IRAQ: Godfather Role Became Dictator Rule

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Apr 15 2003 (IPS) - It was back in 1972 that Adel Darwish, author of several books on Saddam Hussein, and now with the Middle East magazine, met Saddam Hussein for the first time.

"I did not know his name at the time," Darwish told IPS in an interview Tuesday. "I was just told that I would be meeting Mr Deputy."

It was at a film festival in Baghdad. It was also a time when the film ‘Godfather’ had been released. The celebrated film that won three Oscars came later to be known as Godfather I in a trilogy.

"Saddam Hussein was very impressed with the film," Darwish recalls. "Some of us sat together over whisky, and I remember Saddam had very much more than anyone else. He was smoking his heavy cigar, and for 90 minutes he sat talking about ‘Godfather’."

A sign of times to come, though Darwish could not see this then.

Darwish met Saddam Hussein five times, or at least he thinks he did. The last meeting came in 1989, and is the one he has some doubts over. "I think it was Saddam, though it might have been a double," he says. The eight-year war with Iran had just ended the year before, and security around Saddam – certainly the real Saddam – was particularly heavy.

But it definitely was Saddam that Darwish met on another occasion in 1982. "Because he spoke of the film again, and remembered the time we talked about it," Darwish says. A film that clearly made an impression on Saddam Hussein long beyond that particular evening of cigar, whisky, and of course, the Godfather.

No one can say the movie made Saddam Hussein a dictator. But it certainly seems to have left a deep impression.

In later years "Saddam Hussein came to see all of Iraq as his family," says Darwish. "And if anyone went against the family, he would be a traitor to the family." And dealt with as such.

Under the control of the man who came to see himself as patriarch of a nation, Iraq came to be "like Chicago in the thirties," Darwish says. What was seen by others as the ways of mafia were to him the way of the family.

"A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man," says Godfather Don Corleone (Marlon Brando). Saddam Hussein believed he ruled with the hand of a family man. "He thought he is providing the nation with justice undeliverable under international law," Darish says.

Saddam Hussein was evidently convinced his repressive ways were for the good of Iraq, and even admired by Iraqis. "Saddam was talking about how the Godfather put the interests of his family – as he saw them – before anything else."

‘The Godfather’ re-invented the gangster genre, by portraying the gangster figure as a family man bound by honour and tradition. The police, the courts do not hand out justice. The Godfather does. And that ‘justice’ can be swift and ruthless. Inevitably, Saddam Hussein did not see himself as a ruthless dictator; he was only the head of the family handing out swift justice.

"There was this alarming scene in the film where Michael (the Godfather’s son) in his uniform tells his girlfriend to do as he says, or he will shoot her," Darwish says. "Saddam thought that the girl was outwardly scared but was actually sexually aroused, because women admire strong men."

Puffing at his cigar that evening, Saddam said nations are just like women.

But nations are not, and nor are men like Saddam as fatally attractive to women as they project to be, a new study into mafias and their godfathers shows.

Girolamo Lo Verso, a psychotherapist from Sicily where the original mafia arose, concludes after ten years of studying mafia bosses that many of these godfathers actually have "food disorders, anxiety, depression and sexual problems."

In his newly published book ‘La Psyche Mafiosa’, Lo Verso says that one godfather "went to see a psychiatrist because he couldn’t cope with his son’s homosexuality. He had hopes of passing on the family business to him. But the boy rebelled and came out of the closet."

Nor are godfathers as virile as they are projected to be, in cinema or for real. "Real Mafiosi are more interested in power and being in command than sex," he says. "They have hurried sex with their wives in order to have children.but it’s not really a situation of passion," Lo Verso told The Independent.

Whatever his sex life, Saddam Hussein appears to have been turned on more by power. "It became so easy when he came to control the security apparatus," Darwish says. "It became easy to take charge of law and order by brute force." And however repressive, the collapse of Saddam and his regime has by extension of Saddam’s metaphor, left a nation orphaned.

In the film, the presiding patriarch is ultimately succeeded by his youngest son Michael (Al Pacino), a U.S. Marine Corps officer, who eventually becomes even more ruthless. Not unlike Saddam’s sons. In Iraq as in the film, like father, like son.

The cinematic Godfather is a man who has his way because he knows of no other. He gets his son a contract in Hollywood with the famous words: "I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse." Michael explains to his girlfriend just how the man was persuaded. The don’s man "held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains – or his signature – would be on the contract…"

In the end U.S. President George Bush made Saddam an offer that he thought Saddam could not refuse. He did, because it was an offer he could not accept. Godfathers do not take orders.