Dictators have long sought legitimacy by appropriating the symbols of ancient civilizations, to build personality cults, manufacture historical continuity, and portray themselves as heirs to glorious empires. Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, rebuilt parts of Rome to claim Roman Emperor Augustus’s legacy. Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler admired the ruins of imperial Rome, and Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein stamped his name onto its bricks as he partly reconstructed Babylon.
Mussolini called himself the new Augustus, who rebuilt much of ancient Rome. He dug Augustus’s mausoleum to have a piazza built around it to bolster his personality cult. Ruins also fascinated Hitler. A painting of the Roman Forum, the rectangular plaza surrounding the ruins of ancient buildings at the center of Rome, hung on Hitler’s office wall. Hitler also painted ruins. He hated modern architecture and loved that of ancient Rome, which conformed to his ideal form of history.
Saddam Hussein followed in Mussolini’s footsteps in appropriating ancient ruins to bolster his personality cult. He reconstructed part of Babylon, one of the world’s earliest cities, with bricks inscribed with his name to associate himself with the region’s past glories. He also projected his unbridled power like other demagogues through the size, bombast, and grandeur of his palaces. The palaces were meant to constantly remind people of Saddam Hussein’s riches, omnipresence, and permanence. They included a 12th-century palace, Baghdad’s lone surviving Abbasid-era palace near the heavily guarded Iraqi defense ministry.
Why Saddam Hussein Built a Palace Overlooking Ruins
As part of a group of journalists visiting Iraq, we drove past one of Saddam Hussein’s at least 99 palaces during our stay in Baghdad. Our local guide made it a point to tell us about the palace. It was a relic of the past they wanted to put behind themselves, years after Saddam Hussein’s execution. Over 100 km away, Saddam Hussein’s palace in Babil overlooks the ruins of Babylon, the Neo-Babylonian empire’s capital, which was the largest metropolis globally, where King Hammurabi produced the first written law.
In 2018, Paul Cooper wrote that the visitors to the palace were supposed to look out over the ruins of Babylon and make the connection that they were standing in the presence of a great ruler whose legacy would last for millennia. Saddam was not the first dictator to have used ancient ruins in this way. Cooper wrote that the link between the idealisation of ancient ruins and totalitarian rulers has a long history because ruins are never just what they seem: a collection of walls crumbling into the sand. He called ruins repositories of memory and myth in equal measure that help construct fascist narratives of past greatness lost to modern decadence and argue for the tyrannies of the past to be reconstructed in the modern age.
How Saddam Hussein Used Babylon to Build His Personality Cult
The palace in Babil, with angular facades and gaping windows overlooking olive trees and palms, was once Saddam Hussein’s most opulent. It was known for its finery, intricately carved mantles, doorways, and a grand chandelier in its entrance hall in the region believed to be the site of the mythical Hanging Gardens. Saddam Hussein used the ruins in Iraq of the richest archaeological heritage globally to build his personality cult. Archaeologists were among the first groups he met with when he seized power in 1968. Saddam Hussein is believed to have told them that the antiquities were ‘the dearest relics the Iraqis have’ and to have shown the world that Iraq is the offspring of the previous civilizations that have greatly contributed to mankind.
The Iraqi Antiquities Department’s budget increased by over 80 percent in the decade after Saddam Hussein seized power, with a focus on the archaeological sites of Nineveh, Hatra, Nimrud, Ur, Aqar Quf, Samarra, and Ctesiphon. To Saddam Hussein, Babylon, which flourished after Alexander the Great occupied it in the 4th Century BCE, was the most valuable of Iraq’s antiquities. It was perhaps the first city to have over 200,000 residents before wars left it in ruins.
Such was Saddam Hussein’s fascination with Babylon that he spent millions of dollars on the reconstruction of Babylon’s walls at the peak of his war with Iran. The walls were raised to a historically improbable 11.5m height, and Saddam Hussein drew flak globally for turning Babylon into ‘Disney for a despot.’ Saddam, who also built an outdated Roman-style theatre in the ruins, ordered the stamping of his name on the bricks used in the reconstruction when he came to know that kings such as Nebuchadnezzar stamped their names on Babylon’s bricks. The slogan, ‘Nebuchadnasar al-ams Saddam Hussein al-yawm (yesterday, Nebuchadnezzar, today Saddam Hussein)’ was used in 1981 when he chose Babylon to commemorate the first anniversary of his invasion of Iran.
A 1999 US State Department study estimated Saddam spent at least $2 billion building almost 50 of the palaces at a rate of around five annually after the first US war on Iraq in 1991, when he invaded Kuwait. The seven palaces bombed during the war were also rebuilt. The invasion, war, and the sanctions that followed made Iraq a pariah state in the 1990s and added to the miseries of its ordinary people.
The cost of Saddam’s palaces, estimated by the State Department, was more than what the World Food Programme spent in 2001—$1.74 billion—for 660,000 metric tons of food for 77 million people globally. It was the time when Baghdad, an isolated city during the decade thanks to Saddam and his regime, ‘withered and drew in on itself.’ What was once a vibrant city, full of ambition, hope, discotheques, and grandiose construction projects, wrote writer Paul Roberts, ‘was now an ugly, battered Third World slum, with not a single redeeming thing of beauty to be found anywhere throughout all its many miserable square miles.’
Described as ‘gold-plated living memorials’ to his reign, Saddam’s enormous, secure, exquisite, and opulent residential complexes were built across Iraq, keeping his security requirements in mind. Saddam built a palace in his hometown of Tikrit over an area 50 times bigger than the White House. The palaces were double-walled to make them explosion-proof proof with each having big-screen TVs, digital sound systems, gold faucets, silk rugs, and marble.
Inside Saddam Hussein’s Lavish Palace
Saddam’s palace in Mosul was unique even by his standards, with 50-foot waterfalls inside. The linens used in the places were gold-woven, while furniture and doors were carved of teakwood. Saddam is known to have never slept in one palace for over two nights; he moved constantly, fearing American assassination attempts. The palace we passed by was among Saddam’s five palaces in Baghdad. They included Jabul Makhul, much of which was built underground, and the resort-like al Faw that Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, used. Al Faw was designed more as a retreat for those Saddam sought to reward for loyalty and hard work. Saddam hardly stayed at the opulent and ornate palace spread over around 50,00,00 square feet with 62 rooms and 29 bathrooms.
The Americans turned the palace into a military base after bombing it in 2003. A Ferris wheel, a pendulum, a merry-go-round, and a resort village of over 100 condominiums surrounded Saddam’s Green Palace at Lake Tharthar north of Baghdad. The Radwaniyah Palace was under construction near the Baghdad airport when the Americans toppled Saddam. None of the homes of Western leaders—the White House (American), 10 Downing Street (British), the Elysee Palace (French)—compares in ostentation to Saddam’s Sijood palace, which was not even his grandest. From the outside, noted The Washington Post: ‘Two of Saddam’s palaces resembled a Spanish hacienda and an air traffic control tower.’
…its high, thick walls and long landscaped approaches are reminiscent of Albert Speer’s designs for Nazi Berlin. From the inside, the elaborate decoration recalls the interior of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Palace of the Republic, which stands at the end of what used to be known as the Avenue of the Victory of Socialism in Bucharest. Although the motifs of the Iraqi palace are Islamic rather than European, the gargantuan chandeliers, the elaborate ceiling detail, the gold-plated fixtures, and the white marble floors are remarkably similar.
The Washington Post
From Saddam’s Palace to Iraq’s First Major Museum in Decades
During my trip in 2016, Iraq appeared to be beginning to overcome the damage done since the 1980s. The country sought to change how it was perceived by trying to focus on its enviable heritage. There was perhaps no better way to do so than to convert one of Saddam’s palaces—the lakeside mock Rococo structure—in the southern port city of Basra into a museum. The palace, where Saddam’s name and the soubriquet ‘Prince of Arabs’ were carved in calligraphy above its main door, was converted into the Basra Museum on September 27, 2016, seven months after our trip.
The museum showcasing antiquities attesting to Iraq’s rich history was the first to open in the country in decades. Its director, Qahtan al-Obaid, chose the palace for the museum to ‘replace the themes of dictatorship and tyranny with civilization and humanity.’ The museum displayed storied artifacts such as silver coins, pottery, coffins, and tiles dating back over 2,000 years. It was expected to exhibit 3,500 to 4,000 objects when completed. Obaid began working on the project after the British forces, who used the palace as a mess hall after the 2003 invasion to overthrow Saddam, left in 2008.
Like Mussolini and Hitler, Saddam Hussein tried to appropriate the past to legitimize his rule, but often, symbols of glorification of dictators become warnings about personality cults. Iraq converted Saddam Hussein’s Basra palace into a museum, marking transformation and historical reflection.
