But unlike France, where the eighteenth-century Reign of Terror—its counterrevolution—had lasted only a few years, Iraq’s terror, the Ba’athist years, lasted decades. Some of the very best people of Iraq were imprisoned and killed—writers and poets, scientists, freethinkers, intellectuals, academics, teachers, and political organizers. The mass murder and purging of “communists” throughout the Cold War in the Middle East uprooted the left wing, stifled secular voices, and led to the brain drain that was one of many causes of fundamentalism.
