Review From Dictatorship to Democracy: An Insider’s Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam

Al-Bayati, Hamid, From Dictatorship to Democracy: An Insider’s Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam, Philadelphia Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011

 

Hamid al-Bayati was the London representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). His From Dictatorship to Democracy: An Insider’s Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam is about what SCIRI did from the 1990s to the start of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The book is one of omission because what he doesn’t say is sometimes more important than what he does. His main concern was to portray SCIRI in a good light as an organization that pushed for a democratic Iraq while he never mentions important facts like it was created and funded by Iran. On the other hand he does cover what the Iraqi opposition was doing during the 1990s and 2000s which is a story rarely told.

 

There are plenty of examples of Bayati not mentioning the reality of the Supreme Council. At the start for instance, he said that during the Iran-Iraq War the West believed the Shiite opposition to Saddam was controlled by Iran. He doesn’t say that SCIRI was a product of Iran meant to unite the Shiite parties under Tehran’s leadership. He called the party’s Badr Brigade a group of Iraqi soldiers who were defeated during the war with Iran when in fact many were captured troops who were forced into the militia. He also doesn’t mention that it fought on the Iranian side. Later on after the 2003 invasion the Supreme Council constantly complained about U.S. decisions that excluded the Iraqi people from power. What it meant was it kept the SCIRI and the other opposition parties from running the country. Finally, he mentioned that there was a security vacuum in Iraq and that armed groups were taking advantage of that but failed to note that the Supreme Council’s Badr Brigade was still a militia that was killing ex-Baathists and members of the Iraqi armed forces that fought in the Iran-Iraq War at the behest of Iran. All of this was because Bayati wrote his book for a Western audience. If he’d told the truth that SCIRI began as an Iranian proxy many readers would turn against it. That showed the book was a piece of propaganda as much as a history of the Supreme Council.

 

Bayati does cover many important events in the history of the Iraqi opposition and how unrealistic it was. During the 1990s for example, SCIRI pushed Western nations to enforce U.N. resolutions about Saddam repressing his own people which of course was impossible to do without a military intervention or invasion which no one supported back then. In other instances, the author does highlight that SCIRI and other opposition parties were constantly lobbying the United Nations and western powers to take action against Iraq. During this time the U.S. and U.K. just wanted to contain Saddam while other countries wanted sanctions to end and trade to resume. The Supreme Council and others would not let the international community forget that Saddam was still a dictator who oppressed his people.

 

Despite its drawbacks From Dictatorship to Democracy is still a worthwhile read because it talks about what the Iraqi opposition was doing during these years. The few that do usually only focus upon Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress because he played such a big role in convincing the United States to go to war with Saddam. Bayati has plenty of details about the opposition pushing for action during the 1990s along with how they tried to maneuver for power after the 2003 invasion. One just has to remember that there is a lot not said about SCIRI to put it in the best light for Western eyes.

 

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