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Monuments to Self Baghdad's grands projects in the age of Saddam Hussein. No one really knows what ancient Babylon looked like--but Saddam Hussein thinks he does. For 2,500 years, the only visible traces of one of the world's grandest cities were a few mounds of mud bricks baking under the sun some 50 miles south of Baghdad. Archaeologists have scoured the site for the past century, carting artifacts off to Europe and arguing about what sort of city Babylon might have been. But when Saddam's Ba'ath party took power in 1968, he stifled this academic debate as surely as he did political dissent, for he wanted to rebuild the imperial capital as a prelude to rebuilding the ancient empire. And Babylon--or Babel, as it is known in both the Bible and in Arabic--had to be as grandiose and intimidating as Saddam's own ambitions. The reconstruction project continues to this day. Inhumanly tall, bare walls with fierce crenellated teeth have sprung up alongside the unexcavated tumuli. Two or three feet off the ground, a historic tidemark shows the limit of the original remains; on top of them, a somewhat fanciful reconstruction rises. A government guide points out original bricks with inscriptions praising Nebuchadnezzar for his role in constructing the palace. Next to them, the restorers have placed replicas detailing how the structure is being restored to its former glory "in the age of Saddam Hussein." Every year, the guide explains, "Mr. Hussein" presides over plays staged in an adjacent theater built by Alexander the Great. One of Saddam's many homes crowns a hill overlooking the site, which suggests that the wonders of ancient Babylon--theater, hanging garden, and all--are simply follies on the grounds of his estate. The guide sneaks a timid peek at the palace, and then ducks back inside the ruins, as if Saddam himself might be gazing down with a critical eye. This cavalier reengineering of Babel is not unique in Saddam Hussein's Iraq; nor is the guide's reaction. Like a monomaniacal Mesopotamian Mitterrand, Saddam has tried to establish his place in Iraqi history not just through a 30-year domination of his country's politics, but also through the bricks and mortar of a series of grands projets. In the process, he has created a new architectural idiom, one that reflects his overwhelming, unchallengeable grip on Iraq. As the capital and seat of Saddam's power, Baghdad has changed the most. In the more than 11 centuries before he took over, the city had only two civic monuments. This was largely because Islam frowns on figurative art, especially sculpture. Furthermore, traditional Arab cities have few public spaces beyond their streets and the courtyards of mosques. Earlier rulers who wanted to express their power through architecture endowed Baghdad with Islamic schools, taller minarets, and bigger domes. They had hymns praising themselves spelled out in the brickwork of the city's buildings in geometric Kufic script, or written in florid cursive and intertwined with the elaborate arabesque designs on tile roofs. Saddam, who is not known for his timidity, ignored these traditions, and has given Baghdad its greatest face-lift in living memory. The city now boasts an unknown soldier's tomb; a martyr's monument; not one, but two, victory arches; and dozens of small memorials and fountains. Baghdad also has the region's tallest tower and its only double-decker bridge. A monument to the "Mother of All Battles," as the Persian Gulf war is known in Iraq, is currently being planned, as is the world's biggest mosque. Although the city was built on an intimate pedestrian scale, it has been transformed to accommodate the sweeping approaches required by these new monuments. Unfortunately, the ceremonial avenues isolate the winding alleys of the old town, with their teahouses and bazaars, from the business and residential districts that have risen around them. Even residential architecture has been affected: Traditional whitewashed brick houses with elegant wooden balconies are being replaced by buildings with the pompous pediments and stone cladding preferred by Saddam's courtiers. According to an Iraqi who refused to be named, "There is only one planner in this country," meaning that Saddam personally supervises each project. On several occasions, foreign architects have walked away from commissions because he meddled with their designs. Iraqi architects and builders are said to work from the often incomprehensible drawings that the dictator scrawls on scraps of paper. This brave new city invokes a glorious history as a backdrop to a heroic future, with Saddam serving as the link between past and present. Memorials to the Iran-Iraq war refer to the conflict as "Saddam's Qadisiyya," after the seventh-century battle in which the Muslim Arab armies defeated the heathen Persians. In the museum below the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the sword that belonged to the commander of the Arab forces at Qadisiyya is displayed next to Saddam's personal machine gun, and in another museum, underneath the martyr's monument, exhibits draw a parallel between Saddam's life and that of the prophet Muhammad. (When Saddam inaugurated his triumphal arches, he rode under them on a white horse--an allusion to the steed of Hussein, the Shi'ite Muslim hero martyred at nearby Kerbala. Never mind that Saddam and his entourage are Sunni Muslims who have cheerfully martyred armies of Shi'ites themselves.) As Samir al-Khalil, an expatriate Iraqi dissident, has pointed out, Saddam commissioned several war memorials before he even claimed the victories they celebrate. To forge a new identity for his country, Saddam had to rewrite not only his own history, but Iraq's as well. Rather than depicting the country as an improbable and unstable amalgam of Sunni Arabs, Shi'ite Arabs, and Kurds, the monuments attempt to present an image of a coherent, culturally rooted nation of many millenniums' standing. Muhammad Ghani, Iraq's most prominent sculptor, was commissioned to create a statuary sequence of Mesopotamia's various Assyrian, Babylonian, Parthian, Persian, Mongol, Kurdish, and Arab rulers from Hammurabi up to Saddam himself, but the project was canceled because of the Gulf war. Instead, Saddam asked Ghani to produce a series of sculptures portraying national myths. With so little shared heritage to go on, though, Ghani was only able to come up with statues that reflected a Hollywood pastiche of Iraqi themes: "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves," "Scheherazade," "Sinbad the Sailor," and "Flying Carpets." Of course, putting up any sculptures at all constitutes a breach of tradition. The same could be said of the triumphal arches, which are a European import without precedent in the Middle East since Roman times. The very materials of the monuments--stone and steel in the midst of a floodplain, miles from the nearest rock--represent a departure from the Baghdadi custom of using mud brick. The scale feels out of place, too, in juxtaposition with the cramped and narrow streets of the old town. Perhaps the only success in this scramble to invent shared symbols is Muhammad at-Turki's elegant martyr's monument. Its enormous tiled dome resembles the ones that top Baghdad's many mosques, but it is split straight down the middle, with the two halves offset. The rich turquoise walls of the dome shelter an eternal flame, and the split lets in just enough wind to make it flicker. Most of Saddam's monuments, though, are not as successful at stirring the imagination, nor are they even intended to do so: They rely on a crass literalism to demonstrate the power of "the hero of victory and peace." Iraqis live in a world where Saddam's iron fists literally tower over them. Baghdad's triumphal arches take the form of two pairs of crossed swords. A memorial to the Iran-Iraq war, they're made from the material of the war itself. The guns of dead Iraqi soldiers were melted and recast into the 24-ton blades, while Iranian helmets, many of them peppered with bullet holes, lie scattered at the base of the arches. The fearsome fists that hold the swords aloft, fabricated at an ironwork in Britain, are replicas of Saddam's own hands. Similarly, when an American missile destroyed one of Baghdad's telecommunications towers during the Gulf war, Saddam had the pieces of the missile collected, melted down, and cast into agonized portraits of the leaders of the anti-Iraqi coalition. These grimacing Bushes and Thatchers now sit at the feet of a statue of a triumphant Saddam erected beside the tower, which has been reconstructed at almost twice its former height. To encourage Iraqis to spend time among these monuments and, doubtless, to take Saddam's worldview to heart, the government has built an amusement park at the martyr's memorial, a playground next to the triumphal arches, and a theater within the complex of the unknown soldier's tomb. In Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, the pleasant corniche along the Shatt al-Arab river is lined with sculptures of the army officers who died defending the city against Iran, each one pointing an accusing finger at the enemy just across the water (although it was, in fact, Iraq that invaded Iran). Even on their evening strolls and family excursions, Iraqis cannot escape Saddam's defiant, militant image. The countless murals, statues, portraits, posters, mosaics, and reliefs that litter Baghdad constantly remind them of his presence, and his many palaces cement his hold over the capital. Of course, after eight years of sanctions, for Saddam to build anything at all is an act of defiance. As often as America bombs his residences, he has them rebuilt, and then goes on to build even more. His newest complex in Baghdad was designed in the shape of Iraq: The walls of the estate follow the pattern of the country's frontiers, with gates at the points where border crossings would be found on a map. Saddam's residence, of course, is located at the very center. The more gratuitous the structure, the greater the bravado it suggests. Saddam ordered the construction of Baghdad's needlessly complicated double-decker bridge simply to prove that he could complete it despite the sanctions. But any construction will suffice: The government took on the challenge of rebuilding its telecommunications tower after the Kuwaitis commissioned three towers of their own to mark their liberation from Iraq, and when the Kuwaitis put in a revolving restaurant, so did the Iraqis. Baghdad's only suspension bridge--one of the many bridges rebuilt in haste after the Gulf war--is now graced with a plaque that glorifies the heroic exploits of Iraq's engineers. And Ghani has erected numerous sculptures around the country lionizing construction workers. For all this bravura, however, back in Babylon the struggle to reconstruct an archaeological edifice worthy of Saddam's regime is failing. At the entrance to the ruins, a massive bas-relief depicts the latter-day emperor smiling benignly in mock-Babylonian style. But the custodians holed up in the adjacent office are all scowls. Thanks to the sanctions, few Iraqis have the time, energy, or cash for sightseeing, so the souvenir salesmen and tour guides have nothing to do. The United Nations does not permit the government to import chemical preservatives, one archaeologist complains, so many of the ruins are crumbling, while the lack of pumps has contributed to a breakdown in the local irrigation system, and water is seeping into the ancient foundations. Thieves, desperate for hard currency, have stolen into the ruins at night and chipped away inscriptions to smuggle out of the country. Because of inflation, the salaries of the guards are worth only two to three dollars a month, so they either do not bother to come to work or simply join in the pillaging themselves. By all accounts, though, Saddam is undaunted by these obstacles. Work has ground to a halt for the time being, but a second underemployed archaeologist wistfully describes the reconstruction plans awaiting implementation. As soon as the money can be found, he says, the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, will be rebuilt, along with another palace complex. But before any of that, he announces breathlessly, Saddam will proceed with his top priority: rebuilding the Tower of Babel. |
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