-30, 33-36.
Eric Davis and Nicolas Gavrielides, "Statecraft, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture in Iraq and Kuwait," in Eric Davis and Nicolas Gavrielides, eds., Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991), 116-148.
Hanna Batatu, "Of the Diversity of Iraqis, the Incohesiveness of their Society, and their Progress in the Monarchic Period towards a Consolidated Political Structure," in Albert Houráni, Philip S. Khoury and Mary C. Wilson, eds., The Modern Middle East: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 518.
Bengio, Saddam's Word, 168-169.
Lisa Anderson, "Absolutism and the Resilience of Monarchy in the Middle East," Political Science Quarterly 106:1 (Spring 1991), 11.
Mark Juergensmeyer, "Dateline Baghdad: The Saddam Conspiracy Theory," The Globalist, September 29, 2004, n.p. www.theglobalist.com/DB Web/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4181 (accessed July 20, 2007).
Richard H. Curtiss, "Who Caused the War in the Gulf? Five Versions of History," The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs IX: 10 (March 1991), 10-11.
Bengio, Saddam's Word, 49.
Ibid., 51-53.
Ibid., 57-68.
Long, Saddam's War of Words, 82.
Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer, Flights of Fancy, Flights of Doom: KAL007 and Soviet- American Rhetoric (Lanham: University Press of America, 1988), 223-224.
James A. Bill and Robert Springborg, Politics in the Middle East, 3rd ed. (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman/ Little, Brown, 1990), in particular 152-176.
Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 42.
Ibid., 44-45.
Ibid., 44.
Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba'thist Syria (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990).
Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination, 41.
Ibid., 42.
Saddam Hussein, speech on Baghdad radio, February 26, 1991, reprinted in Bickerton and Pearson et al., 43 Days, 233.
Long, Saddam 's War of Words, 154.
Al-Khalil makes this point about public art in the context of war (in this case, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War), in al-Khalil, The Monument, 10-18.
Bill and Springborg, Politics in the Middle East, 170-173.
From an article in al-Qudisiyya, January 21, 1992, cited in Bengio, Saddam 's Word, 69.
Saddam 's Word, 77-79.
Amir Iskander, Saddam Husain: Munadhilan wa Mufakiran wa Insanan (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 320, cited in al-Khalil, The Monument, 33.
Mark Kagan, "After Iraq: Humiliations and Conspiracy Theories," Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy 31:5 (May 2003), 16.
Paul Taylor, "Baghdad's Easy Fall Fuels Arab Conspiracy Theories," Reuters, April 11, 2003, n.p., copy available at www.bulatlat.com/news/3-11/3-11-readertaylor.html (accessed April 13, 2007).
Karin Hörner, "A Cultural Sense of Conspiracies?," paper prepared for the conference: Orientalism and Conspiracy: Workshop in Honour of Sadik al-Azm, at the Asia-Africa-Institute, University of Hamburg, Germany, June 24, 2005.
Paul Wood, "The Day Saddam's Statue Fell," BBC News, April 9, 2004, n.p. http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/ hi/middle_east/3611869.stm (accessed April 13, 2007).
"Supporting Iraq's Sunni Arabs is National, Islamic Responsibility," Al Quds Al Arabi, February 9, 2007.
"Egypt: Saddam Conspiracy Proves a Bestseller," adnkronosinternational, n.p. www.adnki.com/ index_2Level_English.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.384087301&par=0# (accessed April 13, 2007).
Sudarsan Raghavan, "Maliki's Impact Blunted by Own Party's Fears," The Washington Post, August 3, 2007.
Ibid.
Lionel Beehner, "Backgrounder: Iraq's Press:A Status Report," Council on Foreign Relations, May 2, 2006, n.p. www.cfr.org/publication/10574/#4 (accessed September 11, 2007).
Ibid.
Steven Stalinsky, "Middle East Conspiracy Theories," The New York Sun, September 11, 2007.
"The New Iraqi Press—2003," al-bab. com, n.p. www.al-bab.com/arab/countries/iraq/press2003. htm (accessed September 11, 2007) "World Newspapers and Magazines: Iraq," Worldpress.org, n.p. www.worldpress.org/newspapers/ MIDEAST/Iraq.cfm (accessed September 11, 2007).
Adeed Dawisha, "'Identity' and Political Survival in Saddam's Iraq," The Middle East Journal 53:4 (Autumn 1999), 553-567.
Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International Relations, 47.
Butt, A Rock and a Hard Place, 43-44.
From Tishrin , n.d., n.p., quoted in "Arab Press Worried about Syria," BBC Monitoring, April 15, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2948989.stm (accessed September 12, 2007).

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (New York: The Free Press, 1991).

[2] Amatzia Baram, "The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Decision-making in Baghdad," in Amatzia Baram and Barry Rubin, eds., Iraq s Road to War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993); John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, Saddam's War: The Origins of the Conflict and the International Response (London: Faber and Faber, 1991); Committee Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq (CARDRI), Saddam 's Iraq: Revolution or Reaction? (London: Zed Books, 1989).

[3] Jeffrey Record, Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War (McLean, VA: Brassey's Inc., 1993). Robert Springborg, "Origins of the Gulf Crisis," Australian Journal of International Affairs 44:3 (December 1990), 221-235.

[4] Samir al-Khalil (pseudonym for Kanan Makiya), Republic of Fear: Saddam's Iraq (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989); Ofra Bengio, Saddam s Word: Political Discourse in Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jerry M. Long, Saddam 's War of Words: Politics, Religion, and the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

[5] Svetlana Boym, "Conspiracy Theories and Literary Ethics: Umberto Eco, Danila Kiš and The Protocols ofZion ," Comparative Literature 51:2 (Spring 1999), 97.

[6] Shane Miller, "Conspiracy Theories: Public Arguments as Coded Social Critiques. A Rhetorical Analysis of the TWA Flight 800 Conspiracy Theories," Argumentation and Advocacy 39:1 (Summer 2002), 41.

[7] Ibid., 41.

[8] Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985).

[9] Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: Free Press, 1997). Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 5, 27.

[10] Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 3-4.

[11] The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7-16.

[12] David C. Schwartz, Political Alienation and Political Behaviour (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1973), 3.

[13] Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially 21-24.

[14] Bengio, Saddam's Word.

[15] Ibid., 9.

[16] Ibid., 10.

[17] Long, Saddam 's War of Words.

[18] Ibid., 5.

[19] US News and World Report, Triumph Without Victory: The History of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Times Books, 1992), 20-22, 132-133; al-Khalil, Republic of Fear, 17-18, 55-58, 100-101; Baram, "The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait," 11-12.

[20] Long, Saddam 's War of Words, 20, 30.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear, 110-117 and especially 115-116.

[23] Samir al-Khalil (pseudonym for Kanan Makiya), The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (London: André Deutsch, 1991).

[24] Michael A. Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf: A History of America's Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf 1833-1992 (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 112-149.

[25] Bulloch and Morris, Saddam's War, 100-101.

[26] Ibid., 1 3 and 22; Dilip Hiro, From Desert Shield to Desert Storm: The Second Gulf War (London: Paladin, 1992), 83-84. Hiro, From Desert Shield to Desert Storm, 113.

[27] Long, Saddam 's War of Words, 20.

[28] Bulloch and Morris, Saddam's War, 143.

[29] ibid., 8 and 24, Long, Saddam's War of Words, 10-11 and 190.

[30] Gerald Butt, A Rock and a Hard Place: Origins of Arab-Western Conflict in the Middle East (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 43-44.

[31] Saddam Hussein, speech on Baghdad television, August 10, 1990, reprinted in The New York Times, August 11, 1990, quoted in Long, Saddam 's War of Words, 30.

[32] Saddam Hussein, speech on Baghdad radio, February 21, 1991, reprinted in Ian Bickerton and Michael Pearson et al., 43 Days: The Gulf War (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1991), 233.

[33] Joe Barnes and Amy Myers Jaffe, "The Persian Gulf and the Geopolitics of Oil," Survival 48:1 (Spring 2006), 148. Ken Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1993), 191-204.

[34] Hiro, From Desert Shield to Desert Storm, 113.

[35] Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice (London: Macmillan, 1998), Jane Adas, "Iraq Sanctions Challenge," The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs XVII:4 (June 1998), 113.

[36] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: The Fourth Estate, 2005), 866-868.

[37] "Husseins TV Ansprache, ausgestrahlt am 20. März, 2003" ("Hussein's TV Speech, Broadcast on 20 March 2003"), Rhetorikxh, n.p., www.rhetorik.ch/Aktuell/husseinkriegsrede/hussein.html (accessed September 15, 2007).

[38] Pipes, The Hidden Hand, 325.

[39] Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 15, quoted in ibid., 325.

[40] Gareth Stansfield, Iraq: People, History, Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), especially 26-30, 33-36.

[41] Eric Davis and Nicolas Gavrielides, "Statecraft, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture in Iraq and Kuwait," in Eric Davis and Nicolas Gavrielides, eds., Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991), 116-148.

[42] Hanna Batatu, "Of the Diversity of Iraqis, the Incohesiveness of their Society, and their Progress in the Monarchic Period towards a Consolidated Political Structure," in Albert Houráni, Philip S. Khoury and Mary C. Wilson, eds., The Modern Middle East: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 518.

[43] Bengio, Saddam's Word, 168-169.

[44] Lisa Anderson, "Absolutism and the Resilience of Monarchy in the Middle East," Political Science Quarterly 106:1 (Spring 1991), 11.

[45] Mark Juergensmeyer, "Dateline Baghdad: The Saddam Conspiracy Theory," The Globalist, September 29, 2004, n.p. www.theglobalist.com/DB Web/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4181 (accessed July 20, 2007).

[46] Richard H. Curtiss, "Who Caused the War in the Gulf? Five Versions of History," The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs IX: 10 (March 1991), 10-11.

[47] Bengio, Saddam's Word, 49.

[48] Ibid., 51-53.

[49] Ibid., 57-68.

[50] Long, Saddam's War of Words, 82.

[51] Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer, Flights of Fancy, Flights of Doom: KAL007 and Soviet- American Rhetoric (Lanham: University Press of America, 1988), 223-224.

[52] James A. Bill and Robert Springborg, Politics in the Middle East, 3rd ed. (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman/ Little, Brown, 1990), in particular 152-176.

[53] Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 42.

[54] Ibid., 44-45.

[55] Ibid., 44.

[56] Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba'thist Syria (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990).

[57] Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination, 41.

[58] Ibid., 42.

[59] Saddam Hussein, speech on Baghdad radio, February 26, 1991, reprinted in Bickerton and Pearson et al., 43 Days, 233.

[60] Long, Saddam 's War of Words, 154.

[61] Al-Khalil makes this point about public art in the context of war (in this case, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War), in al-Khalil, The Monument, 10-18.

[62] Bill and Springborg, Politics in the Middle East, 170-173.

[63] From an article in al-Qudisiyya, January 21, 1992, cited in Bengio, Saddam 's Word, 69.

[64] Saddam 's Word, 77-79.

[65] Amir Iskander, Saddam Husain: Munadhilan wa Mufakiran wa Insanan (Paris: Hachette, 1980), 320, cited in al-Khalil, The Monument, 33.

[66] Mark Kagan, "After Iraq: Humiliations and Conspiracy Theories," Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy 31:5 (May 2003), 16.

[67] Paul Taylor, "Baghdad's Easy Fall Fuels Arab Conspiracy Theories," Reuters, April 11, 2003, n.p., copy available at www.bulatlat.com/news/3-11/3-11-readertaylor.html (accessed April 13, 2007).

[68] Karin Hörner, "A Cultural Sense of Conspiracies?," paper prepared for the conference: Orientalism and Conspiracy: Workshop in Honour of Sadik al-Azm, at the Asia-Africa-Institute, University of Hamburg, Germany, June 24, 2005.

[69] Paul Wood, "The Day Saddam's Statue Fell," BBC News, April 9, 2004, n.p. http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/ hi/middle_east/3611869.stm (accessed April 13, 2007).

[70] "Supporting Iraq's Sunni Arabs is National, Islamic Responsibility," Al Quds Al Arabi, February 9, 2007.

[71] "Egypt: Saddam Conspiracy Proves a Bestseller," adnkronosinternational, n.p. www.adnki.com/ index_2Level_English.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.384087301&par=0# (accessed April 13, 2007).

[72] Sudarsan Raghavan, "Maliki's Impact Blunted by Own Party's Fears," The Washington Post, August 3, 2007.

[73] Ibid.

[74] Lionel Beehner, "Backgrounder: Iraq's Press:A Status Report," Council on Foreign Relations, May 2, 2006, n.p. www.cfr.org/publication/10574/#4 (accessed September 11, 2007).

[75] Ibid.

[76] Steven Stalinsky, "Middle East Conspiracy Theories," The New York Sun, September 11, 2007.

[77] "The New Iraqi Press—2003," al-bab. com, n.p. www.al-bab.com/arab/countries/iraq/press2003. htm (accessed September 11, 2007) "World Newspapers and Magazines: Iraq," Worldpress.org, n.p. www.worldpress.org/newspapers/ MIDEAST/Iraq.cfm (accessed September 11, 2007).

[78] Adeed Dawisha, "'Identity' and Political Survival in Saddam's Iraq," The Middle East Journal 53:4 (Autumn 1999), 553-567.

[79] Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International Relations, 47.

[80] Butt, A Rock and a Hard Place, 43-44.

[81] From Tishrin , n.d., n.p., quoted in "Arab Press Worried about Syria," BBC Monitoring, April 15, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2948989.stm (accessed September 12, 2007).