Review of Samuel Helfont, Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023)

The Amiriyah shelter bombing has largely faded from memory outside Iraq, but during the Gulf War it was something of a cause célèbre for those who opposed military action against Saddam Hussein. Originally built as a civil defence facility for a wealthy neighbourhood in West Baghdad, ‘Public Shelter No. 25’ was demolished by two American laser-guided bunker-buster smart bombs in the early hours of February 13, 1991. The U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, General Merrill McPeak, claimed that the shelter was being used by the Iraqi military as a command and control base, but most of the 408 Iraqis killed in the strikes turned out to be women and children. Within a matter of hours, graphic footage of their charred and mangled bodies was being transmitted on Iraqi state TV and broadcast around the world. This was more than simply a controversial targeting decision or a tragic mistake — it was a strategic PR disaster for the U.S. and a major propaganda coup for the Ba’ath regime.

In his new book Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America and the Post-Cold War Order, Samuel Helfont identifies this as a turning point in the war. The massacre sparked global outrage, a response that taught Saddam something new about the “power of weakness”. “Prior to al-Amiriyah,” writes Helfont,

the Iraqi regime tried to hide civilian casualties in an attempt to project strength. After the bombing, the regime went to great pains to highlight Iraqi casualties. Saddam realized that the narrative of a weak and helpless Iraq being bullied by a neo-imperialist superpower was much more effective than a narrative of a strong Iraq standing up to the United States. (1)

Along with SCUD missiles fired at Tel Aviv and the Iraqi assault on the Saudi town of Khobi, this became a key component in the way that Saddam chose to conduct the fight: aware that he could not compete with U.S. firepower, he tried to wage a war of symbolism instead. The target here was public opinion abroad and the aim was to redefine the international media narrative. Saddam “quickly recognized the political power that existed in the gap between the justification for the war and the conduct of the war” (2) and was determined to prise this gap open. It was the only real advantage he had in the emerging post-Cold War system of international relations that was being rigged against him. 

One of the things you realise reading Helfont’s study is that, as far as it went, this was a very effective strategy. Unlike his enemies, Saddam had the benefit of three clear objectives: to undermine the weapons inspection regime, remove UN sanctions and destroy America’s ‘New World Order’. By the end of the 1990s, he was close to achieving all of these aims. UNSCOM inspectors had been kicked out of Iraq in 1999. The UN Oil-for-Food programme, established in 1995, had degenerated into a corruption racket that Saddam used to finance his own ambitions. Most important of all, the fragile comity of nations had been shattered: America (and the UK) was now at odds with France, Russia, China and most of the developing world over the issue of Iraq. To show how the Ba’ath regime played an active role in creating these conditions, Helfont makes forensic use of Iraqi state records captured by the U.S. military and Iraqi dissidents after 2003, including Iraqi intelligence and military documents, transcripts of closed-meetings between Saddam and his senior advisers and the archive of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party secretariat. (The big missing prize here is the collection of Foreign Ministry files that mysteriously disappeared during the mass looting that consumed Baghdad in March 2003.) These documents have allowed Helfont to fill in significant gaps in the narrative, detailing methods used by the Ba’ath regime to manipulate peace activists, humanitarian NGOs, foreign journalists, politicians and UN member states to meet its own objectives. The Amiriyah shelter bombing is where this all began — the inspiration and blueprint for a new strategy. 

Maybe it is significant here that the Iraqi Ba’athists had always found a political use for images of violence, pain, torture and gore. In Republic of Fear, Kanan Makiya described a scene from the aftermath of the 1963 coup, when a faction of the briefly victorious Ba’ath party broadcast films of Prime Minister Qassem’s bullet-ridden body on Iraqi state TV:

Night after night, they made their gruesome point. The body was propped up on a chair in the studio. A soldier sauntered around, handling its parts. The camera would cut to scenes of devastation at the Ministry of Defence where Qassem made his last stand. There, on location, it lingered on the mutilated corpses of Qassem’s entourage (al-Mahdawi, Wasfi Taher, and others). Back to the studio, and close-ups now of the entry and exit points of each bullet hole. The whole macabre sequence closes with a scene that must forever remain etched on the memory of all those who saw it: the soldier grabbing the lolling head by the hair, came right up close, and spat full face into it. (3)

The Iraqi Ba’athists specialised in snuff movies. Saddam’s 1979 party purge was filmed and then broadcast on national television, so that Iraqis could see government officials, Saddam’s own party comrades, being led from the room, terrified, to certain death, or begging for their lives. The regime’s security services routinely recorded their own sessions of torture, rape and murder on videos which they used to blackmail or simply break surviving family members. Some of these showed up on the Iraqi black market after the fall of the regime and Donald Rumsfeld recalled watching one recovered from Baghdad by the U.S. army:

It was a twelve-minute film Saddam’s internal security services had put together. The video documented various methods of torture that his regime used, including beatings, limb and tongue amputations, and beheadings. Men were thrown off three-storey buildings. Some were forced to hold out their arms to have them broken by lead pipes. Saddam’s men proudly videotaped their atrocities to terrorize others. (4)

Video was one of the key tools of terror used by the Ba’ath: they instinctively understood the power of the recorded image and the impact of showing unfiltered violence and body trauma. The way the regime used and reused the bloody footage of the Amiriyah victims was in this tradition, in the sense that it was prepared to exploit the most graphic and gory images available for maximum political effect. 

And the effect was to shatter the consensus that existed after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. For a while, Iraq was considered a “test case” for this new international liberal order, a symbolic precedent that would establish “the soundness of the new thinking, the new system of international relations,” according to Helfont (5). Saddam knew that the fate of this order rested on how he behaved and so he felt no incentive to comply with the conditions that it set. The “new system” that was now emerging required his surrender in order to validate itself. This would fundamentally redefine the nature of his rule and would almost certainly trigger the coup that the Americans wanted anyway. But he wasn’t interested in validating the new system. He didn’t feel suicidal. This was a problem, but the lesson of the Amiriyah massacre and the unfolding disaster of UN sanctions gave him the solution. The “strategy of weakness” had found its definitive subjects: the suffering Iraqi children. This was effective because Iraqi children were suffering. The sanctions, ostensibly designed to drive a wedge between the regime and its people and starve it of any materials that could be weaponised, were in practice cruel and illogical. The regime elite did not suffer (Saddam continued to build new palaces, Uday carried on collecting his Ferraris and Lamborghinis) but they fully leveraged the desperation of their own citizens. Under the tenure of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN tried to establish a new framework for conflicts fought in the name of collective security and humanitarianism. Saddam clearly understood that this ideal, which by its very nature was designed to exclude a regime like his, could be undermined by presenting images of starving, malnourished children as direct victims of a “criminal embargo” imposed by the UN itself.

This resonated with a large and receptive audience in the Arab and Islamic world which Saddam also exploited, as the documents that Helfont has uncovered show in detail. The Gulf War created the conditions for a new alliance between the Arab nationalists of the Ba’ath party and the developing Islamist networks of the early 1990s. For one thing, they had clearly defined, common enemies: America, Israel, and the West. For another, rapprochement with a particular Sunni Salafist strand of Islam allowed Saddam to tap into a powerful stream of populist sentiment in the region without compromising his hostility to Iran. This had begun, tentatively, in the 1980s, but found its true raison d’etre once Iraq was engaged in a conflict with America. Saddam’s grand strategy was to pry Sunni Islamists away from the Gulf States and Iran, and to link the plight of Iraq with the fate of Palestine. Saddam’s key insight here was that he could place Iraq at the heart of a MENA master narrative that linked Western “neo-imperialism” to Zionism in a broad conspiracy against the Arab and Islamic world. He conspicuously rewarded the families of suicide bombers in the Occupied Territories with cash bounties to boost his credentials in the struggle to liberate Palestine. His defiance of UN inspectors and allied No-Fly Zones was the visible evidence of his war against the West. This brand of populism gained traction and had the effect of isolating the more conservative rulers from their populations, thereby constraining the public support the US received from regimes that otherwise hated him. He also partly believed his own propaganda: raised in the Ba’ath tradition, these ideas were easy to reconcile with the anti-Zionist, anti-colonial Weltanschauung of Pan-Arabism. Saddam’s own religious observance was mostly for show and he continued to enjoy his Mateus Rosé and Cuban cigars inside his rapidly proliferating luxury palace complexes. The reconciliation with Islam (and Islamism) was ambiguous, conditional and opportunistic: it was, nevertheless, real. Downplayed by certain CIA analysts who got distracted by the regime’s secular habits, this became very important for a shaken and suspicious Bush administration in 2002. 

Popular support for the Iraqi Ba’ath regime in the Middle East and North Africa was supplemented by the increasing visibility of sympathisers in the West: not only those who could be directly persuaded or corrupted by the Ba’ath party’s international networks, but those willing to play a “voluntary role” by participating in and organising anti-sanctions protests and campaigns. The files Helfont uncovers reveal the scope of Ba’ath influence operations and the active role that party agents took in these efforts. This kind of covert subversion was not inconsequential. As Helfont argues, the Iraqi strategy was to change, to shape, the narrative that had been formed by the U.S. and the UN in the aftermath of the Cold War. The aim was to unpick the consensus that knitted together the coalition arranged against them. Russia was a primary target here: the Iraqis knew that the key to breaking the New World Order was to fracture the emerging relationship between Russia and America. This succeeded to the extent that the relationship did break down and, as Helfont shows, Iraq was the aggravating factor:

Iraqi records suggest the Ba’athists helped transform Moscow’s policy in Iraq into a wedge issue…Communists and hardline nationalists in Russia were inclined to push back against Moscow’s pro-Western, post-Cold War foreign policy even without Ba’athist prodding, but Iraqi machinations and Baghdad’s ability to create opportunities spurred these Russians to turn those inclinations into actions. (6)

Pressure paid off: by the end of 1992, Yeltsin had changed Russia’s policy on Iraq and broken with the U.S. position. Crucially, as Helfont notes, the timeline demonstrates that tensions with the West during the Balkan wars did not influence Russia’s attitude towards Iraq. Instead, the growing disagreements over Iraq exacerbated disaffection with America’s (and therefore NATO’s) position on Serbia and, later, the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia. The Iraqis did not cause this split but, Helfont argues, they had a key role in magnifying and promoting the divisions that ultimately led to it. 

The implementation of the 1991 ceasefire and Security Council Resolution 687 did not end the war for Saddam. In fact, it had only just begun. He never renounced his claims to Kuwait and he never accepted the validity of UN-mandated weapons inspections, the demand to disarm or the NFZs. For Saddam, all of this amounted to a violation of sovereignty. (This was a point that others appreciated, notably Russia and China.) He sometimes used brute force to show his enemies that he remained defiant, but the campaign he waged was largely non-military: the war of spectacle that he had tried to fight in 1991 had developed into a more sophisticated media assault, reinforced by diplomatic strategy and covert influence operations. The final weapon in his campaign of subversion was possibly the most important of all: corruption. The Oil-for-Food programme was a prize for the regime, if not for the Iraqis themselves. By the end of the century, it had transformed Saddam’s fortunes: by exploiting UN maladministration, he was able to seize billions in oil sale revenues that he then used to buy influence and import banned items. The OFFP “gave Iraq the political and economic tools to keep the Security Council divided” (7) and the confidence and assurance with which the Iraqis used these tools was justified by their success. Since the early 1990s, the regime had courted French and Russian politicians with the lure of oil but now they could literally allocate barrels to their international supporters (8). The Iraqi corruption of French politics helped to drive a wedge between Washington and Paris and the chief architect of this break was Jacques Chirac, the man who had supplied the Iraqis with weapons and nuclear technology in the 1980s and had his own deep Gaullist hostility to U.S. power. “Following Chirac’s election”, Helfont writes,

Tariq Aziz declared that Iraq was giving French businesses a privileged position and a wave of French companies rushed to make deals with Baghdad in 1995 and 1996. By April 1996, Chirac broke with the United States, openly declaring that the time had come to welcome Iraq back into the international community. (9)

This policy reached a theatrical climax with Dominique de Villepin’s speech at the UN Security Council in February 2003, a grandstanding performance that, almost as much as anything else that happened, made war a certainty. The regime believed that this strategy — buying allies, isolating the US/UK position, splitting the Security Council and fracturing the international community — had worked to the extent that they were protected against regime change. The failure of the US and UK to impose further sanctions on Iraq in 1997, blocked at the UN by France, Russia and China, was viewed (correctly) by Saddam as a major strategic victory. It exposed the new divide that split the global community in two — a divide that Saddam, as much as anybody else, had opened up. By 2001, the conflict was being described by anybody who was paying attention to it as a “forgotten” or “silent” war (10) while France and Russia worked hard to finish off sanctions and kept their eyes on the final prize: the Iraqi oil fields.

At the end of the twentieth century, Saddam felt confident and safe. Helfont’s new book provides an original and valuable explanation of why he was right to feel this way — at least until September 11, 2001.

1. Samuel Helfont, Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), p.56
2. Helfont, p.57
3. Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (University of California Press, 1997), p.59
4. Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (Sentinel, 2011), p.417
5. Helfont, p.59
6. Ibid., p.98
7. Ibid., p.156
8. Those implicated in this racket included the Austrian neo-fascist Joerg Haider, Russian provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Labour MP George Galloway and the French diplomat Jean-Bernand Merimee. 
9. Helfont, p.132
10. Ibid., p.164