Sultan Hashim Ahmad, Saddam Hussein’s defense minister and the “eight of hearts” in the Iraq War’s “deck of cards” most wanted, died in prison on Sunday, July 19. He surrendered to U.S. forces in Mosul in 2003, six months after the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam’s regime. The Iraqi government subsequently sentenced Sultan Hashim to death for his complicity in the 1988 chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish civilians, though the Iraqi presidency commuted the ex-defense minister’s sentence.
Today, some are lionizing Sultan Hashim because of his military service. Certainly, many Iraqis (not only Sunni Arabs but also Shiites and Kurds) honor the Iraqi army over which Sultan Hashim once presided. In both the regional Kurdish capital of Erbil and in Basra, southern Iraq’s largest city, Iraqis continue to honor their army’s legacy on Jan. 6. When I asked Iraqi Kurds about this while teaching in their autonomous region before Saddam’s ouster and just 13 years after they suffered the Iraqi government’s chemical weapons and ethnic cleansing campaign, they explained they differentiated between the Iraqi Army and those in Saddam’s inner circle who were directing it. This should not surprise: Most Iraqis are nationalist and proud of a culture and a legacy that long predates Iraq’s formal 1932 independence.
Indeed, while some outsiders suggest Iraq was artificial in its origins, first crafted in 1921 from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, in reality, the concept of Iraq dates back centuries and is readily apparent, for example, in 13th-century Arabic literature and in the centuries prior to the kingdom’s formal revival. Iraqi identity and Arab ethnic pride have long trumped any solidarity Iraqis have with neighboring Iran, even though the majority in both countries practice Shiism. This is why proposals to divide Iraq in three have always been so misplaced and never find widespread support inside Iraq.
As Saddam’s legacy fades — 37% of Iraqis were born after his execution, and another 20% were under 10 years old when Saddam marched to the gallows — too many people are willing to whitewash his era. They remember Saddam’s fierce anti-Iran attitudes but forget his dictatorship, his willingness to indulge in the basest sectarian bigotry to associate nearly all Shiites with Iran, and his disastrous decision to launch a surprise attack on Iran that sent Iraq down the path to destruction and financial collapse. Iraqis might take pride in the fact that they were perhaps the most developed and advanced Arab society and the Arab world’s least corrupt state prior to Saddam’s reign of terror. No one should forget, however, that Saddam’s rule and choices led Iraqis to fall behind almost every Arab state with the possible exception of Yemen by every meaningful metric.
Today, however, too many gloss over just how disastrous Saddam and his inner circle were for Iraq. Consider, for example, this tweet by Firas Elias, a Middle East analyst whose work regularly appears in Washington think tank circles, offering peons to a man in part responsible for the slaughter by chemical weapons of thousands of Kurds and the deaths of greater numbers by more traditional means. And that doesn’t even begin to address the Shiites against whom he turned the army’s guns. Apologists may say that Sultan Hashim did not have a choice — he was just following Saddam’s orders — but many others, when faced with such a choice, decided to leave their posts and flee with their morality intact.
This is not apologia for Iran. There are many reasons to take a hard line against Iran and Iranian influence in the region, and no one knows this more than Iraqis: This is one of the reasons why Iraqis regularly protest against Iranian influence and have repeatedly burned down Iranian consulates in Iraq’s Shiite south. But erasing a war criminal’s past because of antagonism toward Iran is wrong. Not only does it affirm a strategy which Saddam himself mastered, but it ignores the subsequent interplay between senior Baathists and the Islamic State.
Those who seek to reduce problems in Iraq and the broader Middle East to a single actor do more harm than good. To empower or forgive Baathism or other extremisms out of animus toward Tehran is to condemn the region to further bloodshed. Rather, as the younger generation of Iraqis from across the sectarian spectrum now realize, no society can thrive unless all flavors of extremism are combatted and condemned, no matter what their sectarian or ideological origins.
It is not Sultan Hashim who today should be remembered, but rather his victims. None of their deaths should be rationalized away. Sultan Hashim may have imagined himself an Iraqi patriot, but few did greater harm to their homeland than did he.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
