Republic of Fear Quotes

“On the face of it, the Iraq-Iran war presents itself, both in its origins and in what has sustained it, as the titanic clash of two men locked in a fight to the finish. This does not go far enough only because the dominant political attribute of each man is his unprecedented concentration of authority deriving in the one case fear and in the other faith. Fear and faith are among the most elemental and primordial of all human drives; under certain circumstances they have the force to make men die in droves for no other reason than they cannot imagine doing otherwise. They have conferred onto the person will of these two men the deadly power unleashed by the decisions of this war. The final meaning of a war like this, one it shares with the Lebanese civil war but none of the Arab-Israeli wars, resides in the simple truth that its mere occurrence has taken away from all of us yet another chunk of an already battered humanity.”
― Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“The two perfect symbols that sum up the meaning of the Iraq-Iran war are the human wave strategy and poisonous gas, neither of which lend themselves to a strategy in warfare designed around expressly political ends. Both fixate on death as an obviously nonpolitical end in itself, whether it be purposeless slaughter of noncombatants or one's own soldiery. Ironically, poison gas and trench warfare (a different form of human wave strategy) were inventions indissolubly associated with World War I-a war that gave us such monuments to human folly as the killing fields of Verdun, quite possibly the densest collection of corpses on the planet.”
― Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“The first act of self-defence is to conceal and calculate with respect to all thoughts and emotions, to pretend things are other than what they are. Appearances become even more important than in other "normal" backwards societies. More unhealthy is the compulsive Iraqi concern with being publicly inconspicuous in contrast with other ostentatious and yet less inhuman preoccupations with social standing and conspicuous consumption that afflicts societies in the Gulf. In the Iraqi setting it is essential that things not be called what they area; violence, for example, is thought by the average citizen to be at a "normal" level. To think otherwise is to let down one's defences in the face of its onslaught. The obsession with putting a mask on oneself in the workplace, in dealings with officials, in relations to neighbours and even within the family is so pervasive today in Iraq that inevitably the distinction implicit in the original act of deception gets blurred; the mask fits so completely, so tightly, that it can no longer be readily discarded. Like a snail sealed in its shell, personality and character shrivel up.”
― Samir al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“Gone was the slightest implication of compassion if it had ever existed before. “I have seen young boys burned alive,” he said. “I have seen Iranian and Iraqi boys tearing each other literally with their nails and teeth. It is raging hate against raging hate.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“In Iraq, the public has lost all sense of self; it exists only in the form artificially imparted to it by “its” regime. This was an outcome of statification, party growth, and all the other indices that have been discussed.442 The dissolution of Iraqi identity is the most fundamental explanation for why no connection existed in Baʿthist Iraq between military achievements and extending or withholding political allegiance.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“Masses of Iraqis keep on dying for no palpably tangible reason that they can so much as identify to themselves, far less anyone else. Why?”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“The intimate connection between war and citizenship lies at the heart of the modern state,” Fouad ‘Ajami wrote of the 1967 defeat.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“The absence of real pressures from within Iraqi society, from Iran, from the world at large, or even from his own party leaves those of us who would write about the “cause” of this war with nothing to evaluate “objectively” and argue about.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“History” has very little to say about this war other than to recall the greatest battle ever fought between Arabs and Persians on the plains of Qadisiyyah in southern Iraq (A.D. 636). This event produces intensely emotive imagery in Iraq where the war was officially called Qadisiyyat Saddam. The irony is, however, that the battle of Qadisiyya only succeeded in overthrowing the Sassanian empire because of how rotted through it had become, and historians are agreed that the Arabs won because Iranians abandoned their army in droves to join the Islamic advance. Moreover, Iraq was inside the Sassanian empire at the time (the ruins of its capital, Ctesiphon, are in the geographical center of modern Iraq). So this kind of history is made up of a heap of ironies and is not the “cause” of anything; it merely confirms, albeit negatively, how “modern” Iraqis and Iranians have become.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq

“Therefore, the legacy of pan-Arabism as a phase in postwar Arab politics lies not in its failure over half a century to achieve Arab unity but in the way it captured the high ground of all politics: the language and fundamental categories it is conducted in.”
― Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq