Ba'athist Iraq

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ba'athist Iraq came to power on the 17th of July 1968, when a small number of military units and civilian Ba'athists seized key government buildings in Baghdad in the early hours of the morning. All telephone lines were cut at 03:00. Tanks halted in front of the Presidential Palace. The sitting president, Abdul Rahman Arif, first learned of the coup when members of the Republican Guard began shooting into the air in what the journalist Con Coughlin called "a premature triumph." By the time Arif tried to contact other military units for support, it was already too late. He surrendered, telephoned the coup leader to say he was willing to resign, and was put on the first available flight to London with his wife and son. Not a single person died. What began as a bloodless dawn coup would grow into thirty-five years of one-party rule, two devastating wars, and one of the most ambitious economic experiments in modern Arab history. How did a small party consolidate such total control? What drove a country flush with oil wealth into catastrophic debt? And how did a secular Arab nationalist state end up adding the phrase "God is the greatest" to its own flag?

• 2. The Party Takes Root

  ›

  Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, the leader of the 17th of July coup, owed his success partly to two men he never intended to keep around. Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif, the deputy head of military intelligence, and Ibrahim Daud, the head of the Republican Guard, both knew the existing government was doomed and agreed to help the Ba'athists on the condition of receiving senior positions afterwards. Naif demanded the post of Prime Minister. Daud became Minister of Defence. But al-Bakr had told the Ba'ath leadership in a secret meeting beforehand that both men would be "liquidated either during, or after, the revolution." On the 30th of July, just thirteen days after the coup, Naif was invited to lunch at the Presidential Palace. Saddam Hussein burst into the room with three accomplices and threatened Naif with death. Naif reportedly cried out, "I have four children." Saddam ordered him out of Iraq immediately. Naif was exiled to Morocco. He survived an assassination attempt in 1973 but was killed in London on Saddam's orders in 1978. Daud was exiled to Saudi Arabia.

  With those rivals removed, al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein turned to consolidating the party's grip on the country. Most of 1968 was spent suppressing non-Ba'athist political groups. The Iraqi Communist Party, which had been badly burned by an anti-communist Ba'athist crackdown in 1963, was skeptical of the new government from the start. The Ba'ath responded with what historian Charles Tripp described in his book A History of Iraq as "a curious game" of alternating persecution and courtship. That game ended in 1972-1973, when the Communist Party was offered a place in the new National Progressive Front, a coalition established on the fifth anniversary of the revolution to give the regime a semblance of broader support. The NPF's general secretary throughout its existence was Naim Haddad, and its leadership consisted entirely of Ba'athist members or loyalists. The ICP left the front in March 1979.

  By the mid-to-late 1970s, real power had passed from al-Bakr to Saddam, even though al-Bakr kept his titles. By the end of 1977, al-Bakr had little effective control over the country. In 1977, following Shia protests, al-Bakr relinquished control of the Ministry of Defence; the post went to Adnan Khairallah Tulfah, Saddam's own brother-in-law. When Saddam finally assumed the presidency in 1979, he publicly charged over sixty members of the party with plotting against the Iraqi Ba'athist government in collaboration with Syria's ruling Ba'ath faction and its leader, Hafez al-Assad.

• 3. Oil, Wealth, and a Rising State

  ›

  The Iraq Petroleum Company, the largest oil company in Iraq, was privately owned when the Ba'athists took power. In March 1970, the government forced it to concede a twenty-percent stake to the state. When the company then cut its oil production by half in March 1972, the Ba'ath responded by nationalising the entire company in June of that year. The decision was popular with Iraqis because it removed the last element of foreign control over the country's most valuable resource. To cushion the expected loss of export revenue, Saddam Hussein traveled to the Soviet Union and negotiated the Iraqi-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation, under which the Soviets agreed to purchase some of Iraq's oil. Alexei Kosygin, Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, visited Iraq in April 1972 as a follow-up, which in turn prompted the Iraqi Communist Party to finally accept two cabinet positions.

  The numbers that followed were striking. Oil revenue rose from 219 million Iraqi dinars in 1972 to 1.7 billion in 1974, then 3.7 billion in 1978 and 8.9 billion in 1980 - a rise of over forty times in less than a decade. After the Iranian revolution, Iraq became the second-largest oil exporter in the world. From 1970 to 1980, the economy grew by 11.7 percent. The National Development Plan, which ran from 1976 to 1980, ended with an eleven-percent increase in GNP. Women entered the workforce in significant numbers: by the end of the 1970s they made up 46 percent of teachers, 29 percent of doctors, 46 percent of dentists, and 70 percent of pharmacists.

  Military spending absorbed much of that wealth. From 1960 to 1980 military expenditure trebled, reaching US$4.3 billion in 1981. In that year, per capita military spending was 370 percent higher than per capita spending on education. When Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, the army had grown from 50,000 men in 1967 to a standing force of 200,000 plus 250,000 reserves and 250,000 paramilitary troops.

• 4. Eight Years of War

  ›

  Saddam abrogated the 1975 Algiers Agreement at a National Assembly session on the 17th of September 1980, then launched preemptive strikes on Iran followed by a ground invasion. His stated objective was to restore full Iraqi control over the Shatt al-Arab waterway ceded to Iran in 1975. His underlying assumption was that Iran's new revolutionary government, which had purged thousands of officers and soldiers over its politics, would collapse quickly under military pressure. Saddam himself later admitted in what the source describes as "a rare moment of frankness" that this assessment was wrong. Iran's government treated the invasion as a test of the revolution itself and fought back with a ferocity the Iraqi leadership had not anticipated.

  By 1982, Iran had counter-attacked successfully and driven Iraqi forces back across the border. In that year alone, an estimated 40,000 Iraqis were taken prisoner. The Revolutionary Command Council convened an extraordinary session in 1982 - with Saddam absent - to discuss a ceasefire proposal. The proposal was supported by all members of the Regional Command, National Command, and Revolutionary Command Council. Iran rejected it. Had Iran accepted, the source notes, Saddam would not have survived politically. Rumours circulated that the ailing former president al-Bakr might return; he died in 1982 under what the source describes as mysterious circumstances. A near-mutiny was led by Maher Abd al-Rashid, the father-in-law of Saddam's second son, who publicly blamed Saddam's interference in military planning for unnecessary casualties. This confrontation paradoxically gave military commanders greater independence from Ba'ath Party oversight.

  The financial damage was severe. At the start of the war, Iraq held monetary reserves of $35 billion and posted an annual growth rate of 27.9 percent. By the war's end the reserves were gone. Oil exports as government revenue dropped from $26.1 billion in 1980 to $10.4 billion in 1981, after Iran bombed Iraq's oil facilities and cut its exports by 72 percent. Military spending approached 50 percent of GNP by 1982. The war cost the Iraqi government a total of 226 billion dollars and left a foreign debt estimated at between 80 and 100 billion dollars. One hundred thousand of the one million Iraqis mobilised in the war died. Before the fighting ended in April 1988, Saddam's cousin Ali Hasan al-Majid had been appointed military chief in Iraqi Kurdistan and launched the al-Anfal campaign, in which chemical weapons were used against civilians.

• 5. Kuwait and Collapse

  ›

  Kuwait's oil production policy became, in the Iraqi government's view, an act of economic aggression. The Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries had set an international oil price of US$18 per barrel for its members, but Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates continued flooding the market in violation of OPEC quotas. By October 1988, international oil prices had fallen to US$12 per barrel. By 1990 they had dropped further to US$13.67. Saddam told an Arab League conference that Iraq's revenue had fallen by one billion dollars as a result. Kuwait also held substantial loans that Iraq could not repay. On the 18th of July 1990, Saddam demanded that Kuwait repay Iraq for oil he claimed Kuwait had stolen. When the Kuwaiti leadership did not respond, the Iraqi military invaded on the 2nd of August 1990.

  The international response was swift. The United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and several Arab states all condemned the invasion. President George H. W. Bush demanded the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces. Saddam responded by declaring Kuwait an Iraqi province. The Gulf War coalition, which eventually included 42 countries, expelled Iraqi forces by February 1991. Iraq occupied Kuwait for roughly six months.

  On the evening of the 24th of February, days before the ceasefire was signed in Safwan, the CIA-funded radio station Voice of Free Iraq broadcast a message calling on Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. The speaker was Salah Omar al-Ali, a former member of the Revolutionary Command Council. He urged Iraqis to "stage a revolution" and declared that Saddam "will flee the battlefield when he becomes certain that the catastrophe has engulfed every street, every house and every family in Iraq." A nationwide uprising began in March 1991. Saddam's loyalist forces crushed it. The suppression drove thousands of people to flee to Turkey and Iran; those two countries raised the issue at the UN Security Council on the 2nd and the 3rd of April 1991 respectively, and the Council adopted Resolution 688 demanding Iraq allow access to international humanitarian organisations.

• 6. Sanctions and the Faith Campaign

  ›

  The United Nations Security Council's Resolution 661 imposed sanctions on Iraq following the Gulf War. At the time, thirty percent of Iraq's GNP had gone to importing food and ninety-five percent of its export earnings came from oil. President Bush said publicly that no one could "stand up forever to total economic deprivation" and expected the sanctions to bring Saddam down. They did not. Saddam ruled Iraq until 2003. The Iraqi government did find one unexpected success during the sanctions years: agricultural output increased by 24 percent between 1990 and 1991, driven by Revolutionary Command Council decrees that penalised underproduction and expanded credit to farmers. Official statistics showed arable land growing from 16,446 donums in 1980 to 45,046 in 1990. The sanctions did eventually prompt the establishment of the UN Oil-for-Food Programme, which Saddam originally opposed. The OFFP brought in hard currency and helped reduce chronic inflation. Gross domestic product rose from US$10.8 billion in 1996 to US$30.8 billion in 2000. Still, national income per capita in 2000 was estimated at US$1,000 - less than half of what it had been in 1990.

  In 1993, the regime launched a significant policy reversal it called the Return to Faith Campaign, supervised by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. The Ba'ath Party had been explicitly secular since its founding. Now the government began emphasising Islam. Religious academic institutions opened across the country. Quranic and Islamic studies entered school curricula at all levels. A religious radio station, al-Quran al-Karim Radio, began broadcasting. Aspects of sharia were adopted into the judicial system, and judges were required to study Islamic jurisprudence. Prostitution was made punishable by death. Saddam introduced penal code article 111, which exempted from punishment a man who killed a woman to defend his family's honour. The daily newspaper Babil, owned by Saddam's son Uday Hussein, had initially opposed the campaign on the grounds that it would encourage sectarian division. Later, the same newspaper used the slur rafidah against Shia Iraqis - a term typically associated with ultraconservative Salafi movements.

  The campaign had a visible sectarian dimension. Sunni mosques gained greater freedom in religious practice while the government's Sunni-coded rhetoric implicitly targeted the Shia majority, describing Iran's Shia Islam as a "foreign and heretical form of religion." In 1997, Iraq barred all UNSCOM weapons inspectors from sites declared to be sovereign palaces. Two years later, Iraqi security forces killed the cleric Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, triggering another period of unrest.

• 7. The End of the Regime

  ›

  Following the September 11 attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush built a case for war on the false claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links with al-Qaeda. The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1441 in 2002, stating that Iraq had failed to fulfil its UN obligations; the United States and the United Kingdom used the resolution as a pretext for invasion. On the 20th of March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq. The Ba'ath Party and Saddam went underground. The fall of Baghdad was marked by Iraqi civilians toppling a statue of Saddam at Firdos Square, ending what the source describes as almost 35 years of Ba'athist rule. On the 16th of May 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority banned the Ba'ath Party as part of its de-Ba'athification policy. American troops captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003 and handed him to Iraq's new Shia-led government. From 2005 to 2006, he stood trial before the Iraqi Special Tribunal for crimes against humanity related to the 1982 Dujail massacre, in which the Iraqi government killed Shia rebels. He was executed on the 30th of December 2006. The period of his rule has been described as Iraq's longest stretch of internal stability since independence in 1932, and also condemned as a period of extensive repression, particularly against the Kurdish population. Under his rule, Iraq had also maintained a domestic space program, known under several names including Al Abid, which began in earnest around 1988 before being halted by the events that followed.