War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom

by Oliver North

  In the aftermath of the “Arab Revolt,” Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for colonial affairs, convened a conference in Cairo to determine the future of Britain’s Mesopotamian Mandate. Without consulting with a single person who lived between the Tigris and Euphrates, the participants, including T. E. Lawrence, redrew the borders once again, renamed the territory “Iraq,” and selected Faisal, the son of the sharif of Mecca, a Hashemite and a friend of Lawrence, for the throne of the newly minted “kingdom.”

  The British might have conceived of Faisal as their puppet, but they quickly learned that he had a few ideas of his own. Within months of his August 23, 1921, coronation, the new king convinced the British to send aircraft and motorized troops with machine guns to drive marauding Wahhabis back into Saudi Arabia. Though the operation required Faisal to acquiesce in yet another redrawing of the map—this time the creation of a “neutral zone” along the border of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq—security in the south meant he could start consolidating his authority over his new kingdom. By 1923 Faisal had expelled the Shi’ite mullahs and imams from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and sent them packing to Iran. A year later he handed down what he called the Tribal Disputes Regulations, suborning the rural Shi’ite sheikhs to his Sunni-dominated administration in Baghdad. In March of 1925, the oil-rich Sunni Kurdish enclave of Mosul was annexed. The British helped to make this move official by supporting the so-called Organic Law, which gave Faisal the right to convene and adjourn the Iraqi Parliament.

  By 1930 the king had withstood an attempted coup and forged sufficient consensus among his fractious, multi-ethnic, multi-communal people to permit suffrage for men, implement universal public education, create a national army, institute a system of law, and commence a program of rural electrification. The 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty, granting independence and commonwealth status to the kingdom in 1932, reflected not just British fatigue and the effects of the Great Depression, but the Hashemite king’s skills as an administrator as well. And though the treaty granted the British rights to military bases in Iraq, it made Faisal the first head of state of a sovereign Arab country and a member of the League of Nations. He didn’t live to enjoy the fruits of his labor. A heart attack felled Faisal in September 1933.

  The day after Iraq’s first monarch was laid in his grave, his twenty-one-year-old son, Ghazi Ibn Faisal (meaning “victorious son of Faisal”), assumed the throne. The playboy-turned-potentate proved predictably inept and virulently anti-British. When the Shi’ites in southern Iraq complained, he ignored them. When they rebelled in 1935 and 1936, Ghazi sent the Sunni-led army to brutally repress the uprising.

  As London warily watched Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and Stalin’s purges in Russia, Ghazi began making regular radio broadcasts laced with anti-British propaganda. In 1936, with the monarch’s acquiescence, Bakr Sidqi, an army commander with a reputation for cruelty, led a coup against the pro-British elected government.

  For the next two years, the regime in Baghdad conducted a quiet flirtation with Axis fascism, inviting emissaries from Rome and Berlin to Baghdad. By the time Ghazi killed himself in a drunken automobile accident on April 4, 1939, the British were glad he was gone. But much of what his father had tried to do in the way of uniting a dispirit country had also been undone.

  Ghazi’s son, Faisal II, was only three years old when he ascended the throne, so Emir Abdul al Ilah—a pro-British Hashemite—was appointed as regent. But just two years later, in April 1941, he was forced to flee for his life by yet another nationalist military coup. That was enough for the British, who were now fighting for survival against Hitler. On June 1, 1941, the British army landed in force at Basra, marched unopposed into Baghdad, and reinstalled Abdul al Ilah as regent.

  The end of World War II brought an end to British occupation, but not to Iraq’s internal discord. In January 1948, Communist agitators aligned with nationalists to create a series of street protests against a new treaty with Britain. Distrustful of the army, whose senior officers were predominantly Sunni nationalists, the regent called on the police to open fire. Hundreds were killed. The government collapsed, and even though the Treaty of Portsmouth was abrogated, those who hated the monarchy and the British had a grievous wrong to remember. By the end of the year, they would have another: the defeat of the Arab armies—including a twenty-thousand-man Iraqi contingent—at the hand of Israel in the Jewish state’s war of independence.

  By May 1953, when the eighteen-year-old Faisal II appeared before the Iraqi parliament to swear an oath to “safeguard democratic principles” and become Iraq’s third constitutional monarch, the days of British influence—and the Iraqi monarchy—were numbered. Despite growing oil wealth, a commensurate increase in the standard of living, and a burgeoning intellectual community, the country was increasingly torn by internecine conflict and a potentially violent nationalist movement fueled in large measure by external forces.

  In February 1955, Faisal II agreed to join the so-called Baghdad Pact, an anti-Communist alliance that also included Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and, of course, Great Britain. The king was immediately branded a “lackey of Western imperialism” by the communist press, as well as by Shi’ite opponents of the regime, and Gamal Abdul Nasser—the Egyptian army colonel who had overthrown King Farouk in Cairo. It was the final straw for the anti-imperialist nationalists in the Iraqi army officer corps. They began to plot in earnest—not only against the pro-Western administration in Baghdad but against the monarchy as well.

  Early on the morning of July 14, 1958, General Abd al-Karim Qasim ordered the army out of the barracks and to surround the palace. Before noon, Faisal II, Abdul al Ilah (the former regent), and the palace guards were all dead. Iraq’s thirty-seven-year-long experiment with constitutional monarchy was over for good.

  For the next decade (1958–1968), those who ruled from Baghdad described themselves to the world as an “Arab republic.” But with the exception of a brief period under civilian governance in 1963, the country was run by a succession of military dictatorships. And since the process of electing deputies to parliament had died with Faisal II, the preferred methods for changing governments became assassinations and coups.

  General Qasim barely survived the first such attempt at a change of government when a Baath Party hit team, which included a low-level party apparatchik named Saddam Hussein, tried to gun down the dictator on October 7, 1959. The second time around the Baathists were better organized. On the evening of February 9, 1963, in a scene foreshadowing what would happen forty years later, the new leaders of Iraq broadcast footage of General Qasim’s bullet-riddled body on national television.

  Nine months later, on November 18, 1963, the Baathist National Council of Revolutionary Command was itself thrown out in yet another coup. This one was led by a junta headed by General Abd al-Salam Arif, a friend and admirer of Egypt’s Nasser. Al-Salam survived two Baath-inspired countercoup attempts in September 1964 and in 1965 only to die in a helicopter crash on April 13, 1966.

  General Abd al-Rahman Arif succeeded his elder sibling as the head of Baghdad’s military government. He fared even worse than his brother. Humiliated by Israel’s defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 Six Day War, in which Iraq’s contingent never even engaged the “Zionist enemy,” the resurgent Baathists tried again. This time it worked.

  On July 17, 1968, a decade and three days after the military had destroyed Iraq’s constitutional monarchy, the Arab Baath Socialist Party, a highly disciplined and secretive political entity of no more than eight thousand members, threw out the military dictatorship. General Arif was allowed to flee. In his place the Baathists installed the machinery that would eventually be seized by the most brutal ruler the land between the rivers had ever seen—Saddam Hussein.

  Modern Eden

  Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

  July 1968–September 2002

  If the land between the Tigris and Euphrates is an unlikely place for the start o
f human civilization, then Saddam Hussein is an equally improbable person to become its head of state. Born on April 28, 1937, to a dirt-poor, illiterate family of shepherds, Saddam was apparently raised by a stepfather, his biological father having either died or run off before his son was born. By the age of ten, Saddam was attending school in Baghdad and living with his mother’s brother.

  Lacking the social contacts to get an appointment to the military academy in Baghdad, and too poor to attend a university, Saddam decided, at the age of twenty, to join the outlawed Baath Party. Two years later, in 1959, he was part of the hit team that tried to assassinate General Abd al-Karim Qasim. Though slightly wounded in the encounter, he managed to flee Iraq and spent the next four years on the run—first in Damascus and eventually in Cairo, where he studied law on a stipend and scholarship provided by Nasser’s government.

  In 1963 the budding Baath revolutionary dropped out of school, returned to Iraq, married his first cousin, Sajida Tulfah, and helped to plot another abortive coup later that year. Jailed in the aftermath, Saddam was released after signing an oath promising never again to participate in antigovernment or Baath Party activities. He immediately went underground and rose rapidly within the clandestine Baath organization, establishing a reputation for two qualities: intelligence and brutal ruthlessness.

  On the seventeenth day of July 1968, when the Baathists took over in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein was the enforcer for the tightly organized party—a post for which he was uniquely suited. As the head of the Jihaz Haneen—the Baath security apparat—Saddam had the job of imposing discipline within the party’s regional cells and to intimidate, coerce, or “remove” obstacles to consolidating control over the machinery of government. Immediately after seizing power, the governing Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) authorized Saddam to employ “terror and coercion” to “remove enemies of the revolution,” and he bent to the task with zeal.

  Two weeks after the coup, Baath Party leader Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, the acting president of Iraq, gave his cousin Saddam the privilege of escorting Abd al-Razzaq al-Nayif, the head of Iraqi military intelligence and a potential rival for power, into exile and out of the way. Saddam immediately set about organizing a new intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, and staffed it with thugs from the Jihaz Haneen—many of them clansmen from Tikrit, the impoverished city on the banks of the Tigris that was hometown to both al-Bakr and Saddam.

  In a matter of months the terror and killings were well under way. By January 1969, his security service had “discovered” seventeen “spies.” Thirteen of them just happened to be Iraqi Jews. Saddam attended their public hanging.

  The following month, the entire politburo of the Iraqi Communist Party was jailed. By the end of the year, thousands of Persian Shi’ites had been rounded up and expelled from the country in a Stalinesque deportation.

  At Saddam’s insistence, the new Iraqi leaders established a “watch system” similar to that employed by Lenin, Beria, and Stalin in consolidating Bolshevik control over the whole of Russia. Every neighborhood, newspaper, mosque, school, factory, oil field, and refinery, and particularly every unit in the military, had its own cell of loyal Baathists. The senior official in each cell acted as the commissars in Russia had, indoctrinating the uninitiated into the rules of the party and reporting any infractions up the line to officials in the Mukhabarat. Military officers who voiced concerns about the new regime in Baghdad were purged from the ranks. Any who continued to express reservations about the RCC or the policies of the Arab Baath Socialist Party agenda soon fled for their lives, were thrown into jail, or simply disappeared.

  All of this worked well for controlling the levers of power in Baghdad and most other major cities in southern and central Iraq. But in the north, the Kurds were marching to the beat of a different drummer.

  Along the northern frontier, intelligence agents from Syria, Turkey, and Iran incited the perpetually restive Kurds to begin a new campaign for an independent Kurdistan—one that would be carved not from their own territories but from Iraq.

  Saddam devised a workable solution: divide and conquer. On March 11, 1970, with the full support of the RCC, he presented a “Manifesto of Kurdish Autonomy” to Mustafa Barzani, the head of the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), the most militant of the Kurdish factions. The deal was simple: In exchange for autonomy four years later, Barzani would immediately stop his fierce pesh merga fighters from attacking Baath Party offices, government posts, and police stations.

  Barzani swallowed the deal and signed the manifesto, and Baghdad immediately went to work destroying all the other Kurdish groups. In a move reminiscent of Stalin’s forced migrations in the Soviet Union, Saddam orchestrated the movement of tens of thousands of Arab settlers into the oil-rich Kurdish enclave of Kirkuk. And more than forty thousand Faili Kurds were expelled and pushed across the Shatt al Arab into Iran. Duplicity and deceit had bought time. In Baghdad, the Baath Party was on a roll and Saddam’s star was ascending.

  Internationally, the regime employed the same divide-and-conquer strategy. Denied access to Western arms, they concluded a “treaty of friendship” with the Soviet Union. When Moscow demanded payment for the tanks, artillery, and aircraft they were delivering, the regime devised a unique solution: On June 1, 1972, the RCC nationalized the British- and American-owned Iraq Oil Company and began using revenues from the wells to pay for the Russian ordnance.

  The timing of the move was impeccable. On October 20, 1973, in the midst of yet another Arab-Israeli war, the oil-producing nations of the Middle East slapped an embargo on crude exports to any nations supporting Israel in the conflict. Iraq ignored the embargo and continued to ship. By the time the Western oil consumers convinced the other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to turn on the spigot again, the cost of a barrel of crude had risen to more than $11.50 from $3.10.

  Suddenly the land between the rivers was swimming in money. A massive building campaign was under way in a matter of months. By mid-1975, new schools, hospitals, water treatment plants, cultural centers, public buildings, irrigation canals, athletic centers, and electrical generation and transmission facilities were under construction.

  But that wasn’t all the Baath Party erected with its newfound wealth. Archaeologists, funded by the RCC’s Ministry of Antiquities, probed ancient Mesopotamian ruins for evidence of Iraq’s unique place in world history, all in an effort to build a national identity among the nation’s disparate people.

  But all of these public expenditures notwithstanding, there was still more money left on the table than the RCC had imagined when they seized power in 1968. By the mid-1970s, Saddam was first among equal vice presidents in the Baath hierarchy, and using billions of dollars to erect a labyrinth of competing intelligence and security organizations—all aimed at suppressing any form of dissent inside Iraq, and eliminating any threats posed by the increasing numbers of Iraqi exiles living overseas.

  The RCC also went on an international arms shopping spree. At the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad, Baath Party officials—not military officers—decided among competing bids from Soviet, Yugoslav, French, Belgian, and Italian arms brokers.

  By 1974, the Iraqi military was, on paper, one of the most powerful in the world. When the Kurds began to agitate for the autonomy promised in the 1970 Manifesto, Saddam, as the Baath government official responsible for internal security, unleashed the army. Instead of self-rule, the Kurds were given brutality. The carnage among the pesh merga fighters and their families in the Kurdish highlands was horrific. By March of 1975, nearly one million Kurds had fled to Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

  Fearful of growing internal discord in his own country, the shah of Iran, who had covertly supported the cause of militant Kurdish nationalism for years, suddenly abandoned his highland allies. In exchange for an agreement ending a long-standing dispute over the Shatt al Arab waterway, he went to Algiers, embraced Saddam, and closed the border. Betrayed by Tehran and besieged by Baghd
ad, the pesh merga were crushed. Mustafa Barzani fled into exile, and Saddam was lionized for eliminating yet another “threat to the revolution.”

  By 1978 Saddam Hussein was, in all but name, the head of state in Iraq. His cousin and mentor, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, might have borne the title of president of the republic, but the leaders of the RCC made certain that every decision was approved by Saddam. He had, he seemed to think, everything under control. Then came the ayatollah.

  Even though they deeply distrusted each other, Saddam and Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi—sitting ruler of the Peacock Throne in Tehran—had come to an accommodation. In Algiers, they had settled their countries’ dispute over the Shatt al Arab, reached an odious agreement on the fate of the Kurds, and even ended several disagreements over competing claims to oil deposits along their common border. So in October 1978, no one thought it particularly unusual that Saddam would acquiesce to a request from the shah to evict a sixty-three-year-old Shi’ite imam, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, from Najaf, where he had resided beside the Tomb of Ali since November 1964. Saddam gave the old man twenty-four hours to get out of Iraq. He saw the ayatollah’s departure as a returnable favor to the shah—and a good way of ridding a potential Shi’ite opponent from the neighborhood. But the white-bearded ascetic with the severe visage and furrowed brow wasn’t gone long.

  From Paris, Khomeini continued to incite his Shi’ite followers to overthrow the shah and replace the monarchy with an Islamic theocracy, one that would be led by imams and mullahs who also happened to be his devotees. On January 16, 1979, besieged by student riots and suffering from the cancer that would eventually kill him, Shah Pahlavi stepped down and departed Iran for a wandering exile. Fourteen days later, Khomeini returned to Tehran and proclaimed an Islamic revolution.

  The rest of the world watched with dismay as the Iranian pasdaran, inspired by the mullahs and imams close to Khomeini, purged the Iranian armed forces, ripped up international agreements, and sacked Western libraries, hospitals, Christian missions, and, eventually, consulates and embassies. And while Iran’s neighbors didn’t shed many tears over the destruction of the American embassy in Tehran or the seizure of fifty-three American hostages, they were horrified to hear Khomeini now advocating a worldwide Shi’ite uprising and preaching regularly about the need to replace secular regimes in all Islamic nations with clerical governments.