The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  While Saddam was seeking to settle his military difficulties – and though only Deputy President during the seventies he increasingly exercised full executive power – he was also extending and consolidating his control over the party, armed forces and government. President Bakr proved increasingly easy to control. It was his subordinates at Saddam’s nominal level whom he decided it was necessary to eliminate if he were to achieve complete supremacy, which was now his object. The three men he identified as principal obstacles between himself and the Presidency were: General Hasdam al-Tikriti, the air force officer who was armed forces Chief of Staff; Salih Mehdi Ammesh, Deputy Prime Minister; and Abdul Karim al-Shaikly, Saddam’s old friend and political confederate, whom he had once called his ‘twin’, now Foreign Minister. Tikriti was a dedicated Ba’athist, with high standing in the party, and a tough nut; he could read Saddam’s intentions, rightly feared him but exercised sufficient power to keep him in check. In 1969 he persuaded President Bakr to exile Saddam to Beirut; unwisely he allowed him to return. The following year, while away on an official visit to Spain, Saddam arranged for him to remain outside the country as ambassador to Morocco; in 1971 he was murdered by Saddam’s gunmen while visiting his children at school in Kuwait. Ammesh was also shunted into ambassadorial appointments, first in Moscow, then Paris, then Helsinki. He survived to die of natural causes (unless, as is widely believed, he was poisoned). Saddam’s close friend Shaikly was also sent abroad as an ambassador, to the United Nations in New York, his fault apparently having been to refuse to marry Saddam’s sister. He was dismissed as Foreign Minister in 1971, spent many years abroad and was murdered on his retirement to Baghdad in 1980.

  Saddam’s brutal measures to assure the security of the regime, which were often also personal score-settling, made him feared and hated by many Ba’athists, particularly those who had been admitted to the party earlier than he. In compensation for what he knew was his personal unpopularity, Saddam set out in his early years as Vice-President to win a following among the masses. The opportunity was provided by Iraq’s enormous oil reserves, the second largest known deposits in the world and only slightly smaller than those of Saudi Arabia. The Arab states had been slow to recognize the potential oil offered to transform their economies and to enlarge their international standing and influence. Many of the governments, dynastic, backward and deeply Islamic, actually did not want to exploit their oil wealth, fearing that money would entail modernization and so a disturbance of their traditional ways. Most in any case lacked an educated class capable of investing revenue productively. As a result, many of the rulers were content with whatever disproportionately small percentage of oil income the great foreign petroleum companies allotted them, taking it for themselves and leaving their subjects to subsist as before in poverty.

  The first of the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries to rebel against the foreign petroleum companies was Iran which, under Dr Mussadeq, nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, precipitating a crisis which almost led to war. The crisis was resolved in Britain’s favour but the damage was done. The oil producers had learnt that the petroleum companies, even when acting as a consortium, were not all-powerful and so began to negotiate extraction terms more favourable to themselves. The dynastic governments, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, some of which remained under semi-colonial regimes long after nationalists had come to power in the Mediterranean Arab countries, were timid in their dealings with the great corporations. Post-monarchical Iraq took a more robust line. Kassem took control of the land on which the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) – a consortium of BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil and the French CFP – operated in 1961. President Arif set up the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) in 1964, to develop the fields which the foreign companies preferred to hold in reserve, intending to sell the oil extracted from the new fields on the international market. The consortium reacted by refusing to sell oil they produced, in Iraq or elsewhere, to buyers who dealt directly with INOC.

  The quarrel between the consortium and their own government naturally enraged popular opinion in Iraq. It was heightened by the consortium’s introduction of a policy designed to reduce production in the IPC’s fields and so the oil revenues of the Iraqi government. President Bakr’s administration responded by developing the fields the consortium had put into reserve, so expanding output and replacing revenue lost through the consortium’s reduction of extraction by direct sales onto the international market. Iraq was able to pursue this policy because, as a secularist state with a developed educational system, it had, unlike the dynastic Arab countries, enough engineers, technologists and commercial experts to run an exploration and distribution programme of its own. Saddam, who was intimately involved in the programme, also helped to ensure its success by negotiating an agreement under which the Soviet Union guaranteed to buy any unsold Iraqi oil surplus and an agreement with France to respect its interests in return for a promise that it would not join an anti-Iraq boycott.

  The pact with Moscow was signed in April 1972. Two months later Saddam took the logical step of nationalizing the Iraq Petroleum Company, after which all its revenues would accrue to the Iraqi state. Short of military intervention, there was little that the foreign governments represented in the Iraq Petroleum Company could do by way of reprisal. Saddam had taken the precaution of acquiring a guarantee of Soviet support, at a time when the Soviet Union was at the height of its postwar power; he knew that Britain was in the doldrums, its economy depressed and its government paralysed by domestic problems; the United States, attempting to extract itself from the misery of Vietnam, was in no position or state to undertake another overseas intervention. France, though its interests were hemmed by the nationalization, was bought off by the promise of a preferential price for oil purchases.

  Nationalization transformed Iraq’s economic situation. In 1968, the year the Ba’ath seized power, Iraqi governmental oil revenue amounted to $476 million, or 22 per cent of what was then national income. By 1980, when the benefits of nationalization (multiplied after the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC) had come fully on stream, oil income had risen to $26 billion, representing 50 per cent of the country’s greatly expanded national income. The new money was spent in a way that, as was not the case in so many of the oil-rich dynastic states, would benefit the country at large, to include many of the common people. A large proportion admittedly went on the armed forces, which doubled in size and acquired much modern equipment, including Soviet armoured vehicles and French aircraft. The larger proportion, however, went to modernize the country’s infrastructure and expand its industry. The programme of investment was closely overseen by Saddam, who had had himself made chairman of all the central planning and spending committees. He knew, moreover, what he wanted and, as even his enemies admitted, was a far-sighted and efficient economic manager. Thus he was directly responsible for the electrification of the country, for building large numbers of schools and hospitals, for creating a radio and television network, for adding to the railway system, for building national highways and for setting up industrial and raw-material plants.

  Brutal though he was in his persecution of political rivals and enemies of the Ba’athist party, Saddam did not look for victims among those willing to work with him in the modernization programme. The talented and patriotic were identified, encouraged and promoted. Under his leadership during the 1970s the Ba’ath became a popular movement, recognized by many Iraqis as a force for good within the country and enjoying high levels of support. When membership was thrown open to the masses, after Saddam had decided that it should cease to be merely a revolutionary élite, hundreds of thousands joined. Despite his anti-Communism, moreover, Saddam also propagated Ba’athism as a socialist movement, dedicated to distributing wealth and promoting egalitarianism. A major token of his equalizing purpose was shown by his land reform programme, under which state-owned land was distributed t
o 222,000 farmers, who were also provided with agricultural equipment.

  Saddam was also a social progressive. He sought to abolish illiteracy, raise educational standards and improve the status of women, in sharp distinction to the policies of many of the rulers of neighbouring states. Thanks to Iraq’s start as a mandate state, under European influence, its population was more evolved and better educated by mid-century than many in the region. The Iraqi élite was often educated abroad and the female members of better-off families enjoyed freedoms denied in traditional Arab societies. Saddam sought to extend the privileges of the few to the many and with success. The Ba’athist revolution created a sizeable middle class and consolidated the country’s educational establishment. By the end of the 1970s Iraq belonged, with Egypt and Syria, to the group of Arab countries which were manifestly emerging into the modern world. Such had been the founding principle of Ba’athism, one which Michel Aflaq, who survived until 1989, lived to see at least half-realized. Had Saddam been content to persist simply as a modernizer, he might have become a widely respected Middle Eastern statesman, with friends throughout the region and in the Western world. Some in the West continue to think indeed that his descent into isolation and obloquy represents a failure of Western diplomacy; that had the United States and its allies pursued different policies at key stages in Iraq’s relations with its neighbours during the last two decades of the twentieth century, Saddam could have been restrained from his excesses and retained as a valuable ally and even a moderating influence in a volatile strategic region.

  That may have been to expect too much of his violent and self-centred character. Saddam was apparently able to subordinate his impulse to settle differences by brute force when fully in control of the circumstances in which he operated, as when he was masterminding the Ba’ath investment programme. When opposed, however, he seemed instinctively to resort to the methods by which he had ascended to power in the cruelly competitive world of Arab politics. Saddam was patently not a religious Muslim, not a believer who had imbibed the idea of fraternity and who sought to progress through life by submission to Allah and amity with his fellows. When opposed, Saddam struck out, by the underhand blow if necessary, with outright force if desirable and possible.

  During the 1980s and ’90s, Saddam was frequently opposed, always by the Kurds, who remained irreconcilable, from 1980 onwards by Iran, Iraq’s traditional enemy, and during the 1990s and beyond by the West, for reasons for which by then only he could be held to blame.

  Before the coming of his time of troubles, Saddam was to achieve one more personal triumph, advancement to the Presidency of Iraq. During the era of modernization, Saddam had displayed sedulous loyalty to President Hasan al-Bakr. Bakr’s growing passivity had made it easy for Saddam to rule in his name while avoiding any confrontation; he had nonetheless taken care to consult the older man at every stage, to submit all matters to him for approval and to withdraw if his chosen solution to a problem failed to meet with Bakr’s approval. By 1979, however, Saddam had decided that the sham by which Bakr remained in office and he, as Deputy President, concealed his effective authority could no longer be sustained. External problems demanded that he should emerge from behind the throne and take full power.

  The principal problems concerned Israel, Syria, a fellow Ba’athist state, and Iran. The existence of the state of Israel had unsettled the Middle East since its creation in 1948, giving rise to four wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, in three of which Iraq had been involved. At the end of the 1970s, however, it was the successful American mediation of a peace settlement between Israel and Egypt, the Camp David Accords of September 1978, that provoked Saddam. He had long hankered to inherit the leadership of the Arab world exercised by President Nasser and resented its assumption by Anwar Sadat on Nasser’s death. The Camp David Accords, deeply unpopular with all Arabs outside Egypt and many within, provided Saddam, as he saw it, with the opportunity to displace Sadat, but only if he could get full control of Iraqi foreign policy. That was desirable for another reason. President Bakr was an enthusiast for closer co-operation between Iraq and Syria. Their Ba’ath parties agreed in October 1978 to merge the countries’ ministries of defence, information and foreign affairs. In January 1979 Saddam was sent to see President Assad in Damascus to formalize the arrangement. It was not one which, however, he truly supported, partly because he was an Iraqi nationalist, more importantly because he feared that the alignment – designed to lead swiftly to full union – would frustrate his personal ambitions. Finally, and at the same time, he was growingly concerned by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran. Although Iraq had given Ayatollah Khomeini asylum during his exile from Iran, it had thereby won no gratitude. Khomeini execrated Iraqi secularism and had a particular reason to dislike the Ba’athist regime in its disfavouring of the Shi’a population of the south. The Shi’ites, 200,000 of whom Saddam had expelled from Iraq to Iran as aliens, hated the Ba’athist régime and Saddam was right to fear that, with the most charismatic of the world’s Islamic leaders established as a de facto theocrat just across the border, the situation in the south was likely to become more disturbed.

  In any case, he doubted the capacity of a government led by Bakr to deal effectively with the problems. It was this consideration that prompted him to decide, in mid-July 1979, to remove his former patron from office. He correctly judged that, given Bakr’s isolation and enfeeblement, it would not be necessary to stage a coup but that Bakr would go quietly. So he did. On the evening of 16 July, Saddam, his cousin Adnan, the Defence Minister, and Khairallah called on Bakr in his office and told him that his resignation was required. If given, he would be allowed to retire in dignity and comfort. Bakr’s son staged a token protest but was overpowered. Next day, Bakr announced that he was retiring for reasons of ill-health. He lived for another three years and, though mysterious circumstances surrounded his death, it cannot be proved that he was a victim of Saddam’s malfeasance.

  Many deaths did follow Saddam’s assumption of the Presidency, deaths that were deliberately publicized. Saddam had prepared the ground for the removal of Bakr by seeking support for the move at a meeting of the Ba’athist Revolutionary Command Council on 11 July. He had not expected to be opposed and was outraged when the secretary-general, Abdul Hussein Mashhidi, insisted that the decision be put to the vote. He had Mashhidi removed within the week but this display of independence may have disquieted him. Either because of it, but probably because he had scores to settle anyhow, his first public act after his accession was to announce and carry out a purge. On 22 July the thousand senior members of the Ba’ath party were summoned to an extraordinary conference in Baghdad. The proceedings were opened by the new Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, who announced the discovery of a plot. The plotters, he went on, were all present in the room. Saddam then took the podium to denounce the plotters and called on the recently dismissed Mashhidi to elaborate the details.

  What followed was a grisly compression into a single act of a Stalinist show trial and of its bloody outcome. Mashhidi first explained that he had, since 1975, been a member of a Syrian conspiracy to overthrow both Saddam and Bakr, to bring about the Iraqi-Syrian union. He gave the key dates of the preparatory moves and the names of his confederates. Then Saddam took over again, announced that the enemies of the party had all personally confessed their guilt, had their names read out, sixty-six in all, and ordered those named to leave. Finally, after orchestrated expressions of loyalty from the floor, Saddam called on the audience to join the firing squads that would execute the guilty. A puppet court was immediately convened, twenty-two were condemned to death and, in a carefully filmed event, Saddam led a representative group of senior Ba’athists in carrying out the ‘democratic executions’. The victims were all shot in the head.

  The film of the show trial and its aftermath was widely distributed; Saddam made a triumphal speech to the nation later in the day he had taken part in the executions. It was the start of his campaign to b
ring all activities in national life and all elements of Iraqi society under Ba’athist but more strictly his personal control. Just as Stalin had subordinated all bodies in Soviet Russia to the Communist party, either by deeming them to be organs of state or by inserting party officials into their command structures, Saddam insisted that the Ba’ath should take control or oversee every public body in Iraq and any significant private one also. Teachers were obliged to join the party; after 1980 all journalists, writers and artists were required to join the General Confederation of Academicians and Writers. Although the court system remained intact, it was left to deal only with routine cases; those of importance were referred to the Baghdad Revolutionary Court or to special temporary courts under Presidential control, from neither of which were appeals allowed. The armed forces were kept under the closest supervision and, in a classically dictatorial practice, the Ba’ath ran its own parallel military organization, the Popular Army, which in the first year of Saddam’s Presidency was doubled in size to 250,000.

  For ordinary Iraqis content to lead private lives, doing their jobs dutifully and evincing no interest in politics beyond conforming with the official party programme, Saddam’s rule was not burdensome. On the contrary; his régime was popular. Saddam’s Ba’ath ran something like a welfare state, in which all Iraqis got free schooling up to, if they were capable, university level. Health care was free and available to all; food was cheap; the domestic economy, underpinned by the country’s oil income, was buoyant. Women were truly emancipated, free to find work in the professions, educated to the same standard as males, and going unveiled and unharrassed by the sort of religious police so tiresomely intrusive in other Gulf states. In many respects Iraq was a model of what the West hoped modernizing Arab states would become.