Iraq Inside-out: An Exclusive Interview
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My interviewee and I sat at one of those dinky metal tables by the CoHo. An astute observer passing by could have surmised that the Arab-looking man sitting across from me was an Iraqi-American, but not even Sherlock Holmes could have guessed that just 15 years earlier, in the aftermath of Desert Storm, this Iraqi man had been manning a tank as he and his fellow Shi’ites rose up against Saddam Hussein. Ever since Professor Daniel Moran had told me his colleague’s story during office hours, I knew I had to interview him.
Abbas Kadhim was born in 1966 in the southern Iraqi city of Babylon. The Ba’athist government provided free university education for all students on the condition that they performed well academically. This was a “take it or leave it” system, Kadhim explains, one in which students had a very limited freedom to pursue a field of study of their own choosing if they accepted the government’s offer. The government, he says, “would choose it for you.” So, instead of political science, Kadhim was forced to major in plant pathology at the University of Mosul.
Kadhim was drafted in late 1988, just as he graduated with his bachelor’s degree and the Iran-Iraq War ended. “Unlike here in the United States, where public opinion matters,” he says, the Iraqi people had no say in Saddam’s war against Iran, from which he thankfully had been spared by his status as a student. The Ba’ath Party organized public demonstrations to shore up support for the war and even took attendance of the students, but the smart ones, he says with a grin, could always find a way around it.
After a time as a tank driver and instructor, Kadhim was discharged from the army in 1989 and began to apply for graduate school, once again in plant pathology and once again at the University of Mosul (he had no say in either). Money that the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and others had poured into Saddam’s coffers to fight Iran now became a hot diplomatic issue. The Iraqis viewed this financial aid as a gift from their Arab brothers to contain their common enemy, but their allies insisted that the funds were bonds that had to be paid back. At the same time, there were accusations that the Kuwaitis were drilling more than their fair share of an oil field that sat on the border with southern Iraq. This was particularly galling as Iraq struggled to lift up its battered economy, exhausted by the eight-year-long war. As for Kadhim and his fellow Iraqis, an invasion of Kuwait wasn’t even “on the radar.”
When Operation Desert Storm began, President George H. W. Bush called upon the Shi’ite population to rise up, rise up they did—both in the Kurdish north and in the south, taking control of 14 of the 18 provinces in Iraq. Kadhim explains that Saddam’s draft provided an enormous pool of Iraqi citizens with military experience. Careful not to “exaggerate” his role in the Najaf uprising, Kadhim says that if he hadn’t joined the revolt and Saddam had won, everyone knew that the Shi’ite population as a whole would have been brutally punished. They beat back Saddam’s initial advances, but these were just skirmishers. He commandeered a tank but “we didn’t have a real battle,” he says, since Saddam’s artillery and missiles pounded the city from afar. He says they could look up into the sky and see attack helicopters strafing their positions, and just beyond them U.S. fighter plans—with orders not to engage—patrolling the skies.
“America lost all its credibility,” he says. The Shi’ites felt “double-crossed” and “thrown to the wolves of Saddam.” Had they known the U.S. wouldn’t intervene, they “would never have risen.” All the Americans would’ve had to do, he says, was place a phone call to Baghdad and order Saddam to leave. Instead, a psychological barrier was created whereby the Shi’ites couldn’t trust America. He retains his professorial outlook, however, and argues that from an objective viewpoint “there were many things” that weighed against intervening, since the U.S. had to bear in mind its own national priorities, which excluded nation-building.
He and his fellow dissidents fled from town to town when it became clear Saddam’s army was moving in for a final advance, eventually making their way behind U.S. lines in the south. They were delivered to a detention camp in Saudi Arabia, where Kadhim worked for a year and a half as a translator for the Americans and the United Nations. The Saudis funded these camps, he says, but their generosity was limited to food and medical care, which was often provided by Iraqi refugee doctors and medical students. The camp he lived in was no more than “tents in the middle of the desert.” Wahhabism, the official religious sect of Saudi Arabia, is virulently anti-Shi’ite.
The U.S. granted him a visa in 1992. He shared an apartment with three others in San Francisco and after only a month got a job cleaning and watering plants in banks and other businesses. He then worked for two years with the International Rescue Committee, and later became a hotel receptionist. In 1996 he entered the master’s program at San Francisco State University, studying political science. Just this semester, he completed his PhD in Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley. Last year he taught a course here at Stanford in Religious Studies on Islam, and for about a year he has been working as an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey. There, he tries to teach his students how to “understand and approach the Middle East,” chuckling that “if they can’t make more friends, for God’s
sake don’t make more enemies!”
The image of the U.S. is very important to him, he says, and he wants all the officers he teaches to know that the “primary victim” of Abu Ghraib was the reputation of the United States, not the prisoners that were appallingly mistreated.
He bristles at the suggestion that it’s too late to repair America’s image overseas. “Hell no!” he says, adding, “But we don’t have all the time in the world.”
No one more than he desired Saddam’s downfall, and he wasn’t in principle against regime change carried out by American troops. The problem was he didn’t think it “would be done right,” which would have included many more troops to ensure there was an enforced curfew early on. He has no time for exiles like Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, who he believes “took them for a ride,” referring to Bush administration officials. For him, the conflict is a deeply personal matter as an Iraqi-American. He still has family in Iraq and his father desperately wants to see his grandchildren. “I want it to work,” he says.
Our burritos demolished and both of us out of time, I shook hands with this truly fascinating and inspiring man. Those of you who feel the same way might keep watch for his name in the Bulletin, should his class ever return.
The opinions expressed herein by Abbas Kadhim are his and his alone, and do not represent the Naval Postgraduate School
