Living to Some Purpose

Dr Adnan al-Pachachi

I recently finished reading the memoirs of Iraqi elder statesman and diplomat Dr Adnan al-Pachachi: Living to Some Purpose.

More nonagenarians should write memoirs, I feel. It struck me on reading this book that anyone who has lived through and witnessed first-hand the devastation of the second world war, the existential anxieties of the postwar era, the social upheavals of the Sixties and everything afterward probably has more than one or two interesting things to say about them. Also, in general, the experience and the wisdom of the elderly is far too often undervalued in our day. Would that more folks like Dr Pachachi put pen to paper! They’d find a willing reader in me.

As it is, though, Adnan al-Pachachi is no ordinary ninety-year-old. He served under four different Iraqi governments with distinction. He was a peer and (sometimes grudging) admirer of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was an earnest and unflagging advocate for the rights and dignity of Palestine at the United Nations. He was the man behind the scenes who did as much as anyone else to forge the Trucial States into the United Arab Emirates. He was active in Iraqi opposition politics, but he adamantly and steadfastly opposed American policy, from the prosecution of the First Gulf War, through sanctions and no-fly, through the decision to declare the Second Gulf War. And then he reluctantly came out of retirement to serve as a political figure in the centrist, non-sectarian political formations in the new Iraqi republic. The Iraqiya List of the present day was the vehicle constructed by Pachachi and his peers.

If there is one weakness in Dr Pachachi’s narrative, it appears to be his insistence of inserting praise for himself in the form of commendations, letters and articles written to or about him by other high-ranking and prominent figures in the world of international diplomacy and politics. In the best and most piquant of these cases this can be a little bit underhanded – he delights in being considered a formidable foe by his adversaries. He justifiably revels in being labelled a troublemaker and an intransigent thwart to British interests in the Middle East, for example. I actually don’t mind that much reading what other people thought of his actions in the context of the geopolitical situations he found himself in: they serve a useful purpose and illuminate Dr Pachachi’s own rôle in events. But sometimes they could interrupt the flow, and I feel these might have been better served as entries in the appendices.

One is struck as one reads, with the remarkable breadth and depth of Pachachi’s understanding, his erudition and his strategic sensibility – but more than that, with the subtle turns of his political ideas. He is a man of conviction, but does not fit comfortably into any ideological box (unless one is willing to speak broadly of Arab nationalism). I don’t pretend I would agree with him on every particular, but the man speaks with consideration, integrity and authority. He blends a certain earnestness when it comes to human rights and democratic procedure, with a deep-seated and emotional attachment to the Hashemite monarchy and the generation of civil servants which it fostered. He blends Third World sensibilities – including advocacy for Palestine, a certain limited admiration for Nasser and a certain gratitude toward some Soviet leaders (particularly Khrushchev) – with a palpable Anglophilia.

These may seem incongruous, but Dr Pachachi points out that this is not a contradiction: what he loves in Britain pertains to what is permanent to Britain, whereas what caused him to rail bitterly against British actions at the UN and later as an elder of the Iraqi opposition was the imperialist legacy which he felt to be a betrayal of the British spirit. He is a self-proclaimed centrist and an admirer of American sæcularism, convinced of the failures of both planned œconomy and religious-fundamentalist sectarian politics. And yet he had no truck with the American ‘centrism’ of the neoconservatives and the liberal interventionists when it came to how they treated his own home country, believing them to be serving Zionist goals. The two words he uses most to describe himself are ‘nationalist’ and ‘democrat’, and yet each of these descriptors has its limits. I have no way of knowing how he’d take the comparison, but in many ways he reminds me somewhat of an old-fashioned, moderate-tempered Whig in the mould of Edmund Burke.

I appreciated and enjoyed reading of his own insights into the situation in Iraq from 1990 onward. The fact that he had opposed, from positions of conscience and long experience, all of: the invasion of Kuwait, the American reprisal, the sanctions régime, the open lies (which he doesn’t hesitate to call out as such) on which the younger Bush based his intervention in 2003, the prosecution of the war itself, the destruction of the country he loved and its recomposition on a sectarian basis, renders his account that much more valuable.

Again, much of what makes this political autobiography so interesting, is how Dr Pachachi is able to foreground his take on current events in the Arab world against a context of the past hundred years of history in the Levant and on the Arabian Peninsula – events which he himself witnessed as they were happening and analysed directly in their own aftermaths. Over a career spanning the better part of seven decades, the man has plenty worthwhile to say.