The Ruler for State

Big Brother's watching you. The Father, the State Engineer, the Victorious, the Prophet's Grandson, the Victory and Peace Maker, the Inspired One, the Descendant of the Mohammedan Lineage and tens of appellations which Saddam (and his clique) lavished on himself. His interest in names was overriding. However, what is peculiar about Saddam Hussein is his continual attempts to set himself in the place of the whole state. This is very evident in the type of discourse deployed by the Baathists in their catchwords praising the defeated ruler. Chief among these are two catch-phrases that had become widely epidemic during Saddam's regime. The first, "If Saddam says; Iraq will say", throws into sharp relief the autocracy of Saddam's regime and his unquenchable desire to extend his powers and obliterate the other.
Unequivocally, Saddam denied the Iraqi people their right to vote and decision-making. The parliament itself was no more than a puppet whose strings are mastered solely by Saddam. It was a mere device to give a democratic tincture to his oppressive injunctions, and a scapegoat to which he can assign his miscarriages. Its members are cardboard men swayed in whatever direction the Big Brother likes. Strategic decisions and vetoes on the President's resolutions have no existence on the Parliament agenda. This is reminiscent of Orwell's Animal Farm where the pigs give themselves the prerogative of thinking and making decision for the well being of the rest of the animals. Saddam's latest appeal to the parliament (the National Assembly) to accept the unconditioned inspection for the mass destruction weapons was an attempt to human-shield himself against an imminently impending attack to topple him. However, this can also be viewed as a harbinger of the retreat and defeat of unmatched dictatorship in front of a fledgling democracy. Saddam realized that despite all that he did and can do, he could not separate himself from his people and denies them the right to live like other human beings. As such, the aphorism "the people are more powerful than dictators however cruel they are" proved healthily sound.

The second catchword that used to disfigure the public-building walls is symbolic of the iconic relationship between the Big Brother and the Iraqi people as perceived by the Baathists. It reads "Saddam Hussein's birth is the birth of all the Iraqis." Therefore, whatever Saddam likes, dislikes, desires, rejects and so on represents, willy-nilly, the Iraqis' likes and dislikes. Saddam and the Baathists wanted a homogenous society in which all its members should be Saddams or at least Saddamites. Those who open their mouths in opposition will soon find themselves in a big mass grave in one of the cut-off and out-of-the-way places in Iraq.

This metonymic relationship between the ruler and the state was recognized by the American foreign policy in the context of the 1991 Gulf War. The metonymy: "The Ruler Stands for the State" only applies to those leaders perceived as illegitimate rulers, as George Lakoff so aptly puts it. It was utilized by the Americans through President Bush's iterative invocation "we have to get Saddam out of Kuwait." Thus, they can "refer to Iraq by referring to Saddam Hussein, and so have a single person, not just an amorphous state, to play the villain in the just war scenario."