by John Keegan
Ba’athism’s influence was geographically limited. It did not flourish in Egypt where during the 1950s another movement, loosely known as Arab socialism, achieved dominance through a revolution led by young army officers, notably Abdul Nasser. Nasser adopted several of Aflaq’s ideas; he was an egalitarian and a secularist, fervently anti-imperialist and a champion of Arab unity, which he did much to advance by creating a United Arab Republic which briefly joined Egypt to Syria and established a presence in Yemen. Ba’athism’s most notable success was achieved elsewhere. During the 1950s it found followers in Iraq, several of whom were advanced to ministerial positions after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.
A junior Iraqi Ba’athist was Saddam Hussein, twenty-one in 1958. His prospect of advancement then looked slim. He was uneducated, uncouth and without connections; crucially he lacked any military position, a serious deficiency in view of the domination of the Ba’ath both in Iraq and Syria by young army officers, who were also the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Egypt. Saddam had sought admission to the Iraqi military academy but did not take the entrance examination. Frustrated in that ambition, he had become little more than a semi-criminal drifter, with a reputation for troublemaking and a talent for violence. Possessed of exceptional self-confidence and a ruthless will to succeed, qualities contained in a large and strong physical frame, he was nevertheless determined to become a man of power. In doing so, during the decades of the 1960s and ’70s, he single-handedly defined an entirely new form of Arab leadership, dependent neither on birth nor position nor assumption of religious authority but on the use of force and his personal skills in political manipulation. Saddam’s Arabism was irrelevant; had he been born German or Russian in the age of the dictatorships – and he greatly admired Stalin – he would have understood how to exploit disorder and instability to his advantage and could well have risen to dominance in the Nazi or Marxist-Leninist systems.
Saddam was born in the village of al-Ouja, a small and poor village on the Tigris near the provincial centre of Tikrit, sometime between 1935 and 1939; his birth date was not officially recorded and he is believed, in any case, to have altered it on marriage to make himself appear older than his wife. His father may not have been married to his mother, Subha Tulfah, who was the dominant influence on his life. A strong-willed and outspoken peasant woman, who made a living as a clairvoyant, Subha was certainly married after Saddam’s birth to a fellow villager whom Saddam came to hate; he was scorned and mistreated. Subha, however, had a brother, Khairallah Tulfah, who assumed the role of surrogate father to Saddam and guided his early development. Khairallah, despite his humble origins, had been commissioned as an officer in the prewar Iraqi army, a status that greatly impressed Saddam. Khairallah also fixed Saddam’s political outlook. He hated foreigners, particularly the British, declared his admiration for Hitler and the Nazis and was a supporter of Iraq’s wartime ruler, Rashid Ali, who in 1941 had tried to arrange an alliance with Nazi Germany and for a German expeditionary force to enter Iraq. For his complicity in the plot Khairallah had been cashiered from the army and jailed for five years.
During Khairallah’s imprisonment Saddam, still a child and apparently often driven from the hut which was the family home by his stepfather, kept himself alive by thievery and odd jobs. He had, however, conceived the idea of getting an education and when Khairallah was released, joined him in Tikrit, where his uncle got him into school and supported him. Khairallah was a survivor. He found teaching jobs himself, joined the fledgling Ba’ath party and became sufficiently well-regarded as an educationist to be appointed director of education in Baghdad after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. By then he had moved to the Karkh district of the capital, taking Saddam with him. Saddam enrolled at Karkh high school and appears to have applied himself. He was still, however, the local provincial rough who ran a street gang and who fought with anyone who opposed him, mocked his peasant ways or supported the pro-British, monarchical government which represented the established order before the revolution of 1958.
The revolution of July 1958 led to Saddam’s initiation into the culture of political violence and opened his eyes to the possibilities of personal advancement to power by killing. He had joined the Ba’ath party in 1957, apparently for idealistic reasons; since it then had only 300 members in Iraq the move was certainly not opportunistic. It was no doubt, however, influenced by his uncle Khairallah’s espousal of Ba’athism and by the advantage membership of the Ba’ath provided, as shown by his uncle’s appointment as Baghdad’s director of education. But Khairallah did not last long in the job. An Iraqi Communist, Saddoun al-Tikriti, denounced him as a man of unsavoury reputation and he was removed. Shortly afterwards Saddam, apparently at his uncle’s prompting or to avenge family honour, arranged to lie in wait for Saddoun outside his house and murder him by a shot to the head. It was too blatant a crime to be overlooked. Both Saddam and his uncle were arrested and taken into custody, where they remained for six months. In the absence of incriminating evidence, however, they were eventually released.
In another sense, the killing of Saddoun did Saddam no harm, rather the contrary. It conferred on him among fellow Ba’athists a reputation for ruthlessness, at a time when the party was looking for ruthless party loyalists. The Iraqi Ba’athists had been disappointed by the outcome of the 1958 revolution. Its leader, Abd al-Karem Kassem, was a regular officer of conventional views, anti-British and anti-monarchist but equally neither Nasserist nor Ba’athist in outlook. As an Iraqi nationalist, he was unwilling to see Iraq become subordinate to Egypt in an Arab socialist union and was equally resistant to the Ba’athist message of merging Iraq with its neighbouring states in a pan-Arab renaissance.
Had Kassem merely held aloof both from the Nasserists and the Ba’athists, his régime might have survived. Alarmed by the activism of the Nasserists and Ba’athists among the group of so-called Free Officers who had brought him to power, he turned to the Iraqi Communists, who in their enthusiasm for a Soviet alliance necessarily opposed both movements. In March 1959 some of the Free Officers therefore decided to stage a coup. It was an unwise move. The coup was badly organized, lacked popular support and quickly failed. Kassem took a savage revenge. Using the Iraqi Communist Party as his agency of repression, he encouraged it to hunt down and murder all the complicit Free Officers. The avengers went farther; they also killed many of the officers’ nationalist supporters and in Mosul organised a mob reprisal which lasted a week and culminated in mass executions.
The surviving Ba’athists were outraged. Not only had Kassem set back their dream of creating a pan-Arab state, by severing Iraq’s ties with the Egyptian Nasserists. He had also killed many of the men who had risked their lives in rising against the monarchy. The Ba’athists decided on revenge in their turn. Their difficulty was that, as a still tiny party of professional people and students, they lacked members who had any familiarity with violence. A general who had survived Kassem’s purge, Ahmad al-Bakr, was a Ba’athist sympathizer, however, and he had appropriate contacts. As a Tikriti, he knew Khairallah and through the uncle he met the nephew. Recognizing that Saddam could be useful to the party as a thug and enforcer, he introduced him to Ba’athist party members. Saddam was not to be admitted to the party at once but he was selected to take part in the attempted assassination of Kassem which was being prepared in the autumn of 1959.
The attempt was botched, perhaps by Saddam’s hastiness in opening fire on Kassem’s motorcade on 7 October 1959. Kassem was only wounded and recovered. Saddam may have been wounded by return fire; he certainly always claimed to have been so. In the confusion which followed the shooting he made his escape, got home to his native village and then succeeded in crossing the frontier into Syria. Once arrived in Damascus, he was sheltered by local Ba’athists and introduced to the founder of the movement, Michel Aflaq. Aflaq, impressed by what were now Saddam’s credentials as a serious revolutionary, apparently admitted him to full party membership and
arranged for him to find safer refuge with other Ba’athists in Egypt.
Saddam was in exile four years, which he spent completing his high school education and mingling with other political revolutionaries. He also enrolled as a law student at Cairo University, though he did not complete his degree, and married his cousin, Sajida, Khairallah’s daughter. Marriages within the family are common practice in the Arab world and it is possible that the two young people had been betrothed since childhood. Saddam also joined the Egyptian Ba’ath party and collected friends. One of his closest comrades in Cairo was a fellow survivor of the plot to assassinate Kassem, Abdul al-Shaikly, who was studying medicine and would later become Iraqi Foreign Minister before the two fell out. It is alleged that Saddam, during his Egyptian exile, became associated both with Egyptian intelligence and with the CIA. Of that there is no proof though he was apparently financially supported by the Egyptian government, which was concerned to foster its political contacts with foreign Ba’athists after Syria withdrew from political union with Egypt in 1961.
Saddam’s chance to return from exile came in 1963 when Kassem was overthrown in a coup, apparently engineered by the CIA and led by Ahmad al-Bakr, Khairallah’s friend and Saddam’s early sponsor. The 1963 coup was particularly bloody. Kassem was removed from power only after prolonged street battles in which hundreds died; he was shot after a peremptory trial and his bullet-riddled body was then exhibited on Iraqi television. Bakr became Prime Minister in the change of régime, which effectively established the Ba’ath as the ruling party, and shortly after the transfer of power Saddam, with Abdul al-Shaikly, flew from Cairo to Baghdad, to be welcomed home by a crowd of exultant Ba’athists at the airport. Saddam the pan-Arab revolutionary seemed to be about to enter into his political inheritance.
The reality of his return proved different. Despite his undeniable record as an early enemy of Kassem and as an anti-Communist Arab nationalist, Saddam’s humble origins still told against him in his homeland. To the better-educated, middle-class Ba’athists he looked and sounded like a peasant. He was aware of their contempt and resented it. He also knew, however, that he could compensate for his lowly personal standing by winning respect by force; and in the immediate aftermath of Kassem’s overthrow the political situation in Iraq offered plentiful opportunities for violence. Kassem’s successor, President Arif, filled his government with Ba’athists but failed to quell dissent between its two factions, a civilian group of pan-Arabists and a military group loyal to the army’s traditional ‘Iraq first’ policy. Eventually he expelled all the Ba’athists from their ministerial posts but left the party in being. Bakr, Saddam’s party mentor, exploited the situation to achieve dominance, using Saddam, now head of internal party security, to bully and browbeat his opponents.
Saddam remained committed to seeking personal power. That required the removal of Arif, a risky undertaking as the President had the full support of the army. There were several plots, all premature; nevertheless, Saddam proceeded and, in one of the most mysterious episodes of his career, was identified as a conspirator, arrested and imprisoned in October 1964. How he escaped execution has never been explained; nor was his escape in July 1966, after a period in gaol when he was not harshly treated. How he occupied his time between his escape and the successful removal of Arif’s brother Abd al-Rahman from the Presidency in July 1968 is also unclear, as are his whereabouts. On 17 July 1968, however, he arrived outside the presidential palace, riding on a tank and dressed as a lieutenant. By telephone Bakr ordered Arif to go to the airport; a bloodless change of power was completed by a broadcast announcing that the Ba’ath party had assumed control.
Bakr had engineered the coup by persuading the leading Ba’athists in the army, notably Generals Daud and Nayif, to lend him their support. He had given them his assurance that, once Arif was removed, the army would be accorded ultimate authority within the country. Not only had he no intention of keeping his word; in the aftermath of the coup he had Daud exiled to Morocco and Nayif to London (where, in 1978, Saddam, then President of Iraq, arranged for him to be murdered). The new government was filled with ministers from the civilian wing of the Ba’ath party, relegating the army to a subordinate position. Saddam was not given a ministry; instead he became head of state security, a position of decisive importance which he would use to advance himself to supreme power eleven years later.
He was also appointed deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) of the Iraqi Ba’ath, the supreme party organ in the country; although the Ba’ath had not so far achieved its programme of creating a unitary Arab state, it was organized into Command Councils in each of the countries, notably Syria and Egypt, where it had sizeable numbers of followers, a system devised by Aflaq himself. The success of the 1968 revolution diminished rather than increased, however, Aflaq’s influence in Iraq. Instead it was the Tikrit connection which would now come to dominate. Bakr brought many Tikritis beside Saddam into positions of power after 1968. One was his friend and Saddam’s uncle Khairallah, who became mayor of Baghdad. Khairallah, according to Con Coughlin, Saddam’s biographer, constantly reminded Bakr to depend on Saddam. ‘You need family to protect you, not an army or a party. Armies and parties change direction in this country.’
The relationship between Bakr and Saddam was not one of blood ties. They were unrelated. Bakr nevertheless had from an early stage fostered Saddam, got him into the Ba’ath and sponsored his career. In the years after the 1968 coup, they would work intimately together, Bakr consolidating the Ba’ath’s hold on power, Saddam providing force whenever needed to protect Bakr’s position and intimidate or dispose of his enemies. Saddam was already an accomplished thug and murderer. During the seventies he would become a master of state-directed repression; he ran a pervasive domestic security and intelligence system, supported by an apparatus that incarcerated, interrogated, tortured and killed the régime’s opponents as necessary.
Saddam was also pursuing the parallel policies of extending the Ba’ath’s power into every institution and organ of public life, on the Stalinist model he favoured (though it equally equated to the Nazi programme of Gleichschaltung), meanwhile ensuring that his own personal power was enlarged in unison. Some of his acts of repression were deliberately ostentatious, such as the condemnation to death of fourteen Iraqi Jews in January 1969 and their public hanging in Baghdad’s central space, Liberation Square. The Iraqi Jewish community had once been one of the largest and most emancipated in the Middle East. Saddam had early, however, detected that anti-Semitism, which he represented as anti-Zionism, was popular with the masses, who shared the common Arab hatred of Israel and resented the consistent failure of the Iraqi army’s participation in the Arab–Israeli wars.
Saddam also pursued the régime’s domestic enemies, as he privately characterized them, the non-Arab Kurds of Iraq’s northern provinces and the Shi’a southerners. Historically the Arab Muslim population of Iraq has been dominated by Sunni. Statistically, however, they are a minority within the country, making up only a fifth of the population. Better educated and more successful in every branch of public life, they formed the main body of the Ba’ath party. It was to the disadvantage of both Kurds and Shi’a that they were associated with Iran, Iraq’s neighbour but traditional enemy. Iran is the only Middle Eastern country in which Shi’a predominate; Saddam suspected Iraq’s Shi’a of complicity with the Shah of Iran in his effort to expand his territory by encroachment. He also suspected the Kurds of disloyalty, with some justification. The Kurds, a stateless people whose homeland is divided by the national frontiers of Iran, Syria and Turkey as well as Iraq, have a long history of seeking liberation and unification by playing their host countries off against one another. They had sustained a state of rebellion in the north ever since the creation of Iraq by the British in 1920. This blew sometimes hot, sometimes cool. In the early seventies the Kurds grew troublesome again and were supported both by the Shah and the Soviet Union, which saw in lending them support
an opportunity to punish the Ba’ath for its persecution of Iraq’s Communists. The Ba’ath regime could not afford to ignore the problem. The Shah’s support for the Kurds was not wholly opportunistic, since Iranians and Kurds are ethnically linked; more important, some of Iraq’s largest oil resources are centred around Mosul, effectively the capital of Kurdistan.
In an uncharacteristic display of moderation, Saddam decided to deal with the Kurdish rebellion by diplomacy rather than force; he may also have been brought to that decision by the notable failure of the Iraqi army to make headway against the rebels on their own ground. What followed demonstrated that Saddam could be a realist as well as a violent revolutionary. He first approached the Soviet Union, from which Iraq was beginning to buy arms to re-equip its forces. As a valuable commercial client, he got a hearing; Kosygin, then Soviet premier, promised in 1970 to withdraw support from the Kurds, as long as Saddam agreed not to take revenge; on his return from Moscow Saddam actually consented to grant the Kurds a measure of the autonomy they had long been demanding. The catch was that the implementation of the concessions was to be postponed for four years. The Kurds saw the catch and continued to make trouble. Saddam trumped them in 1975 when he submitted to the Shah’s demand that Iraq should renegotiate the 1937 treaty which aligned the Iraqi–Iranian border along the Shatt el-Arab in midstream (the Thalweg). This Algiers Agreement was greatly to Iraq’s disadvantage but, as a short-term means of pacifying Kurdistan, Saddam judged it desirable. So it proved; within two weeks of the new treaty being signed, Iran had withdrawn its support from the Kurds, whose rebellion collapsed. That would not, however, be the end of the Thalweg issue; it was to underlie Saddam’s ill-judged decision to attack Iran in 1980, the inception of a war of eight years that would exhaust both countries.
