by John Keegan
The logic of the Arab Union was that both of its component states were Hashemite monarchies. Monarchy, however, outside Jordan, was almost as discredited in the eyes of nationalists as the pro-Western régimes that underpinned it. It attracted no support from the Free Officers who were instigating their own measures to secure Iraq’s future. Under the leadership of Brigadier Abd al-Karem Kassem and Colonel Abd al-Salim Arif, they had decided to overthrow the Hashemite dynasty, declare a republic and form a government drawn from the ranks of the army. They had also decided to act quickly since they foresaw that the growing discontent within the officer corps could not much longer be disguised. The opportunity to act was given them by Nuri himself who, alarmed by an American intervention in Lebanon, to avert a civil war, and by the evident hostility of Nasser’s United Arab Republic to the Arab Union, decided to send elements of the Iraqi army to the Jordanian border as a measure of support to Jordan’s King. The deployment was seen by Kassem and his military allies as providing the opportunity to mount a coup and on 14 July 1958 army units moving towards Jordan entered Baghdad and attacked the royal palace. The young King, Faisal II, and the Regent, Abd al-Ilah, and other members of the royal family were shot in the courtyard. Nuri, allegedly attempting to escape the city disguised in woman’s clothing, was shot in the street the following day.
Immediately after this bloody end to Iraq’s royal government, the country was proclaimed a republic and Kassem Prime Minister, Minister of Defence and Commander-in-Chief. Supreme power was vested symbolically in a three-man sovereignty council. Arif was appointed Deputy Prime Minister. Tension between the two soldiers revealed itself at once. Arif belonged to the Nasserist school of nationalists whose overriding aim was to create a single Arab nation within which the states descending from the old imperial system would lose their identity. Kassem was an Iraqi nationalist, committed to Iraq’s economic development and its evolution as a rich and powerful independent state. Half Sunni, half Kurdish Shi’a by birth, he was presumably well positioned to foster national unity. Temperamentally, however, he was an authoritarian, whose inclination, when he encountered opposition, was to use force to resolve his difficulties. He genuinely sought to build a homogenous Iraqi society and tried to integrate both Kurds and Shi’a with Sunni, promising prosperity and permitting the public organization of political and interest groups – women, youth, nationalists, the Muslim Brotherhood – hitherto suppressed. He recognized Kurdish separateness, though not the right to separatism, revoked the Iraq Petroleum Company’s oil exploration rights and announced a scheme of radical land reform, designed to end the days of absentee landlordism over wide areas of agricultural holdings.
Kassem’s policies, combined with his undoubted personal magnetism, brought him widespread popularity. It was a shallow popularity, however, dependent on his ability to mobilize crowds in the street; his role as ‘Sole Leader’ was ultimately supported, as the previous régime had been, by the intelligence and security forces and the army. Shallow popularity was opposed, moreover, by the hostility of displaced rivals and well-organized covert groups, Nasserist Free Officers who rejected his policy of ‘Iraq First’, the Ba’ath, which was growing in strength, and the Communists.
He was obliged early on to remove Arif, his co-conspirator, whom he imprisoned but did not execute; Rashid Ali, who had led the military revolt of 1941 and who returned from exile expecting to enter into his inheritance, he did execute. He was also driven to fall out with the Communists; after a preliminary attempt to draw them into his scheme for broadening his political support, he found their determination to work for their own ends a threat to his position and he progressively withdrew the privileges he had begun by granting them, without actually coming to an open breach. His management of the Communist problem was the most successful strand in his dictatorship.
He also began well in his attempt to palliate the Kurdish problem. In 1960, as part of his liberalization programme, he allowed the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) to organize openly. Its co-operation with the Communists and its efforts to draw the Soviet Union into Iraqi domestic politics understandably alarmed Kassem, however, and he rejected its over-bold demand for the grant of regional autonomy. That move provoked armed protest in Kurdistan and by the autumn of 1961 serious fighting had broken out in the north, engaging the army in a campaign of repression. The leader of the most important Kurdish group, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, a long-time opponent of the Baghdad government, returned to the field with his peshmerga guerrillas, who were to become a permanent cause of internal disorder during Kassem’s period in power and under Saddam.
Kassem’s most dedicated opponents, however, came from the groups apparently closest to him, the Arab nationalists and the army. His foreign policy pleased both, for he reasserted Iraq’s rights over Iran’s in the Shatt el-Arab and he revived the claim to Kuwait, so menacingly in June 1961 that Britain, Kuwait’s traditional protector, was prompted to send an expeditionary force to the emirate, from which it had only just been withdrawn. Because so much of the Iraqi army was committed to Kurdistan, Kassem was unable, however, to respond with a corresponding military deployment to the Kuwait border. At British representation, the Arab League, to which all Arab states belonged, recognized Kuwait as an independent country and on the withdrawal of the British troops replaced them with others of their own, largely drawn from the army of the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria).
Kassem’s response was to remove Iraq’s representation from the Arab League and to break off relations with several Arab states that had recognized Kuwait’s independence. These were empty gestures. Within Iraq the Free Officers and other nationalists, and the Ba’ath, took the view that he had humiliated Iraq, left it isolated in the Arab world and, most critically of all, caved in to British imperialism.
The Kuwait affair left Kassem in a precarious position. Outwardly he retained his popularity; his use of oil revenues for the general good, particularly by the improvement and expansion of the electrical and health care system, was widely welcomed and his reduction of the rights enjoyed by the Iraq Petroleum Company was seen as proper and patriotic; but his hold on power was maintained only by a balancing act. Believing he was accepted as ‘Sole Leader’ by the masses, he had failed to protect himself by creating a real network of power groups loyal to himself. Other power groups, covert and conspiratorial, resented his refusal to position Iraq at the centre of the Arab nationalist movement and his determination to pursue a policy of ‘Iraq First’. He had already survived several attempts to unseat him: a crude conspiracy led by the returned Rashid Ali in 1958, a rising in the north in 1959 and an assassination attempt in October of that year, in which the young Saddam Hussein had fired on his car. The decisive stroke, however, was to be launched by the Ba’ath, now a well-established and efficient force in Iraq’s unofficial politics. Its leaders, particularly Kassem’s former confederate Arif and Brigadier Hasan al-Bakr, were dissatisfied by Kassem’s isolation of Iraq within the Arab world and by his dependence on the Communists for support. They also hated his insouciant belief in his own popularity as a safeguard of his personal security. That was perceptive. Kassem, though apparently aware that trouble was brewing, merely arrested some of the leading Ba’athists. He did not deploy dependable units of the army to protect himself. On 9 February 1963 others in the Ba’ath struck against the air force, which was loyal to Kassem and also had Communist connections. Meanwhile they brought their supporters into the streets in Baghdad and sent army units they controlled to the Ministry of Defence. Had Kassem armed the Communists he might have survived but he disdained to do so. In the prolonged street battle that followed he and his supporters were eventually overcome, captured and shot.
Power now seemed to belong to the Ba’ath but the leaders of the coup appointed the non-Ba’athist Abd al-Salim Arif as President, with the Ba’athist Hasan al-Bakr as Vice-President. There ensued a troubled period of disputed authority. The Ba’ath had become the most important political force in
Iraq but its factions could not agree, the points of difference, as usual, being over the relative weight to be given to the pursuit of Iraqi and wider Arab nationalism. Arif, who enjoyed wide support in the army, eventually used his military position to quash the Ba’ath, ruling thereafter as a military dictator. He created the Republican Guard as an inner army, recruited from dependable tribal allies, and he trod a narrow path between Nasserism and straightforward Iraqi nationalism. He proved a skilful politician and might have enjoyed a long period of power had he not been killed in a helicopter crash in 1966, apparently a genuine accident. Power then passed to his brother Abd al-Rahman Arif, another soldier, who attempted to perpetuate his system of personal rule. The second Arif, however, lacked the former’s skills and encountered more difficult problems, including the aftermath of the Arab disaster of 1967 in the war with Israel, a deteriorating situation in Kurdistan and the outbreak of a Communist-led revolt in the south. Under his uncertain hold on power, the Ba’ath was able to reorganize and to extend its tentacles, notably into units of the army and the Republican Guard. In July 1968 the Ba’ath staged a semicoup, which disposed of President Arif by putting him on an aircraft out of the country. It was subsequently unable, however, to agree on the division of power with the non-Ba’athists in the army who had joined in Arif’s removal and a fortnight later, on 30 July, it staged a second coup, which appointed the veteran Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr President, with his young kinsman Saddam Hussein as his deputy. Bakr’s base of power, though he held the post of secretary-general of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, was in the army. Saddam’s power, which he was already and secretly dedicated to making absolute, derived from his role as a Ba’athist, an experienced conspirator and a member of an extended family, clan and tribal network centred on the provincial centre of Tikrit. Hasan al-Bakr has been described by Charles Tripp, a leading historian of modern Iraq, as ‘a typical regimental officer, solicitous of the welfare of his subordinates and able to use the language of military collegiality to create a certain bond with fellow officers. Despite the radical Ba’athist rhetoric that he used when occasion demanded, his views were conservative and rather typical of his provincial background: pan-Arab to some degree, but also imbued with a keen awareness of status distinctions between different lineages and clans among the Sunni Arabs … of Iraq.’ Saddam, by contrast, was a completely uncollegial figure, solicitous of no one’s welfare but his own and animated by a Stalinist ruthlessness to acquire and maximize personal power.
3
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein, a poor and uneducated provincial youth, came to exercise absolute power in Iraq by a mixture of violence and political intrigue. His rise followed a novel and unusual path. Leadership in the Muslim world is traditionally associated with birth or religious status, often both together. Indeed, traditional Muslim society offered the ambitious none of the ways upward customary in the West. Worldly ambition was anyhow not a quality thought proper by pious Muslims. At the heart of the Muslim system lies the idea of the Umma, the community of fellow believers, commanded by the Koran to live in harmony under the authority of the Imam or Caliph, the successor of the Prophet. The succession divided Muslims almost from the beginning, soon after the death of Muhammad, into the Sunni majority, which believed that the Caliph, though he should preferably descend from Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh, was to be elected and accepted by the faithful as long as he showed himself ‘rightly guided’ by the law of God; and a number of minorities, of which the Shi’a was the largest. The Shi’a hold that the succession was flawed from the start, believing that the Caliphate should have passed to the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali. This dispute gave rise to murder and civil war and divides Islam to this day. Nevertheless, neither faction diverged from the central idea, that Muslims live under the law of God, revealed in the Koran and to be upheld by Muhammad’s successor.
Practical difficulties made the idea difficult to sustain; the history of Islam for many centuries is a record of dissent and dispute, often violent, of succession by victory in war, not election, and, at times, of competing caliphates. Internecine violence always, however, affronted pious Muslims, so much so that Islam invented a unique institution, that of slave soldiery, to absolve those in dispute of the sin of fighting fellow believers. A unified Caliphate was only reestablished in comparatively recent times when the Ottoman Turks, a non-Arab people from Central Asia who had been recruited to serve as slave soldiers, imposed their authority over the Arabs by military force and assumed the Caliphate by diktat. From the sixteenth century onwards the history of Islam became largely that of the Ottoman empire, with its seat at Constantinople (Istanbul). Areas of the Islamic world, notably in India and South-east Asia, never formed part of the Ottoman Empire; many of its subjects, in south-eastern Europe and the Near East, remained Christian. The empire, however, embraced the historic heartland of Islam and almost all Arabs were, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, directly or indirectly subjects of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph.
Power in the Ottoman world, both secular and religious, was dynastic; sons succeeded fathers, though favoured wives were often able to evade the principle of primogeniture and new sultans commonly consolidated their accession by murdering brothers en masse. The traditional principle persisted nevertheless; birth and religious status were the bases of worldly authority. Religious status could be quite widely drawn; the servants of the Sultan-Caliph, his ministers and military commanders, derived their authority from association with him. Thus, for example, the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt, whose leaders ruled the country during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were legitimized as the Sultan-Caliph’s viceroys (Khedive). Unnervingly, alternative legitimate power could also arise spontaneously, through the appearance of a Mahdi, a man directly guided by God. The most famous Mahdi of modern times was Muhammad Ahmed, who became ruler of Sudan in the 1880s.
Mahdism, dynastic usurpation, fragmentation of the Caliphate or patronage by it were the only means, until the twentieth century, by which power could be transferred in the Muslim world. The historic ideas of the Umma, the community of believers, of the Caliphate and of the overriding authority of the Supreme Being and his law as revealed in the Koran, impeded the emergency of secular politics. Much was changed in the Islamic and particularly the Arab world, however, by its penetration by European imperial powers in the nineteenth century. The conquest of Algeria by the French after 1830 and the subordination of Egypt to British rule after 1882 subjected large numbers of Muslim Arabs to the processes of European government, based not on the ideas of religious fraternity or divine authority but on those of administrative efficiency and economic development; with them the Europeans brought also secular education and law, both quite alien to the Muslim mind, which for centuries had used schools as a means of Koranic instruction and the courts as a forum for judgement by Sharia, Koranic law.
European imperialism did not extinguish the power of Muslim ideas; in the long run, indeed, by a process of reaction, it was to reenergize Islam and in a highly aggressive form. In the early twentieth century, however, the worldly behaviour of some young Muslims was decisively altered by exposure to European thought and practice. In the Ottoman empire, dissatisfaction at the failure of the Sultan-Caliph’s government to stem the encroachment of European powers prompted a group of army officers, the ‘Young Turks’, to set up a modernizing régime; its leaders were irreligious Turkish nationalists; their tendency to treat the Arabs of the empire as subjects rather than fellow-Muslims led to the beginnings of what has been called ‘the Arab awakening’. The awakening was accelerated by Turkey’s defeat in the First World War which led to the fall of the Sultanate, the abolition of the Caliphate and the attachment of the Ottomans’ Arab provinces to the French and British empires as League of Nations mandated territories. Cast adrift in a world where a supreme Muslim authority no longer existed, the Arabs within the mandates and in the British protectorate of Egypt began to respond to direct r
ule by Europeans by emulating European political forms. One manifestation, the Muslim Brotherhood, which appeared in Egypt in 1928, was specifically Islamic in character but sought to preserve religious values by adopting such European practices as recruiting young people into a Scout movement, founding schools, hospitals and clinics and building factories, all run on Islamic principles. The Muslim Brotherhood, eventually to be persecuted by Arab régimes of specifically secular character, has survived into modern times; one of its adherents, Sayyid Qutb, conceived the theory of Islamic renewal which inspired the terrorists of 11 September.
Another direction taken by the Arab awakening was the creation in Syria after the Second World War of a political party dedicated by title to ‘resurrection’. The Ba’ath Party, founded in 1944 by a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq, proclaimed the unity of all Arabic-speaking people and their right to live in a unitary state. It specifically denounced the boundaries imposed on the Arab lands by the empires – including the Ottoman. Aflaq went farther; Christian though he was, he invoked the idea of Islam, propounded by Muhammad, as the common inheritance of all Arabs, Muslim or not, and its rise as an historical experience which gave the Arabs a particular mission in the world. The Arabs were to transform themselves first by spiritual renewal and then their political and social systems. Paradoxically, Aflaq was politically a secularist and the Ba’ath was to become the first secular party in the Arab world. It gave no place as leaders to traditional religious figures and emphasized Western rather than Islamic social values: the importance of scientific and technical education and the equality of the sexes. Nevertheless the roots of Ba’athism were metaphysical, which perhaps explains its appeal to the Arab mind. Aflaq was also rigidly anti-Communist, regarding Communism as another form of foreign imperialism.
