Shame and Honor, Terribly Twisted: A central truth of Arab culture is on full display in Iraq

Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party loyalists are fighting for their lives. The conventions of war mean nothing to these masters of brutality and ruse. They employ death squads to massacre their own people in order to prevent them from accepting food and water from coalition forces. Dressed as civilians, they hide behind women and children, and open fire in the certain knowledge that any return of fire must claim innocent victims. They place anti-aircraft weapons in or near schools and hospitals and markets, and use ambulances to convey arms. Then they blame coalition forces for casualties that they have made sure will occur. Young Iraqis, presumed to be defectors, have been found shot dead with a bullet in the back of the head. As Saddam himself said in a perfect summary of the perverted logic of mass intimidation and terror, "We will see how many Iraqis the Americans are prepared to kill."

Ruling a population of some 22 million, he himself is already responsible for the death of between 1 and 2 million of them, almost literally decimation, with another 4 million driven into exile. Among other refinements of torture, his Ba'ath party loyalists have stuffed living victims feet first into shredders. Accusing one unfortunate man of wishing to flee the country a few days ago, Ba'athists tied him to a lamppost, cut his tongue out, and obliged the local residents to watch him die slowly. Saddam and his henchmen will commit every conceivable crime in order to survive in power. Should he see advantage in using weapons of mass destruction, he will. Superior power alone is able to constrain him.

Yet people still seem taken by surprise. Lt.-Gen. William Wallace, commanding V Corps, reacts to the cruelties before his eyes by saying, "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against." Deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz comments, "We probably did underestimate the willingness of this regime to commit war crimes." Those accustomed to democratic procedure habitually show complete lack of comprehension of the mechanics of tyranny. Arab regimes are all tyrannies, some hard, some soft, depending on the personality of the ruler and the demands he makes on his police and security apparatus. It is not terror as such that singles out Saddam among other Arab rulers, but the exceptional scale on which he deploys it. The late President Hafiz Assad of Syria ordered artillery to raze the Syrian city of Hama, killing an unknown number of thousands and cementing over their corpses. In the Algerian civil war, between 100,000 and 120,000 people have been killed, many of them villagers whose throats are slit by their attackers. Yasser Arafat's Palestinians fire on their own people, dispatch mobs to lynch supposed collaborators with Israel, and organize suicide bombers to kill innocent bystanders. On one occasion in the current intifada, two Israelis lost their way in the West Bank town of Ramallah, and were captured and beaten to death in the local police station. Smiling, one of the Palestinian murderers then held up his blood-stained hands before a joyful crowd. Whooping Iraqis are to be seen on television dancing round the corpses of American and British soldiers who may well have been executed.

Arabs do not have some special bad character conditioning such behavior, needless to say. Generally speaking, they are hospitable and eager for friendship. Every country has its share of sadistic criminals, and they have to be restrained by the law. A tyranny, on the contrary, licenses sadistic criminals, empowering and of course rewarding them. "Law," said Saddam Hussein in a memorable utterance, "is two lines above my signature." Crime becomes the order of the day. The strong enrich and enjoy themselves, the weak endure or go to the wall. With undoubted cunning, Saddam has contrived to steal Iraq's oil wealth, make the country his private fiefdom, and enroll the Ba'ath party into a mass criminal enterprise. Would-be tyrants can learn from his example, as he learned from Stalin and Hitler.

Nothing like a nation-state, Iraq is a conglomeration of conflicting ethnicities and religious faiths, comprising Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds and Turcomen and Assyrians who are not Arabs, the Christian Chaldeans, and other minorities. These are laboratory conditions for the cultivation of a strongman who can hold together the different identities, and not for some benign philosopher-king, let alone a democrat. Iraqis have furthermore been indoctrinated to believe that they won their independence militarily from Britain, the colonial power between the world wars. Independence unfortunately did not mean freedom. But some of them do indeed see American and British forces as invaders of their land out to reimpose colonialism, and therefore to be fought. The phenomenon of nationalism without a nation-state to embody it is rather hallucinatory, but it may be a good augury that it is possible in the end to build a nation-state out of apparently incompatible religious and ethnic elements.

Like all Arabs, Iraqis live in what anthropologists call a shame society, and this generates common values that all can share, to that extent acting as a social glue. The key to motivation in such a society is the acquisition of honor that brings high status to the individual, and conversely the avoidance of shame that is a guarantee of low status. To complete the anthropologists' schema, Westerners live in a guilt society, whereby whoever does something wrong feels conscience- stricken about it, even if nobody ever finds out what he did. On the shame-honor scale of values, the individual who does wrong need feel bad only if he is discovered. If he gets away with it, he can congratulate himself on his cleverness. What can look like lying or dissembling on the part of Arabs, or in contrast boasting, is often prompted by the shame-honor calculus invisible to the outsider.

In this culture, honor implies victory and triumph, while defeat brings unmitigated shame and disgrace. In that spirit Saddam likes to assert that the 1991 Gulf War was a famous victory worthy of constant celebration. In that same spirit, the Egyptians have built a museum in Cairo in the pretense that the 1973 war was a famous victory, when in reality the Israelis were ultimately in a position to annihilate the Egyptians on the near side of the Suez Canal, and capture Cairo on the far side. Attempting to convert the reality of defeat into the illusion of victory, Palestinians on the West Bank have built shrine-like models of the sites where suicide bombers have done their work, complete with mock-ups of dead Israelis.

Constructing a heroic biography for himself, depicting himself all over Iraq in the poses of a ruler fit to be compared to the greatest in history, and defying the might of the United States, Saddam knows he can count on the appeal to honor. A strong man earns applause because he is capable of deeds the weak could never even contemplate. Utterly bewildering to Westerners, the spectacle then arises of people coming to admire the tyrant who oppresses them. Promoting hierarchy and obstructing trust, shame-and-honor values appear to be the main obstacle to democracy in the Arab world. Usually, Islam is considered a more significant obstacle to democracy; it has separatist aspects, to be sure, but its vision of equality and justice may reasonably be considered democratic.

On the opening day of hostilities, apparently having just survived a missile attack directed at him, Saddam in a television address gave a perfect example of shame-honor rhetoric (allowing for the awkwardness of instant translation): "These days will add to your record, your bright record, all you male and female dignified people. This is your share of dignity and victory, and everything that will raise the status before God and will let the infidels down . . . And your enemies will be in humiliation and defeat, God willing." One of the less amiable verses of the Koran concerning the treatment of enemies is "Cut their throats, and be patient," and that is what Saddam exhorts his people to do. All his speeches contain characteristic sentiments of this kind: God sees war against the West as "a source of honor, pride, glory, and blessing for you in this life and the hereafter." So homogenous is the culture that Yasser Arafat's speeches are indistinguishable in tone and language.

Originally from Pakistan, Hala Jaber is a journalist with experience of the Muslim and Arab world. In an article in a British newspaper, she has explained that Iraqis, including Shias, "fight not to save Saddam Hussein but to defend their honor." The desecration of honor, she goes on, is "an unforgivable sin in Iraq's culture." Writing from a London address to another British newspaper, someone by the name of Ahmad al- Abdallah is a typical voice from the Arab street, conceding that Arab rulers are all tyrants who resort to torture or deportation of their minorities, only to conclude, "So what is left to them is honor." Saddam's deputy and vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan justified suicide bombers with the words, "This is a battle of honor, dignity, and every single Arab shares that honor with us." The Arab press is giving the impression that Iraq has virtually won the war. Whoever feels dishonored cannot be talked out of it, or reasoned with. Shame sears the soul, and it has to be wiped out and avenged in a public way that all can witness and appreciate. No cost is too great for this end. That is the wellspring of the fanaticism we are witnessing.

In the collapse of all totalitarian regimes there comes what strategists call a "tipping moment," when people must think of self- preservation as the supreme value. This was last evidenced in mid 1990 in the old Soviet Union, when the choice had to be made between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Carefully weighing up the situation, army generals and party bosses concluded that Gorbachev either would not or could not kill them; he was therefore doomed to lose power; and it was a sensible career move to desert him in favor of Yeltsin, the coming winner. In Saddam's case, honor would dictate that he die a Hitler-type death in a bunker, and so establish his legend. Otherwise defeat, perhaps followed by flight and exile, will bring shame upon him, proving that his claim to victory and heroism was only posturing. Either way, on the day when he can no longer exercise the power of life and death, Iraqi army generals and Ba'ath party loyalists will then have to make their choice too, whether to go down with him or accommodate to the successor regime. Careerist survival at this point has priority over honor.

One hopes that, in much the same way the Soviet Union turned into Russia, Iraq will turn into a nation-state and democracy -- a forbidding but not impossible task, so long as Iraqis are allowed to do it for themselves. Nobody yet has any clear idea what sort of future government Washington envisages. Well qualified as many of them are, members of the Iraqi opposition are being kept under wraps. Outsiders cannot be expected to make decisions for Iraqis. It may be necessary for the United States to keep the peace during a transitional period. But any sort of American military or civil administration with political responsibilities is certain almost immediately to arouse both an Islamic and a shame-honor reaction uniting the population against it. Iraqis would perceive themselves as defeated and colonized rather than liberated, and the shame of that is likely to lead to an intifada even more violent than the Palestinian model. That's how to strangle democracy at birth.

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