The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq.

• Author: Paz, Francis X.

Samir al-Khalil, now revealed as the pseudonym for Kanaan Makiya, the son of the leading Iraqi architect, Muhammad Makiya (see the remarkable Profile about the two in the New Yorker, Jan. 6, 1992), has written a trenchant study about a strange monument constructed in Baghdad in the late 1980s by the present Bath regime. Two huge forearms, enlarged casts of President Saddam Hussein's very arms with every bump and follicle shown, burst out of the earth opposite each other holding crossed scimitars, on top of which is a disproportionately small Iraqi flag. This is at one end of a 100-meter esplanade and parade ground; at the other end are two more identical arms, each larger than the Arc de Triomphe. All this is supposed to memorialize Iraq's "victory" over Iran in the recent war. The sculptor was the late Iraqi artist Khalid al-Rahal, although Mr. al-Khalil tells us that according "to a reliable source," President Hussein himself was the originator of the idea. So huge was the project, that the arms of this triumphant "Victory Arch" could be cast only in Basingstoke, England, at the world's largest foundry.

Mr. al-Khalil/Makiya is the "Iraqi oppositionist" who wrote Republic of Fear, about the tyrannical nature of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, so one might expect The Monument to be a partisan view of Bath Iraq. It is that indeed, but it is much more. The author has given us his reflections, one could say meditations, on the nature of architecture, art and politics in general and on Iraq in particular. He has also added his understanding of how present-day Iraq has used its architectural tradition, both pre-Islamic and Islamic. He shows how Hussein has utterly transformed Baghdad and how the traditional city of the early 20th century is no more; it has been...