The Iraqi state that emerged from this trauma has struggled to reestablish territorial integrity. Its governance structures are fragile and prone to sectarian favoritism. In 2006, then-Senator Joseph Biden suggested that an Iraq of autonomous regions split along ethnic lines might bring an end to the civil war.¹ More than ten years later, US policymakers continue to debate whether a unified Iraq will ever again be governable.² This project explores the conditions that led to the breakdown of the Iraqi state through an examination of Iraqi political life during Saddam Hussein’s time in power.

There is little doubt that the recent history of political trauma Iraq has experienced has its roots in the Baʿth Party’s governance. Yet understanding how and why nation-building failed in Iraq has been challenging, at least in part, because of difficulties observing the inner workings of autocratic governance structures. The internal workings of a dictatorship are often described as taking place within a “black box”—while some of the input and output characteristics are known, the inner dynamics of how power coalesces and is maintained remains opaque. And because collecting information in a nondemocratic setting is so challenging, relatively little scholarship has sought to explain the mechanics of autocratic control in the world’s most repressive regimes. It is virtually impossible to study the internal politics of such regimes while the dictator is in power.³ Even after regimes have been overthrown, new holders of political power may have an incentive to hide information about the repressive and control apparatuses due to the political implications of exposing the often widespread nature of societal complicity with the ancien régime.⁴ And although the existing literature on non-democracies has grown tremendously in the last twenty years, it tends to be sparse when compared to scholarly work that seeks to explain political life in democracies.

Despite these barriers, determining the specificities of everyday political life in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era has become possible as a result of the recent availability of millions of documents recovered following two pivotal events—the establishment of Kurdish self-rule in northern Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Uprisings and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Baʿthist regime in 2003. The first cache of government documents was salvaged following large-scale popular demonstrations that took place following the Iraqi military withdrawal from Kuwait. This collection—known as the Iraqi Secret Police Files—is housed at the University of Colorado Boulder. These files provide detailed information about Baʿth Party and government operations in northern Iraq leading up to 1991. At the time of my visit to this archive in December 2013 to January 2014, I was the only researcher to have visited the collection.⁵

The second cache of government documents is composed of two collections that were captured during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The first collection consists of the tapes and associated transcripts of conversations between Saddam Hussein and various advisors and underlings. Until recently this collection, which is no longer available to the public, was housed at the Conflict Records Research Center at the National Defense University.⁶ The second collection consists of documents assembled by the Iraq Memory Foundation. The Hoover Institution acquired the Iraq Memory Foundation collection in 2008, and these files became available for scholarly research in 2010.⁷ The documents in this second collection include both print and video materials which provide a rich picture of the everyday practices of Iraq’s highly repressive autocracy.⁸

Reliance on collections of Iraqi government documents no doubt allows for only a partial, incomplete picture of political life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Another important source of information comes from the first-hand testimony of Iraqis. Between 2003 and 2008, documentary filmmakers associated with the Iraq Memory Foundation recorded the experiences of 190 individuals who lived through Baʿthist rule as part of an oral history project. These testimonials aired on al-ʿlraqiyya—an Arabic-language satellite and terrestrial public television network in Iraq that serves 85 percent of the country’s population.⁹ I include the first-hand testimony of individuals interviewed for this project at various points in the book.¹⁰

Using data from these three collections, as well as material from a vast secondary source literature on Iraqi politics and history, I have sought answers to a series of foundational questions related to autocratic governance in Iraq. What did the Baʿthist regime actually know about its citizens? Why did it use blunt, seemingly suboptimal, forms of punishment against its population? And what explains variation in the types of compliance and resistance behaviors undertaken by Iraqis during Hussein’s dictatorship?

While some of my findings affirm a conventional narrative about citizen behavior in autocratic Iraq, in other cases the archival evidence demands we update the accepted wisdom about Iraqi political life. I find that, despite pretensions to political hegemony, the Iraqi regime frequently lacked important information about its population, and this problem of intelligence gathering varied in magnitude across ethnic, religious, and communal groups within Iraq. When rebellious behaviors occurred, inadequate information about the specific identity of the perpetrators led the regime to engage in forms of collective punishment that reinforced and cemented identity cleavages precisely among those groups about which the regime was least informed. Ethno-sectarian and communal identities alone, therefore, cannot explain the wide range of behaviors observed on the part of Iraqi citizens.

My argument is state-centric in the sense that it suggests states create the political behaviors that they face as a result of their policies toward their citizenries. While my theoretical focus is squarely upon the actions of the state, the state itself is constrained in a number of ways that limit its ability to pursue its preferred policies and achieve its desired outcomes. Most important, states are constrained by their financial and infrastructural, or bureaucratic, resources as well as by the inability of state political leaders to accurately predict or anticipate the response of international actors to their foreign policy initiatives.

In particular, the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein faced three key constraints on its power. First, Hussein was unable to render all parts of the country politically “legible” to the central government in Baghdad. What is meant by the term legible? Scott suggests that a central problem of statecraft involves effective “mapping” of a country’s terrain and its people to aid the basic functions of the state, including taxation, conscription, and the prevention of rebellion.¹¹ From a political economy perspective, relatively illegible citizens and regions are those for which monitoring costs are high.¹² This was a problem particularly for Iraqi government efforts to politically penetrate the three most northern provinces in Iraqi Kurdistan. Second, despite a well-educated population and abundant oil reserves, the Iraqi state proved to be highly vulnerable to economic shocks, many of which were induced by foreign policy crises. The devastating human and financial costs associated with the Iran-Iraq War and the catastrophic suffering caused by the international sanctions regime of the 1990s were two key contributors. Third, the Iraqi state under Hussein—not unlike other dictatorships which struggle to accurately assess the incentives and motivations of foreign governments—miscalculated the international response to key foreign policy decisions with important knock-on effects for domestic politics. For example, when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Hussein expected a war lasting weeks, not years. These three constraints—which are both structural and contingent in nature—form the political context for Iraqi politics in the late twentieth century.

The arguments that I put forward relate to the literature on state-building and, ultimately, state breakdown. While most of the literature on statebuilding has focused on the European experience associated with the development of strong territorial states,¹³ and on the African experience associated with states struggling to project political power across territory,¹⁴ I seek to understand how state power is projected in a context that might be more favorable for state development—the contemporary Middle East. Middle Eastern states—endowed with the financial resources to invest in governance structures and a conflict-prone external environment conducive to nation-building—would seem to present a relatively favorable set of conditions for creating robust states. Yet within the Middle East, there has been considerable variation in the strength of states despite a broad similarity of structural economic and international conditions. My findings suggest that certain parameters—like the difficulties associated with policing a diverse ethno-sectarian population—were built into the creation of the Iraqi state and proved difficult to manage over time. This was particularly the case as the state faced a tightening budget constraint as a result of poor foreign policy decision making. Although the dissolution of the Iraqi state was, indeed still may be, avoidable, the forces working against a unified Iraqi state are strong and self-reinforcing.

The weakness of the Iraqi state has its roots in the construction of political identity and social cleavage structures both during and directly after Hussein’s dictatorship. While most scholarly accounts of the determinants of societal cleavage structures have focused on the experience of democratic countries and emerging democracies,¹⁵ my arguments suggest when and why certain identities become salient across communities within an autocratic regime. My findings also challenge a conventional narrative about sectarianism in Iraqi society. The myth of monolithic Sunni, Shiʿi, and Kurdish populations in an eternally and hopelessly fractured society belies both the multi-sectarian nature of collaboration with the regime, as well as the tremendous threat posed to regime stability by rivals within Hussein’s own Sunni community.¹⁶ And perhaps most pernicious, this conventional narrative has, and likely will continue to have, a harmful influence on the formation of US policy in Iraq.

The focus on institutional type (e.g., military, party, personalist regime, or monarchy) represents a step away from a previous literature on non-democratic rule that offered reflections on how power was projected under autocracy and the lived experience of autocratic rule for citizenries. Arendt’s work on the origins and outcomes associated with totalitarianism is seminal; she defines totalitarianism as a “form of government whose essence is terror and whose principle of action is the logicality of ideological thinking.”¹⁹ For Arendt, the use of terror and ideology are an outgrowth of a regime’s desire to dominate all aspects of citizen life. Although Arendt’s use of the term totalitarian has been criticized by scholars who argue that truly totalizing forms of social control are not possible even in the most repressive regimes,²⁰ the ambition to create totalizing forms of social control would seem to be one dimension by which to distinguish such regimes from other types of autocracy.

Linz focuses on the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes without regard for the precise institutional form. While he defines authoritarian political systems as ones with limited forms of political pluralism, he sees totalitarianism, on the other hand, as having an ideology, a single party, and “concentrated power in an individual and his collaborators or a small group that is not accountable ...