King of Clubs, Deputy of the Green Swastika, Commander of the Black Banner. Many titles could have been heaved upon him, and given his long and tumultuous history, he would hardly have eschewed any of them, with a smile already both charming and repugnant. In the long, strangely proud tradition of declaring dead those who still (or already, if we are to countenance actual resurrection) are able to complain about it, perhaps no man have eluded the tendency, or rather the explicit desire to bury in ink as well as dirt more than Izzat Ibrahim. Saddam's Queen regnant, and wise and tacit enough to elude, then as now, his many Henryesque purges.
At 26 years and two weeks, he participated in the "glorious revolution", taking place in the July so prone to revolutions, including the memorable and recent 14 July (not the one you think about) establishing Arab nationalism outside, or alongside its blossom in great Misr, as well as eliminating the British holdfast in the heart of the old Caliphate and far older Mesopotamian cradle. But in fulfilling the promise made by Qasem's 1958 uprising, not only against a flawed and schizophrenic Hashemite monarchy but against disorder and revolution itself, its progeny would carry the promise of Ba'ath to fruition as a perfectly ordered police state, including a throbbing collision with its only twin and neighbour, the Alawite Assad-Ba'athist monarchy. For 35 years it would last, and Izzat Ibrahim would, strangely, follow it from the start to beyond its death throbs, including that very violent one christening itself the Dawlah al-Islamiyyah. Caliph he would never be, nor President, nor would he have wanted either, but in that small embodiment of power in the shadows, the shoulder beckoning between the head and the arm, always faithful, juxtaposing his quiet persona with a formidable presence in the ever-changing inner circle of the burgeoning Hussein dictatorship. After the bloody 1979 takeover, he just as quietly assumed the Vice Presidency the new ruler had left empty, and conjoined his obvious ambitions as Saddam's Dauphin to actual mingling of blood by marrying his daughter, one of an alleged 13, to the infamous Uday. Which of the bride's closest two men would have assumed power, if a third could not be produced and grow to maturity, we shall not know now, that the benefactor fell before his, in Tony Benn's and Jacques Chirac's view and, maybe, god's, time. Izzat would, perhaps the most remarkable (and on a personal level surely exhilerating) feat of the long and brutal dictatorship that took cue from its bloody inauguration - if one counts the takeover of July, yet again, 1979, that is - by compelling a divorce from the dictator in the wings by order of the current one. In this, perhaps, he also demonstrated an affection for his own blood which, typically for the Arab tribalist bonds that survive even the most strident and terroristic institutions of the regime, and perhaps fatherly affections as well. It was a suggestion that few would have dared. And seemed only the more respected and irreplacable for it.
For the long, painful and glorious years that was liberated Iraq, he presided over a growing economy, a rapid expansion of the military, and eight long - and, again, dangerous not the least to those in positions of command - years of challenging the rivalling beacon, in many ways its supposed antithesis, in Persia, followed by an impossibly even more audacious challenge of its two main benefactors, King Fahd's Saudi Arabia and Bush's United States. And endured, at some point, what had just as likely been a death sentence by means of leukemia. A position in the highest ranks of the green would have allowed professional medical care, but Izzat hedged his bets by travelling to the European Union to ascertain treatments at a clinic in Vienna, avoiding arrest for the many war crimes piled up in the shadow of his master. Yet again, the grim face with the more eye-stealing moustache seemed to endure in its everlasting laughter.
With the dusk of the Ba'athist regime, his would wait for another two decades, or very nearly so. The invasion of 2003 that toppled the government, Izzat went into hiding like his boss, and fellow Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, both executed in four years' time. And Izzat remained nowhere to be found. Due to his aged and always seemingly frail state, one might have expected him to be dead, or else in exile. But Izzat was not one to run, and his equally undying loyalty to the now very dead and deplored Saddam was expressed in the proclamation of his rise to national secretary of the party endured. As the merger of the Ba'athist regime, now a measly and outlawed party, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's organisation, controversially present before the 2003 invasion (and thus by presidential fiat), soon an approved affiliate with the franchise-prone al-Qa'ida hawk whose shadow had supposedly legitimised the intervention, would soon make its presence known, under the brand of Islamic State of Iraq. Of all the top names testifying of the Ba'athist-Sunni blessing, or reconstitution, of the regime into a radical, populist, openly terroristic (without the prefix "state") organisation bent on establishing an actual Islamic State in Iraq, it was yet again in the shadow of civil infighting between Shi'ah and Sunni factions and the supposedly global Jihadi threat.
Arising as a very concrete and provincial power, and bent on - in some sense - resurrecting the Saddam regime, if not Al-Ba'ath, in its latest and most miserable incarnation, paranoid and prone to incorporate the latest Islamist and openly Jihadi trends in its secular law, formerly praised by zealous Westerners as embodiments of the alternative to repressive colonial and hibernated traditionalist dogma. Where the Ba'athists had proclaimed, more or less piously, lashings and brandings and amputations and beheadings, for the corrupt (not currently in favour), the promiscuous (likewise), the stealing (again...) and so forth, the new Islamist brand would practice its new-old creed through a lense of icily serious theology, killing and otherwise doling out justice before recognised in name as a state. For its breakthrough in Iraq, whereas its rise in Syria had been shielded by an optical pad of civil war, liberation and general chaos, he was instrumental in forging together tribes and veterans and criminals and business interests joined only by a common defiance of an evermore aggressive, near-genocidal Shi'ite-dominated conglomerate in Baghdad. From this common denominator of vindicated and besieged Sunnidom, a common formula was reached, and proved strong enough to vanquish the highly financed, and highly ineffective armed forces of Iraq now left to its own, now mainly proverbial, defences.
In all this, Izzat Ibrahim, the Devil's actual deputy for 40 years, continued for another eighteen summers in his waining twilight years, and grew into a man of his own making long before entering the stage as the chairman of this force which - bar his competitor in Syria, which at that point had died, replaced by a sordid, last-minute Dauphin by now reduced to tragedy and humiliation in his triumph - had once been assumed as the future of the Arab world, a face perhaps further away from Nasser's than any man. Yet, Izzat's face, that of the Undying, would live long after carried in a glass box to cheering crowds, to a quiet and barely even forgotten announcement five years before his already long-expected demise, perhaps represented Babylonia and its British-made current construct of Iraq itself; a cobbled construct, quiet and small, unassuming but able to punch well above his weight; his final years were ultimately as tragic as any of his age in such times, but he refused assuming the cloak of complete obscurity even as the entire world around surmised it. His hand helped guide Iraq throughout the entire Ba'athist epoch and well beyond it, transcending the supposed, equally false and cobbled divide between Ba'athist Islamist hand-and-head-chopping "secularism" in place in the early 2000s and the violent, supposedly Salafi-Jihadi but equally Sunni Arab identitarian movement we yesterday talked about as if it were the prime geopolitical foe of the day. Being a paragon of these two spent forces, he may represent the most pathetic and wasted in a man of supreme intelligence, sublime intrigue for which his tribe was never particularly known, and survival in a world where those who could save the day, it may seem, are already dead.
