The New York Times Magazine
Suppose you're an architect, ambitious and eager to build. You're teaching theories of design at a university. You push your students to think and ask questions. You see yourself as an activist, aware of and inspired by ideas of civic responsibility. One day the department chairman tells you that he has received a report about your ''subversive activities.'' You have a choice: you can join the ruling party or leave the university. A high-powered friend advises you to leave and recommends you for a job with a government development project. Soon you're working alongside the biggest names in architecture, who have flown in from around the world to refashion your capital. The years go by. Slowly the budget money dries up. The famous names move on. Yet you are still toiling for the dictator.
In your mind's nightly dialogue you still think like the rebel you once were. Yet each morning you go to the dictator's office to oversee the engineering of his megalomaniacal dream. By now, you see no way out, and compared with two of your colleagues, you're lucky. The wife of one and the brother of the other were executed.
For most of us born in democratic countries, the question of what we would do when faced with moral quandaries under a totalitarian regime is purely hypothetical. We like to think we'd do the right thing, but who knows what daily choices we might make to survive. Not everyone is coded for courageous subversion. And what is survival? Just a matter of subsistence? What about surviving intellectually, professionally, as a part of society?
I met such a man in Baghdad recently. His name is Mowfaq al-Taey. He was an architect in Saddam Hussein's presidential engineering office. He lives with his wife and two children in a government apartment building that formerly housed mostly presidential architects and engineers. It sits inside the grounds of the Republican Palace, which is now part of a vast fortress occupied by the Americans and the Coalition Provisional Authority. Whenever he wants to come or go, he must pass through a network of American checkpoints. Though he's not crazy about the American soldiers occupying Iraq, he is relieved that at the very least, the inner battle that degraded his being all these years is over. ''Of course, we wanted the external war to end,'' he told me. ''But more than that, we wanted the internal war to end.''
Al-Taey said he hated Hussein's regime and disagreed with the Arab nationalist ideology of the Baath Party. Yet until the day before the United States invaded Iraq, al-Taey was overseer, contractor, troubleshooter and quality controller on Hussein's imperial projects. This meant al-Taey was often in the uncomfortable orbit of Hussein, who liked to call the architect, somewhat affectionately, the ''old man,'' on account of his white hair.
Al-Taey is a likable, erudite man who believes more in history than in religion and wishes his fellow Iraqis would too. He has mussed hair, green eyes and pale skin and an energetic, sleepless edge about his gait. He sees himself as a craftsman as much as a man of the mind and seems to take comfort in the thought that he has lived all the insane moral paradoxes he loved to read and think about in the Surrealists and Existentialists and in the theater of the absurd.
Yet it's those moral paradoxes, or rather how he faced them, that gnaw at him now. The reckoning in the privacy of conscience is far from resolved. It takes time. And these days, time is overshadowed by the drama of daily events -- the electricity and fuel shortages, the dirty water, the daily attacks by guerrillas, carjackings, kidnapping, robberies, rapes and revenge killings that are proceeding at a steady pace.
What struck me about al-Taey from the first time we met -- besides the fact that he could not keep up with his own thoughts or stop talking, whether about theories of architecture, the history of Baghdad or his tangled conscience, all while driving distractedly on a tour of his architectural biography -- is that he felt the need to justify his life. Nobody had really asked him to. He was not a Baathist. He was not dismissed under the Americans' de-Baathification policy, which barred senior Baath Party members from holding government jobs. The only tribunals in Iraq so far are those that are circulating unofficial hit lists on the Internet and on broadsheets. They've taken to picking off top Baathists, like a former president of Baghdad University, who was one of Hussein's physicians and was writing a diagnosis in July when the patient turned assassin and shot him in the head. Al-Taey's tribunal is more personal.
As we sputtered around Baghdad in his ailing light blue 1980's Chevrolet, al-Taey talked about his life in 1960's England, where he went to study architecture. He was already a left-wing activist, he said, and he fit right in with the socialists and the antiwar movement and sexual revolution. He was a follower of Bertrand Russell. He was high on ideals, and he disdained the Baathists.
''All of a sudden we come back to Iraq and do all the things that we know are bad,'' he said, speaking about a circle of Iraqi architects who all studied in England and returned in the 70's. ''Still, I had to work, support my family. I didn't go out of the country. I stayed and I suffered.''
As the Chevrolet ambled along the Tigris River, passing the imperial mansions of Hussein's daughters and the regime's bigwigs, he squinted at them as if they were mirrors of his conscience. Then he laughed, his shoulders jumping nervously. ''Whenever I come here I turn away,'' he said, gesturing toward a house he made for Hussein's youngest daughter.
What he really detested was the style. Pointing to a columned facade, he said: ''Like Hitler's architecture. Saddam always loved these imperial columns. Those two columns that every house must have. Why? Because if the leader of the country smokes a cigar, even if the people hate him, they'll imitate him and smoke a cigar.''
One house that al-Taey built belonged to the former commander of Hussein's Special Republican Guard. ''He's No. 4 or 5 in the pack of cards.'' He had to beg al-Taey to put the two columns up. ''He knew I hated them. He said, 'Do whatever you like, but please for heaven's sake, put in those columns or I won't be able to sell it later.'''
''I am not proud,'' he said, crinkling his nose. ''I was forced to do bad things. If I didn't, I'd lose my job.'' He and his colleagues used to mull over these aesthetic compromises in their closed circle. ''This battle within you continues and really irritates you. Any sensitive person, when he puts his head on the pillow at night, thinks, What the hell am I doing?'' So what was the conflict? Building for the dictator? The compromised architecture?
Like Hitler, stalin and Napoleon, Hussein was obsessed with architecture. He understood it as the means to reify his power and ensure his place in history. ''None of us were architects,'' al-Taey repeatedly told me. ''Saddam was the architect.'' Hussein would sketch his ideas, then choose architects to execute them. He turned the presidential engineering office into a battalion with 45 architects and 700 engineers and consultants from the university. He was known to show up at a palace, and if he didn't like the floor, he'd order it ripped up and new marble flown in.
Whereas for the dictator, architecture is a means to a megalomaniacal end, for the architect who has a touch of that megalomania, the building is the end. ''One thing about an architect is he's a pragmatist,'' al-Taey often said, as if to justify the dulling of his political conscience. ''We teach pragmatism. The politicians have an idea behind the project. Architects want to build.'' Hussein's idea was imperium, and from the moment he assumed power in 1979, he unleashed his vision by executing ''suspect'' ministers, invading Iran and Baathifying every corner of Iraq.
Al-Taey was not a Baathist, and during the 70's, he was teaching theories of architecture at Baghdad University and encouraging debate in his classes. A fellow lecturer filed a report that al-Taey was attacking the government. That's when he was faced with the choice -- join the Baath Party or get out. His friend Hussam al-Rawi, a high-ranking Baathist -- who was recently dismissed from the university under the de-Baathification policy -- advised him to leave and recommended him to the Ministry of Housing. Al-Taey took the offer and began working on everything from housing projects in the southern marshes to the master plan of Baghdad.
The early 1980's in Iraq was a dream for architects. Baghdad was turned into a vast playground for construction. The 1982 nonaligned-nations conference was scheduled to meet in Baghdad, and Hussein was planning to anoint himself leader of the Middle East. He transformed the Baghdad landscape with imperial boulevards, shopping centers, high-rises, hotels to house the visiting leaders, tourist parks and monuments. Highly acclaimed architects of the avant-garde -- Robert Venturi, Richard England and Ricardo Bofill -- assisted in building his vision. And al-Taey found himself in the middle of it all. ''To work with Robert Venturi? If you're an architect it's the dream of your life.''
Each time the opportunity arose for al-Taey to leave, he didn't. Now he looks back with regret to the moment -- sometime around 1986, he doesn't remember exactly -- when he was asked to join the presidential engineering office. A well-known Iraqi architect and friend who had also studied in England was called at the same time.
''I said yes; he said no,'' al-Taey recalled, explaining that the other man had a thriving private architectural firm. ''I couldn't say no!''
Then he said: ''He was a principled man. I envied him. I could have said no.'' He fished around until he found some consolation. ''I went to the man who chose me, and I told him that I didn't want to be made a Baathist.'' The official assured al-Taey that it wasn't necessary. ''At least I had the courage to say no to that.''
It was a crucial turning point for al-Taey and the country. Hussein of course did not become leader of the Middle East, and his assault on Iran was depleting the country's resources. Hussein began to abandon public works in favor of architecture for the individual. After the Persian Gulf war, while the people suffered under sanctions, monthly rations and decrepit hospitals, up went the palaces and mansions. With each year al-Taey slipped deeper into Hussein's enterprise of Stalinist imperial kitsch. It was a precarious place to be. Architects were not immune from whimsical execution.
To outsiders, al-Taey was the quintessential insider reaping the benefits of Hussein's reward system. But as a non-Baathist with a dangerous family background -- half his family was Communist, and his uncle was executed for being a founder of the outlawed Islamic Dawa Party -- he felt that his position was tenuous. As recently as a few weeks before the war, a sculptor whose work al-Taey had rejected filed a report about al-Taey's subversive background; a highly placed friend in the presidential office intercepted it.
So why didn't al-Taey get out? Well, he said, if he'd gone back to the university to lecture, his salary would have been one-tenth what it was at the president's office. And at least he was building -- sometimes even with pride, like his adored Zawra Park in Baghdad, like the modest houses for professors with no columns. As for imperial projects he supervised, ''spending money on palaces was better than making more missiles,'' he said, speaking about what he told himself at the time. ''Tomorrow we can transform palaces into a university.''
One afternoon we drove along a Baghdad highway to the outskirts of the capital, where the epic blue-and-white Mother of All Battles Mosque rises alone on an expanse of sand. With its 120-foot-tall minarets shaped to look like Scud missiles, the $7.5 million mosque was said to have been built as an elegy to the gulf war and was completed in time for Hussein's birthday in 2001. A lake in the shape of the Arab world winds around the mosque and an 80-foot-long mosaic of Hussein's signature. Another pavilion was built to house the 600-page Koran said to be calligraphied in Hussein's blood. The mosque was, in fact, conceived as a prototype one-fifth the size of Hussein's true ambition -- the Saddam Mosque, which would have been one of the biggest in the world. Al-Taey practically lived here for the year and a half it took to build -- an unheard-of speed for such an awesome project. What gives al-Taey some comfort, however, is that he managed to skim costs by using cheap materials here and at the palaces and, in his mind, saved the country millions. At various points in the mosque, al-Taey would stop and say: ''Look at the ceiling. It looks just like expensive Moroccan tiles. But it's only cheap painted gypsum.'' Or: ''Look at these gold plates on the doors. They are copper lacquered with epoxy.''
As we left the mosque, he said, ''People ask me why I worked.'' Who exactly? I asked. ''Maybe I ask myself why did I work,'' he replied. ''And I think of that film with Anthony Quinn.'' The film, ''The Secret of Santa Vittoria,'' takes place in an Italian village famous for its wine. Quinn, the town drunk, finds himself mayor when the Germans march in to occupy the town and steal its wine. Suddenly Quinn has to be a responsible man and outwits the Germans by going along with them. ''He saved the wine of the village by lying,'' al-Taey said. ''I had the right to ask for the most expensive materials. I had that right. Instead we saved the money.'' And more than that, ''By building this you are keeping a whole city working for a year instead of starving, because the craftsmen who worked here are from the most poverty-stricken parts of Iraq.''
Al-Taey said that ever since his return from England he has always felt like an outsider, alienated, and not just within Iraqi society. ''We are alienated from ourselves,'' he says. It's that schism in the mind, one so complete that the public and private selves never encounter each other, that Hannah Arendt fixes on in her essay, ''Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility.'' Speaking of the paterfamilias, the bourgeois man, she writes, ''It became clear that for the sake of his pension, his life insurance, the security of his wife and children, such a man was ready to sacrifice his beliefs, his honor and his human dignity.'' And because she is talking about ordinary Germans who were driven to mass murder, she writes, ''He does not regard himself as a murderer because he has not done it out of inclination but in his professional capacity.''
This phenomenon of the split man, that quintessentially 20th-century creature, had a chance to flourish among the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In the aftermath of these regimes, the attempts to apportion individual blame have revealed again and again the astonishing power of denial.
In Iraq, the split man takes on a slightly different hue, since family and tribe take priority over civic responsibiltiy. But the conscience still nags. In the northern city of Kirkuk, I met a millionaire who had formalized that dichotomy, and it drove him to unabashed alcoholism. ''I've been drinking for 35 years, just for relief, to fall asleep, because I've never felt comfortable for one hour in my life,'' he told me one evening, downing half a bottle of whiskey. He was a Kurd, and he had agreed to Hussein's ''Arabization'' program, in which Kurds were made to change their ethnicity in order to tip the balance of oil-rich Kurdish Kirkuk in favor of the Arabs. All the man's public records now declare him an Arab. Had he refused, he would have lost money, and money had become his god. ''If you were rich, you could silence the regime with money,'' he said. ''We paid for survival.'' He did so by doling out more than a million dollars to finance the regime's apparatus of fear -- the public statues and murals of Hussein, the new intelligence and security buildings of Kirkuk. Neither the Kurd nor al-Taey was a murderer. But they did, in their own ways, silence their internal moral voices.
In 1991, Kanan Makiya, the exiled Iraqi author and architect, wrote ''The Monument,'' a meditation on the meaning of Hussein's gargantuan crossed-swords Victory Monument, Baathist art, Warhol, kitsch and the retreat of aesthetic judgment. In it, he is harsh on the Iraqi intelligentsia who degraded the Iraqi landscape with the Baathist vision. He has recently returned after 35 years and is working on the Iraq Memory Foundation, a project dedicated to exposing Baathist Iraq. Now, after spending time with the intelligentsia and exploring what collaboration means in such a context, his judgments have softened. ''You realize no amount of law can ever capture the human complexity involved in living with and sucking up to the regime,'' he told me. ''These people, in their own minds, remained distanced from the regime. This ability to retain a professional integrity while not allowing the context in -- this is a faculty that has been cultivated.''
But other exiles are less generous. As one said of al-Taey, ''The people who accepted to work for Saddam didn't all kill people, but they showed the ugliness that killed people.'' And, he said: ''Mowfaq says he was a good architect. He never did anything wrong. That's crazy. Many people had the chance to work for Saddam and didn't. I never wanted to leave my country or become a refugee.'' This exile had joined the political opposition, witnessed the Anfal -- Hussein's extermination campaign against the Kurds -- and at a certain point had to flee.
When confronted with this kind of criticism, al-Taey responds: ''The Iraqis who left don't know what we went through to survive'' -- the fear, the treachery of jealous colleagues and the bad conscience. For although what seems to bother al-Taey the most in the end is the bad architecture, ultimately his aesthetic judgment is an ethical judgment. It's that aesthetic judgment that Makiya was driving at in ''The Monument.'' As he wrote: ''The kindest thing that can be said about the collaboration of the Iraqi intelligentsia in the various works of the Baathist city is that they chose to live at the expense of their art or whatever else they were engaged in doing. . . . Faced up to honestly, with the minimum of necessary compromises, and the interests of loved ones in mind, it can actually become heroic. . . . By the same token, it must be acknowledged that by and large the works that such an intelligentsia produces are worthless.''
That kick is what pains al-Taey. You make all those moral compromises for love of the work, the endeavor, the process, bricks and mortar of building, and in the end the creation shames you.
Al-Taey is back at the university now biding his time. Although he's technically still a government employee, he won't invest himself in the new government. Maybe it won't last, says the ultimate pragmatist. ''I can support myself. I have orchards.'' Besides, as he said: ''The American attitude is to dismiss design work. They want just contractors. Architects should not work as contractors'' -- which he essentially did for the last 20 years. ''Now I'm not willing to go against my ethics. Nobody wants to repeat the same mistakes twice.''