The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  The price paid by ordinary Iraqis for their material well-being under Saddam’s régime was the restriction of their political and intellectual liberties, taken for granted in Western countries, and the awful penalties suffered by those who disobeyed or dissented. In a memorandum submitted to the United Nations by a group of exiled Iraqi intellectuals soon after Saddam’s rise to power, they wrote:

  The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is one of the harshest, most ruthless and most unscrupulous régimes in the world. It is a totalitarian, one-party system based on the personality cult of Saddam Hussein. The man and his family and relatives have control of the regular army, People’s Army, police and security services. All news media are under the strict control of the régime and there is no opportunity for freedom of expression. Political organization is limited to the Ba’ath party and a number of insignificant, obsequious organizations. Trade Unions do not exist. Membership in any opposition party is punishable by death. Any criticism of the President is also punishable by death. Torture is the norm. The security system is all-powerful, omnipresent and enjoys unlimited powers.

  Westerners who hoped for a different Iraq may have been indulging in wishful thinking, misled by the Ba’ath’s commitment to secularism and modernization. The mind of Islam is deeply resistant to the ideas of individual freedom and political diversity which lie at the heart of Western liberalism. Muslim illiberalism is particularly strong in the Arab lands, Islam’s heartland; no Arab country has ever been a true democracy and even in the other secularist states, such as Syria and Egypt, the political tradition favours single parties and strongman leadership. The tradition connects to the most salient elements of Muslim religious belief: the idea of the Caliph, the successor of the Prophet, as ruler of the Umma, the Muslim community; the unique power of the Koran as a guide to human behaviour, not to be challenged by secular writings; and the role of the Sharia, religious law, as the code by which communities are to be regulated. The primacy of these elements has been protected since the fourteenth century because the religious leadership of the majority Sunni sect then ‘closed the gates’ of ijtihad, the practice of independent reasoning which had hitherto permitted Muslim scholars to adapt the Sharia to changing circumstances. Thereafter the past, not the present, has determined how Muslims should think.

  Secularist though he was, Saddam was enormously assisted in his imposition of a totalitarian system on Iraq by the Islamic adherence to conformity of thought and behaviour. It was farther reinforced by the Ottoman inheritance, which emphasized the dominance of the ruler and the leading roles of the army and state bureaucracy and had institutionalized the practices of draconian punishment of any infringement of that order. Only sixty years, after all, had elapsed between the withdrawal of Ottoman rule and the elevation of Saddam to supreme power. It is not surprising that both he and his subjects should have resumed so easily the respective habits of unquestioned authority and subservience to it that had been second nature to their grandparents’ generation.

  Ultimately, however, neither Islamic tradition nor Ottoman inheritance wholly explains the nature of Saddam’s totalitarian authority. The man, by any index of his personal behaviour, public policy and spoken pronouncements, was as President of Iraq a monster of cruelty and aggression. The nature of his régime owed more to twentieth-century ideologies of intolerance and systems of repression than to anything derived from the more distant past. Michel Aflaq, the founder of Ba’athism, had modelled the organization of his party on Hitler’s Nazi movement, of which he was an admirer. Saddam was an acknowledged admirer of Stalin. The examples of those two mass murderers seem the most patent influence on his policies and ambitions. It is commonly said that the principal motive animating Saddam has been the instinct to survive. Saddam seems much more than a survivor. The impulse to dominate appears to have informed all his acts on his way to power and then on his exercise of it. Saddam has sought first to become leader of Iraq, then the chief warlord of the Gulf region, a nuclear warlord if he could assemble the means, with the leadership of the Arab world as his culminating aspiration. If he has been frustrated in his life plan, it is important to know how. The records of his military adventures supply much of the answer.

  4

  Saddam’s Wars

  Saddam was never a soldier. That omission in the story of his life may help to explain much about his behaviour as he grew to manhood and afterwards. It had been his ambition to train as an officer at the Iraq Military Academy in Baghdad but he lacked the education even to attempt the entrance exam. He resented his exclusion and conceived what was to prove a lasting jealousy of contemporaries who did secure commissions. He believed that they were unfairly privileged and probably with reason. As was not the case in many developing countries, the composition of the officer corps in Iraq was class-based. The military profession was a middle-class occupation, dominated by families which had often supplied officers to the old Ottoman army. Indeed, many of the leading figures in mandate and post-mandate Iraq, such as Nuri al-Sa’id, Prime Minister at the time of the overthrow of the monarchy, had been Ottoman officers. They were favoured by the British and often Anglophile in consequence.

  There was an alternative, nationalist tradition in the army, represented by such officers as Rashid Ali, who led the attempt in 1941 to form an alliance with Nazi Germany and the brief military action against the British army and RAF garrison. Saddam’s uncle, Khairallah, was a supported of Rashid Ali but, like other officers who took part in the action, suffered by doing so. He was sentenced to a lengthy term of imprisonment. The leaders were hanged. The British successfully quashed the nationalist trend in the officer corps after 1941 and it was not to revive until the appearance of the Free Officers movement in Egypt in the 1950s inspired Arab officers all over the Middle East to espouse the anti-colonialist cause.

  Saddam’s hostility to professional officers may, however, have bitten deeper as he rose higher in Ba’athist politics and perhaps became a dominant sentiment once he achieved power. Self-made dictators are often so affected. Hitler nurtured a deep suspicion, eventually amounting to hatred, of the German regular officer class, particularly those qualified as staff officers. His attitude may have been differently based from that of Saddam, since he had been a frontline soldier who regarded staff officers as shirkers. Stalin, Saddam’s idol, probably better anticipated his attitude. Stalin, though closely involved in warfare from the beginning of the Bolshevik seizure of power, was also never a soldier; instead he served as a political commissar, imposing party control over the decisions of commanders. The generals of the First Cavalry Army, with whom he served on the southern front during the Russian civil war, retained his favour, irrespective of their military talents, after he became ruler of the Soviet Union. Others, all too often the most promising, became the victims of his suspicion and died in the great military purge of 1937. Saddam betrayed the same trait. He identified successful generals as potential rivals and had them removed and often killed once they achieved popularity.

  Events presented Saddam with ample opportunity to humiliate and victimize Iraqi generals for, under his dictatorship, his country was almost continuously at war. His first war, against Iran, began almost immediately after his seizure of power in 1979 and lasted from 1980–88. His second, now known as the First Gulf War, effectively began with his annexation of Kuwait in August 1990 and culminated in total defeat in February 1991. His third war, the subject of this book, began on 20 March 2003 and resulted in the capture of Baghdad on 9 April, the collapse of the Iraqi armed forces and Saddam’s disappearance (but eventual discovery in hiding on 13 December). Even the years between 1991 and 2003 had failed to bring peace to his country; immediately after the army’s collapse on 28 February 1991, the UN imposed restrictions on Iraq’s freedom to operate military aircraft in the Kurdish zone, north of the 36th parallel; in 1992 the United States, Britain and France announced the imposition of another ‘no fly zone’ in the Shi’a region south of the 32nd parallel. Th
e bans on the operation of military aircraft were enforced by the coalition air forces and by missile forces, which attacked radar stations, air bases and anti-aircraft sites.

  Saddam was entirely responsible for setting his country on the path of this twenty-year war. In the period before the seizure of power when, as deputy to President Bakr, he had had control of Iraqi foreign policy, he had correctly judged that the Shah’s Iran, then supported by the United States, was too powerful a neighbour to be opposed. Its armed forces outnumbered those of Iraq, as did its population, and it had allies who were not to be crossed. It was for those reasons that Saddam had in 1975 judged it necessary to yield to the Iranian demand for a realignment, in Iran’s favour, of the Iraq-Iran frontier on the Shatt el-Arab waterway, to follow the Iraqi shore instead of the Thalweg (centre line); the adjustment had been announced as a unilateral act by the Shah in April 1969.

  Saddam’s reconciliation with the Shah in 1975 was brought about entirely through his calculation that a cession of national territory in the south was necessary if the north of the country was not to escape from Ba’athist control. During the early seventies the Iraqi Kurds, who regarded the nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company as a usurpation of their oil-bearing regions around Mosul, and who in any case felt excluded as non-Arabs from the country’s political system, completely dominated as it was by the Sunni Arab minority, initiated an insurgency which rapidly turned into a bitter internal war. It was a conflict that the Iraqi army, trained as a national defence force, was ill-equipped to fight; tanks and artillery were not the weapons needed to win a guerrilla war in the Kurdish mountains. Moreover, the Kurds were supported by the Soviet Union which saw their resistance as a means of bringing pressure on Saddam to desist from his persecution of the Iraqi Communist Party. The calculation was well-judged. In January 1970 Saddam visited Moscow and agreed to scale down operations in Kurdistan if the Russians would cease supplying weapons to the guerrillas (the Iraqi army was also a major beneficiary of Soviet army supplies).

  Inevitably, given his devious nature, Saddam found ways round the agreement. The Iraqi army was not withdrawn from Kurdistan, and a serious assassination attempt was even mounted on the life of the Kurdish leader, Mustapha Barzani. Nevertheless, the security situation improved in Kurdistan until in 1974 the Shah, who had many Kurdish subjects of his own, chose to intervene on his own account. He, as leader of the largest Shi’a community in the Middle East, was affronted by Iraq’s mistreatment of its Shi’a majority; he also sought means to force Iraq to accept his claim to the west bank of the Shatt el-Arab. The Iranian intervention was decisive. At a meeting in Algiers on 6 March 1975, Saddam, acting as President Bakr’s deputy, conceded the territorial adjustment, though it effectively gave control of Iraq’s tiny coastline on the Persian Gulf to Iran, in return for an Iranian promise to withdraw support from the Kurds. ‘It was either that’, Saadoun Hammadi, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, was reported to have said, ‘or lose the north of the country.’

  The situation remained, nevertheless, highly unstable. The Kurds were not reconciled to the régime, nor were the Shi’a. The Soviet Union remained a powerful patron of the Iraqi Ba’athists but continued to feel concern for the country’s surviving Communists. The Shah was as involved as before in the welfare of Iraq’s Shi’a community, which, in the province of Khuzistan, spilled over into his own country. Ultimately it was Iranian rather than Iraqi politics which determined the next twist of events. The Shah’s programme of modernization had alienated the religious leadership of his own Shi’ites, who regarded it as a violation of Islamic orthodoxy. The imams found secular education and the emancipation of women particularly repugnant. Theirs was an attitude that was gaining strength throughout the Muslim world and emboldening traditionalist leaders in many states. The most influential of the Iranian traditionalists, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been expelled from his homeland, was in 1977 living in Najaf, one of the holy cities of the Shi’a sect in southern Iraq. At the Shah’s request he was expelled again, finding refuge in the West, but within Iran the demand that he should be allowed to return became irresistible and in February 1979 he was welcomed home to Tehran in triumph. His reappearance doomed the Shah but also created the circumstances in which Saddam, once installed as Iraq’s President, should embark on a disastrous war.

  Although the Ayatollah Khomeini had been given sanctuary in Iraq after his expulsion from Iran, and despite Saddam’s efforts to conciliate his Islamic régime after his return from exile in Paris, he evinced no gratitude. Khomeini was an Islamic fanatic, who had devised a new interpretation of Shi’ism. Pious Shi’ites believe that the successors of Muhammad had disappeared from human view but continued to exist as ‘hidden’ imams. In their absence, and until the reappearance of the latest hidden imam, other religious leaders were forbidden to exercise any political role. Khomeini taught that, despite traditional Shi’a belief, a true mystic inspired by Allah and a master of religious law – implicitly himself – was entitled to teach and rule. His preaching and his dominating personality captured the imagination of millions of Iranian Shi’ites and brought him to power. He at once initiated an internal Islamic revolution, which caused the deaths of thousands of the Shah’s modernizers; but his vision went farther. He saw his mission to be that of spreading the revolution throughout the region and that entailed confronting secularists everywhere. The nearest, who was also a notorious persecutor of Shi’a believers, was Saddam Hussein. While in exile in Paris Khomeini had named his enemies as ‘First the Shah; then the American Satan; then Saddam Hussein and the infidel Ba’ath Party’.

  Immediately after Khomeini’s return home, Saddam attempted to ingratiate himself with the Islamic régime in Iran by declaring a policy of ‘mutual respect and non-interference in internal affairs’. He began to pray in public, to show consideration for Shi’a religious practices and holy places and generally to demonstrate his respect for Islamic belief. Khomeini was quite unmollified, correctly judging Saddam’s sudden demonstration of piety as merely expedient. He called on the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam and openly supported Shi’ite resistance to Ba’athist rule. Iranian involvement in an attempt to assassinate Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister and, anomalously, an Eastern Rite Christian, was barely disguised.

  During 1980 Saddam was progressively driven to conclude that all attempts to placate the régime of the ayatollahs were pointless; Iranian Islamicism was not only hostile but also dangerous to Ba’athism, while, as long as Khomeini ruled, there could be no hope of settling the Shatt el-Arab dispute. Force alone, Saddam decided, could rectify the situation. Objectively, moreover, the resort to force was a logical option. Khomeini’s revolution had devastated the Iranian armed forces, a leading element of the modernization programme, and a disproportionate number of the victims had been senior officers. Military morale had been heavily depressed as a result, as had operational efficiency. Saddam had good reason to conclude, therefore, that Iraq’s armed forces, though only half the size of those of Iran, were capable of achieving a quick and cheap victory.

  Saddam began the Iran–Iraq war on 22 September 1980 by launching squadrons of his air force, equipped with French Mirage fighter-bombers, against ten Iranian air bases. His hope was to repeat the success of the Israelis on the first day of the 1967 war when, by co-ordinated surprise attacks, the air forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria had been destroyed in a few hours on their airfields. His hope was not achieved. As Saddam was later often to complain, geography was against Iraq. Iran is a large country and its military bases were distributed all over its territory, many distant from the frontiers; Israel’s targets in 1967, by contrast, had all been concentrated close behind enemy frontiers in easy reach of attack. In 1980 much of the Iranian air force survived the initial strikes and was able to mount retaliation on the same day, not only against Iraqi air bases but also against Iraqi naval units and some oil facilities, which were to prove critical targets throughout the ensuing eight-year war.

>   Nevertheless Saddam had been correct in his prewar judgement that the disorganization brought about by the ayatollahs’ purge of the secularist, but efficient and well-trained, Iranian military leadership would make it difficult for Iran to mount an effective defence. Within a month of the start of the war the Iraqis had advanced into Iran on a front of 600 kilometres (373 miles), to a depth varying from 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) in the north to 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) in the south. They had captured several towns and got within artillery range of Dezful, a key transportation centre in the northern oilfields. In the south, after a bitter battle in the streets, the city of Khorramshahr had been taken, but at a cost of 7,000 dead and wounded. The Iraqis had, however, failed to take nearby Abadan, the old Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s refinery centre through which most of the country’s oil was exported down the Gulf; without Abadan, moreover, they were ill-positioned to recapture the east bank of the Shatt el-Arab.

  Having achieved his initial advance, Saddam, who was acting as supreme commander despite his complete lack of military experience, ordered the army to dig in on a defensive line. He apparently wished to avoid inflicting casualties, in the belief that the Iranians would give in if offered the chance to do so; he also calculated that the ground captured could be used in bargaining for a settlement. On both counts he was wrong. The Iranian people had been seized with patriotic fervour and, as events would demonstrate, were prepared to accept very heavy casualties to avoid defeat, while the Iranian government had no interest in negotiating a settlement on any terms favourable to Iraq.