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Iraq
Geopolitics
Part III: A
Poisonous Geopolitical Jungle
By
Henry C K Liu
First appeared in Asia
Times Online on September 15, 2004
Other articles in this series:
Part I: Geopolitics in Iraq an Old Game
Part II: Geopolitical Weeds in the Cradle of Civilization
While post-World War II Iraq remained safely under British imperialist
control, in neighboring Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh's
democratically-elected nationalist government enacted an oil
nationalization bill in 1951. Responding to a British legal challenge
in the World Court against Iran and taking it up in the United Nations
Security Council, Mossadegh traveled to New York to defend Iran's
sovereign right, gaining much support from the world's nations.
US becomes entangled
Then he went to the Netherlands to defend Iran successfully at The
Hague, which voted in favor of Iran in its international legal dispute
with Britain. On his way home, Mossadegh also paid a visit to Egypt,
where he was enthusiastically received as an anti-imperialism hero. Not
surprisingly, Mossadegh was toppled a year later by a military coup
engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency. The event signaled the
emergence of the US as the leading external actor in the Middle East on
behalf of neo-imperialism, in effect replacing Britain's traditional
imperialist role in the region. Furthermore, the Shah of Iran was now
indebted to the US for his throne.
In its January 1952 issue, Time Magazine, hardly a liberal publication
and a leader of the anti-communist press, nominated Mohammed Mossadegh
as Man of the Year. The Time essay read in part:
"There were millions inside and outside
of Iran whom Mossadegh symbolized and spoke for, and whose fanatical
state of mind he had helped to create. They would rather see their own
nations fall apart than continue their present relations with the West.
Communism encouraged this state of mind, and stood to profit hugely
from it. But communism did not create it. The split between the West
and the non-communist East was a peril all its own to world order,
quite apart from communism. Through 1951, the communist threat to the
world continued; but nothing new was added - and little subtracted. The
news of 1951 was this other danger in the Near and Middle East. In the
center of that spreading web of news was Mohammed Mossadegh. The West's
military strength to resist communism grew in 1951. But Mossadegh's
challenge could not be met by force. For all its power, the West in
1951 failed to cope with a weeping, fainting leader of a helpless
country; the West had not yet developed the moral muscle to define its
own goals and responsibilities in the Middle East. Until the West did
develop that moral muscle, it had no chance with the millions
represented by Mossadegh. In Iran, in Egypt, in a dozen other
countries, when people asked: 'Who are you? What are you doing here?'
The East would be in turmoil until the West achieved enough moral
clarity to construct a just and fruitful policy toward the East."
As Time saw it, communism was producing a dual effect. It fanned
anti-imperialism in the colonies while it created pressure in the West
to placate Third World nationalism to keep it from going communist. On
March 8, 1951, the day after Ali Razmara, Iran's pro-Western premier,
was assassinated, Mossadegh submitted to the Iranian majlis
(parliament) his proposal to nationalize Iran's oil. Within weeks, a
popular wave of anti-imperialist sentiment swept him into the
premiership. The British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co had been paying
Iran much less than it did the British government. Ayatollah
Abol-Ghasem Kashani, a leading Shi'ite fundamentalist cleric who had
been fighting the infidel British in Iraq and Iran, played a key role
in the nationalization of oil in Iran. His followers had assassinated
Razmara.
The Iranian crisis inspired Egypt, which followed with an announcement
that it was abrogating its 1936 unequal treaty with Britain. The
Egyptian government demanded the withdrawal of British troops from
Egyptian soil and an end to British occupation of the Suez Canal. When
Britain refused, Egypt exploded with anti-British riots, hoping that
the US, which had opposed British use of force in Iran, would take the
same line in Egypt. The Times essay reported that "the US, however,
backed the British, and the troops stayed. But now they could only stay
in Egypt as an armed occupation of enemy territory. Throughout the
East, that kind of occupation may soon cost more than it is worth."
The Time essay went on:
"The word 'American' no longer has a good
sound in that part of the world. To catch the Jewish vote in the US,
president Harry S Truman in 1946 demanded that the British admit
100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine, in violation of British promises
to the Arabs. Since then, the Arab nations surrounding Israel have
regarded that state as a US creation, and the US, therefore, as an
enemy. The Israeli-Arab war created nearly a million Arab refugees, who
have been huddled for three years in wretched camps. These refugees,
for whom neither the US nor Israel would assume the slightest
responsibility, keep alive the hatred of US perfidy. No enmity for the
Arabs, no selfish national design motivated the clumsy US support of
Israel. The American crime was not to help the Jews, but to help them
at the expense of the Arabs. Today, the Arab world fears and expects a
further Israeli expansion. The Arabs are well aware that Alben Barkley,
vice president of the US, tours his country making speeches for the
half-billion-dollar Israeli bond issue, the largest ever offered to the
US public. Nobody, they note bitterly, is raising that kind of money
for them."
As the Time essay warned, winning the hearts and minds of the Arabs
away from communism was made hopelessly difficult by US policy on
Israel. As a pro-Republican publication, the position taken by Time was
not exactly bipartisan, as the Jewish vote at the time was
predominantly Democratic. Still, the warning was prescient. In pro-West
Iraq, both Shi'ites and Kurds sought political influence through the
Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) as well as the Ba'ath Socialist Party in
its early stage as a dissident organization after World War II. Between
1949 and 1955, Kurds and Shi'ites comprised 31.3% and 46.9%,
respectively, of the central committee membership in the ICP. This
explained partly why the US was less than sympathetic to Shi'ite and
Kurdish separatist aspirations all through the Cold War. US hostility
toward Iraqi Shi'ites would escalate after the Shi'ite Islamic
Revolution in Iran in 1979. Today, despite the claim of aiming to
spread democracy in the Middle East, geopolitics will not permit
US-occupied Iraq to accept the democratic principle of majority rule
that will give political control to the Shi'ite majority.
By 1954, political instability continued in pro-West Iraq as the US
tried to substitute fast-waning British dominance by creating the
Baghdad Pact which was formed on February 4, 1955 as part of the US
global collective security system to prevent Soviet expansion into the
Middle East. Members of the pact included Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan,
Shah-ruled Iran and Britain, with the US and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) participating. It was hoped that Syria and Jordan
would also join to complete the anti-communist arc of pro-West
countries in the region. A single voice of resistance came from Egypt.
Rising Arab nationalism and popular opposition to imperialism in the
entire region, ignited by regular passionate broadcasts of Egyptian
president Gamal Abdul Nasser, caused Syria to reject the Baghdad Pact.
Even the young anglophile King Hussein of Jordan, who later would
transform into a US puppet, had to bow to the will of his people when
they took to the streets in large numbers to denounce the pact.
An Anti-Communist Pact is Born
The Baghdad Pact, known also as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO)
or the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), was one of the least
effective Cold War security alliances created by the US. Modeled after
NATO, CENTO aimed at containing Soviet expansion by creating a
defensive line of anti-communist states along the southwestern frontier
of the USSR. The Middle East and South and Southeast Asia were
politically volatile regions during the 1960s with the ongoing
Arab-Israeli conflict, the North-South Korea confrontation and the
Indo-Pakistan wars. The US, with its main geopolitical aim of
containing communist expansion, tried to befriend all warring parties
in both regions to prevent any tilt toward the Soviet Union. Members of
CENTO, an anti-communist treaty organization, saw no compelling purpose
to get directly involved in either the Arab-Israel or the Indo-Pakistan
dispute, where communist infiltration was not obvious. In 1965 and
again in 1971, Pakistan tried unsuccessfully to get assistance through
CENTO in its wars with India. The Baghdad Pact trapped the US into
supporting corrupt, unpopular and undemocratic regimes in Iraq, Iran
and Pakistan. US support for Israel was an insurmountable obstacle to
the development of improved relations between the US and Arab nations,
including members of CENTO. More importantly, the alliance did little
to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence in the area. Non-member
states in the Middle East, feeling threatened by CENTO, turned to the
Soviets, especially Egypt and Syria, even though they remained hostile
to communism domestically. The pact lasted nominally until the Iranian
Revolution of 1979.
Egypt recognized the People's Republic of China in 1956, becoming the
first Arab and African nation to establish official diplomatic
relations with the communist country that the US had placed on the top
of its forbidden list. Egypt's decision on China defied US policy of
containment of new China through diplomatic isolation. As a penalty,
the US withdrew on July 19, 1956, its loan offer to finance the Aswan
High Dam, and Britain and the World Bank followed suit immediately. In
response, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956. The
Soviet Union then offered an aid program to Egypt, including a loan to
finance the Aswan High Dam.
Crisis over the Suez
Anthony Eden, then British prime minister, characterized the Egyptian
nationalization of the canal as "theft", and US secretary of state John
Forster Dulles declared that Nasser would have to be made to "disgorge"
it. The French and British depended critically on the canal for
transporting oil, and they felt that Nasser had become a symbol of
nationalist threat to their remaining interests in the Middle East and
Africa. Eden wanted to launch a military response immediately, but the
British military was not ready. Both France and Britain froze Egyptian
assets within their jurisdictions and prepared for war in earnest.
Egypt promised to compensate the stockholders of the Suez Canal Company
and to guarantee right of canal access to all ships, making it
difficult for France and Britain to rally international support to
regain the canal by force. The Soviet Union, the East European bloc and
non-aligned Third World countries generally supported Egypt's struggle
with imperialism. President Dwight D Eisenhower distanced the US from
British positions and stated that while the US opposed the
nationalization of the canal, it was against any use of force. Britain,
France and Israel then united secretly in what was to become known as
the tripartite collusion. Israel opted to participate in the
Anglo-French plans against Egypt to impress the imperialist West that
the Jewish state could play a useful geopolitical role against Arab
nationalism.
Secret arrangements were made for Israel to make the initial invasion
of Egypt and overtake one side of the Suez Canal. The British and
French attempted to follow the Israeli invasion with high-pressure
diplomacy, but being unsuccessful, sent troops to occupy the canal.
However, the action on the part of the tripartite collusion was not
viewed with favor by the US or the USSR since military intervention to
enhance isolated national interests challenged a world order of
superpower geopolitical predominance in the region. Regional conflicts
must not be allowed to conflict with the geopolitical pattern of
superpower competition for the hearts and minds of the unaligned.
Responding to superpower pressure, the tripartite troops were withdrawn
from the Canal Zone in December under the direction of the United
Nations. A United Nations Emergency Force was then stationed in the
Gaza Strip and at Sharm el-Sheikh and on the Sinai border in December
1956 and stayed for more that a decade until the Six-Day War of 1967.
Egypt kept the canal and reparations were paid by Egypt under the
supervision of the World Bank. Overall, the actions of the tripartite
collusion were not considered beneficial to the campaign to spread
democracy in the Cold War context because they pushed Nasser and Egypt
further towards the USSR. The war over the canal also laid the
groundwork for the Six-Day War in 1967 due to a lack of a peace
settlement following the 1956 war, in which Egypt suffered a military
defeat but scored a political victory.
Britain's disastrous behavior in the Suez crisis of 1956 exposed its
thinly-disguised, last-gasp imperialist fixation disguised as
anti-communism. Israel, led by David Ben-Gurion's hawkish faction with
a pro-West, militant confrontational policy, with Golda Meir replacing
the moderate Moshe Sharett as foreign minister, invaded Egypt on
October 29, 1956. Sharett's policies with regard to neighboring Arab
states were characterized by vision and pragmatism, but this form of
diplomacy was never given a chance by the hardliners, who were mostly
fixated in the belief that "Arabs respect only the language of force",
as Winston Churchill had said about the Russians. Sharett, albeit an
ardent Zionist, attempted to develop policies based on constructive
engagement, rather than belligerence and dehumanization, with
neighboring Arab states. Sharett believed that Israel could have a
special role to play in the developing nations of the world, including
the Arab countries. Sharett was among the few in the Middle East who
recognized that terror and counter-terror between Palestinians and
Israelis would lead to an endless cycle of violence, which if not
controlled by enlightened political leadership, would become a way of
life that would eventually destroy both peoples. His political and
diplomatic wisdom was always portrayed by the Israeli mainstream as
"weak and cowardly".
By contrast, Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall" doctrine of
Zionism that sought to expel the Arabs of Palestine by force has
dominated the Israeli political scene to this day. Jabotinsky viewed
Zionism as a colonial enterprise, in the same vein as British
colonization of America or Australia, with Arabs as Native Americans or
Australian Aborigines. Israel was to accomplish with militant Zionism
what British imperialism, weakened by what Zionists viewed as the
British disease of liberalism, failed to accomplish in the Middle East,
which is to totally and permanently emasculate a once-proud Arab
nation.
While the US opposed Anglo-French military intervention to undo
Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal, US military strategy in the
region was made explicit on January 5, 1957 by a presidential message
to Congress known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, to provide military
assistance to countries in the region, include the employment of US
armed forces, to oppose international communism. Israel saw
anti-communism in the Middle East as God's gift to the new Jewish
nation on Arab land and became a fervent supporter of the Eisenhower
Doctrine, with wholesale marginalization of the Israeli left and
moderates in Israeli politics. Instead of moving in the direction of
the Switzerland model, as a neutral oasis in a sea of rising Arabic
nationalism against "divide and rule" imperialism, contributing to the
development of the region for the benefit of all, Israel presented
itself as an outpost of European imperialism and US neo-imperialism,
setting itself up as a hostile garrison state in a region where Jews
are outnumbered by 50 to one.
Unless Israeli policy changes with a new self image and political
destiny, its continued existence as a hostile nation among Arabs is not
sustainable any more than neo-imperialism is sustainable in the Third
World. Throughout history, the Jews have contributed greatly to the
prosperity of their various adopted countries. There is no reason why
they cannot do so in the Middle East, their ancestral home, except for
a short-sighted, more-than-clever-by-half posture of catering to
Western imperialism by claiming to be the sole European democracy in
the Middle East that deserves US support. If Israel wants to stay in
the Middle East, there is no escaping the need to be a genuine Middle
East nation, throwing its lot in with those of other Middle East
nations, rather than setting itself apart as a European transplant.
King al-Shareif al-Hussein of Saudi Arabia lived for a tribal dream of
ruling Syria. According to some historians, such as Avi Shlaim and
Simha Falpan, the dream for a Hashmite-controlled Great Syria was an
obsession for both father and son. When this dream proved elusive, his
son, King Abdullah, sought alliance with the Zionist movement to
achieve his father's dream. This tribal dream was exploited by the
Zionist leadership to drive a wedge between the neighboring Arab
states. Ironically, the Arab countries whose armies entered Palestine
on May 15, 1948 did so partly to keep King Abdullah from gaining
control of the Palestinian portion of Palestine, which had been
allotted to Palestinian Arabs by UN General Assembly Resolution 181.
According to historian Falpan, during a meeting with King Abdullah at
Shunah, Jordan, which took place soon after Husni al-Zaim's coup in
Syria, Moshe Sharett wrote in the spring of 1949 that the king told him
that "the idea of Great Syria ... [is] one of the principles of the
Arab revolt that I have been serving all my life."
Falpan also wrote that the tactic of misleading Abdullah with Syria was
strongly endorsed by Yigal Yadin, the Israeli chief of staff. In a
consultation between the Israeli Foreign Office and the Ministry of
Defense on April 12, 1949, Yidin reported: "Abdullah is more interested
in Great Syria than in Palestine. This is in his blood, this is his
political and military outlook and he is ready to sell out all the
Palestinians in this aim. We have to know how to play this card to
achieve our aim ... We should not support the plan of Great Syria but
we should divert Abdullah toward this plan." This kind of tactical
geopolitical scheming cannot overcome the strategic geopolitical
blunder of an Israel denying the need to come to terms with the
realization that for Israel to survive, it needs to accept the reality
that it must become a bona fide Middle East nation, not an extension of
New York, and that its acceptance by Arabs rests on its developing a
genuine posture of fraternal friendship, not hostile opportunistic
geopolitical calculations.
Israel's Independence
On May 15, 1948, the Israel war of independence officially began with
the declaration of Israel as a Jewish state simultaneously with British
withdrawal from Palestine. But Israeli military action started a month
earlier. As the British prepared to evacuate, the Israelis invaded and
occupied most of the Arab cities in Palestine in the spring of 1948 to
fill a military vacuum. Tiberias was occupied on April 19, Haifa on
April 22, Jaffa on April 28, the Arab quarters in the New City of
Jerusalem on April 30, Beisan on May 8, Safad on May 10 and Acre on May
14. Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the
1948 war, admitted that every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs, a
deliberate policy to induce Arabs to flee Palestine en mass. The
massacre at Deir Yassin on April 9, committed by commandos of the Irgun
headed by Menachem Begin, was part of that policy. Begin wrote: "Arabs
throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of 'Irgun
butchery', were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for
their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened,
uncontrollable stampede. The political and economic significance of
this development can hardly be overestimated." The propaganda campaign
of Deir Yassin to induce panic on Arabs was so effective that the
incident became embarrassingly detrimental to Israel's international
image; so much so that Israeli historians have since felt compelled to
deny if not the facts, at least the policy intent, blaming the massacre
on the nature of war.
Egypt, Syria and Jordan, newly independent and still weak from
century-long colonial oppression, formed an ill-equipped, ill-trained
and ill-led coalition army of 20,000 to move into Palestine on the side
of the Palestinians against Israel's 60,000 well-equipped, seasoned and
well-led troops fresh from fighting under British command in World War
II. The bloody war lasted a year until April 3, 1949 when Israel and
the Arab states agreed to an armistice. Israel gained about 50% more
territory than was originally allotted to it by the UN partition plan.
The war created over 780,000 Palestinian refugees who were forcefully
evicted from Jewish-held areas. Gaza fell under the jurisdiction of
Egypt. The West Bank of Jordan was occupied by Jordan and later
annexed, consistent with secret agreements made with the Zionist
leadership prior to the initiation of hostilities.
Bloody End to Monarchy in Iraq
In post-World War II Iraq, Nuri Said, 14 times prime minister who
always took orders dutifully from his masters in London, having come
down hard on Iraqi nationalists, kept Iraq from active opposition to
the creation of Israel and hitched Iraq to the 1955 Baghdad Pact, a US
instigated anti-communist security agreement binding Iraq to Britain,
Turkey, Shah-ruled Iran and Pakistan, finally signed his own political
death warrant and that of the puppet monarchy he served by supporting
the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. Reactionary
pan-Arabism took a step forward under British guidance in 1958 when on
February 12, a pro-West federation between Jordan and Iraq, called the
Arab Union of Jordan and Iraq, was formed with a common premier. Within
five months, on July 14, 1958, a successful military coup by the Free
Officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the Said
government. The three main components in the Iraqi army, Nasirrites,
communists and Ba'athists, united and dethroned the puppet king,
executed all members of the royal family for treason and even denied
them of Islamic burial rites for sins against the holy. Nuri Said
himself was caught two days later, trying to escape from Baghdad
dressed as a woman, by a mob which tore him apart with their bare hands
and left his mutilated body to be flattened by passing vehicular
traffic. Collaborators with the West were cut into pieces and "burnt
like lambs". Public statues of the treasonous monarch were torn down in
street demonstrations so large in numbers and so euphoric in passion
that the new Revolutionary Council had to proclaim a curfew to keep
order. Based on that history, neither the current US-installed
President Ghazi al-Yawir, a Sunni Muslim tribal chief, nor his
US-appointed prime minister, Iyad Allawi, a long-time US operative, nor
other members of the US-appointed interim Iraqi government, has any
reason to sleep well. Already, several ministers of the Allawi cabinet
have failed to physically survive their interim political appointments.
The Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party of Iraq and the Communist Party of Iraq
(CPI) were the two major political parties in post-World War II Iraq.
The two parties initially shared some characteristics, but
irreconcilable ideological rivalry soon developed due to contradiction
between egalitarian communism and hierarchical tribal culture and the
internationalist support to the CPI provided by a non-Arab foreign
power in the form of the Soviet Union, within the context of USSR state
interests. The state-to-state relationship between Ba'athist Iraq and
the USSR based on geopolitics affected the domestic strategy of the CPI
and vice versa. The growing ranks of the Ba'athists were upset by
communist internationalist criticism of Arab nationalism, which
prioritizes Arab unity and the power politics aspirations of the Arab
nation over universal social justice.
A new government of Iraq was proclaimed by General Abd-al-Karim Qasim
on July 15, 1958 and the pro-West Arab Union with Jordan was
immediately declared dissolved. Iraq then worked for close relations
with the United Arab Republic, which had been established by a union of
Egypt and Syria earlier that year. As events developed, the Ba'ath
Party in Syria was forced to dissolve in 1958. In 1959, Iraq formally
withdrew from the Baghdad Pact. A year later, Iraq again made claims on
Kuwait as an integral part of its Basra province, while Kuwait formally
received its independence as a separate nation from Britain. On June
25, 1961, Qasim officially called for "the return of Kuwait to the
Iraqi homeland". In September, Qasim rejected efforts to establish
political autonomy for Kurds in northern Iraq and launched a major
military campaign against Kurdish separatists. These issues of Kuwait
recovery and Kurdish separatism predated the Saddam Hussein government
by three decades, hardly credible pretexts for Bush's war for regime
change in Iraq.
In time, a power struggle ensued between Iraqi communists and the
US-backed Ba'athist faction under Qasim, who had bought Western support
for his government by not interfering with the Western control of
Iraq's oil production. Qasim had tolerated Iraqi communists as a force
against the Ba'athists in his government. Soon, the Ba'athists began to
receive backing from US anti-communist policy. To retain US support,
Qasim turned on the Iraqi communists. During the turmoil, communist
casualties suffered from the US-trained Iraqi government internal
security forces numbered over 5,000. An attempted anti-communist coup
against Qasim was nevertheless launched on March 8, 1959 by Ba'athist
Colonel Abd al-Wahhab al-Shawwaf. Backed by conservative units of the
army, Shawwaf alleged that the Qasim government was dominated by
communists. The coup failed. In October 1959, the Ba'athists led by
al-Shawwaf made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam
Hussein, who would become president in 1979, was a member of the
assassination squad. After having been shot in the unsuccessful coup
attempt, Saddam fled to Syria, then to Egypt, where he studied law at
Cairo University. The Iraqi Ba'athists and the US Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) shared a common interest in getting rid of the
Soviet-tilting Qasim.
On February 8, 1963, the Qasim government was overthrown, with the help
of the CIA, by a group of young officers who were sympathizers though
not members of the Ba'ath Party. Qasim himself was executed by firing
squad the following day. Two days later, on February 11, the US
recognized the new Ba'athist government on the basis of its
anti-communism.
Author Said K Aburish (Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge)
who worked with Saddam in the 1970s, claimed that the CIA's role in the
coup against Qasim was "substantial". CIA agents were in touch with
army officers who helped in the coup, operated an electronic command
center in Kuwait to guide the anti-Qasim forces, and supplied the
conspirators with lists of people to be killed to paralyze the
government. The coup plotters repaid the CIA with access to Soviet-made
jets and tanks the US military was keen on acquiring.
The Ba'athists, never having ruled any country, lacked experience in
1963 in managing the government apparatus left by British colonial
rule. They focused their energy instead on eliminating communists in
public office. Since many professionals and public administrators were
leftists, the anti-communist campaign rendered the government
inoperative. The Ba'athist government fell in November 1963 after only
nine months in office, having been unable to end violent political
feuding that spilled over onto the streets that in no small way was
stirred up by CIA covert action, but not before another 3,000 leftists
were killed, as reported in John K Cooley's The Shifting Sands of
Arab Communism. Not a single word from Western human-rights groups
about these mass killings, let alone the US State Department or the
White House, which four decades later listed the Iraqi gas attack on
Kurdish villagers among its list of pretexts to invade Iraq. The double
standard was based entirely on geopolitics. The collapsed Ba'athist
government was succeeded by a pro-West government of right-wing
technocrats, with CIA help.
Abd al-Salam Arif, a colonel at the time of the 1958 coup, and a rival
of Qasim, became the new president, and he took steps to exclude
Ba'athists from his government and brought in Nasirrite nationalists,
which immediately put him on the wrong side of the US. On April 13,
1966, Arif was killed in a helicopter crash of unknown causes, and was
replaced by his brother, Abd al-Rahman Arif. Iraqi relations with
Western powers worsened following the Six Day War which began on June
5, 1967. Iraq gave token assistance to the frontline Arab states in the
Six-Day War with Israel. Believing as most in the Arab world did that
the US provided direct military support to Israel during the Six-Day
War, Iraq broke diplomatic relations with Washington in protest.
On July 17, 1968, a Ba'athist coup ousted Abd al-Rahman Arif. General
Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr became president and Saddam Hussein was named vice
president. By 1968, Saddam had moved up the Ba'ath Party ranks and
wiped out the last pockets of communist resistance in the south and
north. With the domestic threat from communists under control, Iraq
improved relations with the Soviet Union as geopolitical leverage
against the West. As a matter of policy throughout its history, the
Communist Party of the USSR repeatedly sacrificed its sister parties in
other countries to enhance the geopolitical interests of the USSR as a
state, consistent with Josef Stalin's policy of socialism in one
country. Global communism as an extremist movement directed from Moscow
was mostly a figment of US paranoid imagination.
Ba'athist Ideology Takes Root
Since 1968, Iraqi politics has been a one-party system dominated by the
Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party of Iraq. Ba'athist ideology combines
elements of Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism and tribal socialism.
Its slogan is "Unity, Freedom, Socialism" - unity among Arabs, freedom
from Western imperialism and socialism with Arabic characteristics.
Prior to 1958, Ba'athist parties in many Arab countries were dissident
political organizations struggling for recognition and popular support.
Members were imprisoned by many host governments and party organs were
driven underground. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party operated clandestinely
against the pro-West Iraqi government while it competed for followers
with the Iraqi Communist Party. This background shaped the
characteristic and culture of the party. Tariq Aziz, top ranking
Ba'athist and vice president of Iraq in charge of foreign relations,
wrote in 1980 on the party's clandestine revolutionary heritage: "The
Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party is not a conventional political
organization, but is composed of cells of valiant revolutionaries ...
They are experts in secret organization. They are organizers of
demonstrations, strikes and armed revolutions."
The decision by the US occupation authorities to marginalize the Ba'ath
Party from Iraqi politics after the last year's invasion was a
strategic as well as a tactical error, for not only was it
strategically counterproductive to destroy the only secular political
organization against Islamic fundamental extremism, it was also
tactically foolish because the Ba'athist cells have been trained to go
underground to easily survive official persecution to create
insurmountable problems for the US-imposed governing authority.
The record of governance of the Iraqi Ba'ath government had been
undeniably impressive. The secularization policies gave rise to an
intellectual elite, including many female professionals in all fields.
"Teaching the woman means teaching the family," was a battle cry.
Literacy was increased dramatically with free universal education.
Party slogans such as "Knowledge is light, ignorance darkness", and
"The campaign for literary is a holy jihad", were promoted. The Iraqi
Ba'ath Party was a political organization of clandestinity and
ubiquity. Iraqi Ba'athists throughout its history might deviate from
strict interpretation of Ba'athist ideology of Arab unity, freedom from
foreign domination and tribal socialism, yet Ba'athist doctrine
generally set guidelines for Iraqi policy formulation, such as
geopolitical non-alignment, pan-Arabism and domestic accommodation with
diverse religious and ethnic groups. Iraqi Ba'athist policies, as
distinct from Ba'athism in the Arab world in general, were directed
toward specific Iraqi needs and problems, keeping Iraq from extreme
pan-Arabism.
In 1970, after decades of unrest, the Iraqi government, barely two
years under Ba'ath leadership, agreed to form an autonomous Kurdish
region, letting Kurds into the cabinet. In 1971, borders with Jordan
were closed as a protest to Jordan's attempt to curb the Palestinian
Liberation Organization. In 1972, Bakr nationalized Iraq's oil
industry. US, British and Dutch oil corporations lost their holdings,
including the 25% share of the Iraq Petroleum Company that had been
owned by US-based Exxon and Mobil. The Soviet Union, and later France,
provided technical aid and capital to Iraq's oil industry. In April
1972, in response to rising US hostility, Iraq signed a 15-year
friendship pact with the Soviet Union and agreed to cooperate in
political, economic and military affairs. The Soviets supplied Iraq
with arms.
During the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, a rapprochement
between the Iraqi communists and the Ba'athists came about from the
Iraqi government's increasing reliance on the USSR in the face of
domestic and foreign pressures. With US urging, the Shah of Iran
claimed the Shatt al-Arab waterway in 1969 and seized three strategic
islands in the Arabian Gulf in 1971, reducing Iraq to a landlocked
position. Kurdish guerrilla and terrorist activities in northern Iraq
were sponsored by Iran and the US. British/US hostility over Iraqi
nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1972 and to Iraq's
role in the 1973 Arab War with Israel forced Iraq to tilt further
towards the USSR. Clashes between government forces and Kurdish
separatist groups began in March 1974 only after the Kurds received
military aid from the US through Shah-ruled Iran. In 1975, a settlement
of border disputes was reached with Iran to stop inciting and aiding
Kurdish separatists.
Central to Saddam's vision had always been to unite the Arab world.
When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat broke ranks with Arab solidarity by
signing the 1978 treaty with Israel, Saddam saw it as an opportunity
for Iraq to play a leading role in pan-Arab affairs. He was
instrumental in convening an Arab summit in Baghdad that denounced
Sadat's betrayal of Arab solidarity through a separate political
reconciliation with Israel. The summit imposed economic sanctions on
Egypt that lacked effectiveness due to Arab disunity. On June 16, 1979,
Bakr was stripped of all positions and put under house arrest. Saddam
became the new president, followed by a massive purge within the Ba'ath
Party.
While outsiders were not privy to the real causes of Iraqi political
developments, one factor was a split over a proposed union with Syria,
where Regional Ba'athists predominated. Saddam gained control of the
Iraqi Ba'ath Party with an adherence to pan-Arabism. National elections
were held on June 20, 1980. An analysis by Amazia Baram, "The June 1980
Elections to the National Assembly in Iraq: An Experiment in Controlled
Democracy", in Orient (September 1981) shows that 75% of those elected
were Ba'athists, 7% women, over 50% with higher education, 40% Shi'ites
and 12% Kurds. Democracy had come to Iraq two decades before the 2002
Iraqi War to spread democracy in the Middle East.
Revolution in Iran, a Hostage Crisis and a War
Early in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran took place that was to
have serious geopolitical consequences for Iraq. Strong Shi'ite
fundamentalist opposition against the Shah in Iran accelerated in the
late 1970s as the country came close to civil war. The opposition was
lead by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who lived in exile in Iraq and
later in France. On January 16, 1979, the unpopular Shah was forced to
flee Iran. Shapour Bakhtiar, a liberal, as new prime minister with the
help of the Supreme Army Council, could not control the agitated
country overflowing with theocratic activism. Khomeini returned to an
Iran engulfed with religious passion on the first day of February in
1979. Ten days later, Bakhtiar went into hiding, eventually to find
exile in Paris. On April 1, after a landslide victory in a national
referendum on an Islamic Republic for Iran, Khomeini declared an
Islamic republic with a new constitution reflecting the ideals of
Islamic government. To the chagrin of US propagandists, democracy
reflective of the will of the people again turned anti-US. Khomeini
became supreme spiritual leader (valy-e-faqih) of Iran.
On November 4, 1979, Islamic students stormed the US Embassy, taking 66
people, the majority US citizens, as hostages. It was an event that
dealt a fatal blow to the re-election efforts of president Jimmy Carter
and contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan, with historic
consequences to US domestic politics and foreign policy, turning the US
decidedly to the extreme right. For Saddam, the Iranian revolution made
him an instant darling of Washington.
Unrest among Kurds in northern Iraq intensified, inspired by unrest
following the events in Iran, taking advantage of the Iraqi
government's preoccupation with renewed religious animosities between
Shi'ites and Sunnis in southern Iraq linked to the rise of Shi'ite
fundamentalism in Iran. Relations between the two neighboring
countries, never good, deteriorated rapidly. On September 17, 1980, the
agreement on Iraqi/Iranian borders from 1975 was declared null and void
by Iraq, which claimed the whole Shatt el-Arab, a small, but important
and rich area. Iraq claimed territories inhabited by Arabs (the
southwestern oil-producing province of Iran called Khouzestan), as well
as Iraq's right over Shatt el-Arab, which the Iranians call Arvandroud.
When Iranian students took the hostages at the US Embassy, it was at
first not at all clear whom they represented or what they hoped to
achieve. In fact, a similar mob had briefly done the same thing nine
months earlier, holding the US ambassador hostage for a few hours
before Khomeini ordered him released. But this time Khomeini, in
response to persistent US hostility, saw political utility in this
potent symbol, and issued a statement in support of the action against
the US "den of spies". The students vowed not to release the hostages
until the US returned the Shah to Iran for trial, along with the
billions he had stolen from the Iranian people and kept in overseas
banks.
Taking on the safe return of the hostages as his personal
responsibility, Carter, a committed born-again Christian, tried to
pursue a peaceful resolution by gradually building pressure on Iran
through economic sanctions. He ordered an embargo on Iranian oil export
on November 11. Rejecting the option of immediate military action
recommended by his hawkish national security advisor Zbigniew
Brezezinski, as too risky to the lives of the hostages, Carter
escalated tensions by freezing Iranian assets in the US. While
secretary of state Cyrus Vance led official diplomatic efforts,
Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, spent thousands of hours
working secret channels at the disposal of the office of the president
to end the crisis. For the first few months, the US public rallied
around Carter, who had clearly made freeing the hostages his top
priority. As fall turned into winter and then spring, and negotiations
failed to produce a deal or even any visible signs of resolution,
frustrated US public opinion demanded stronger action. Time was turning
against Carter's non-military approach.
Finally, with the Iranians showing no signs of ever releasing all the
hostages, Carter, desperate, approved a high-risk rescue operation on
April 11, 1980 designated as "Desert One" that had been under
contingency planning for months. Despite the fact that the odds against
its success were forbiddingly high, Carter ordered the mission and was
disappointed when he received reports that the rescue mission by Delta
Force, code named Eagle Claw, had had to be aborted in midstream due to
three of the six deployed helicopters malfunctioning under desert
conditions. During the withdrawal, another helicopter crashed into a
C-130 transport plane while taking off, killing eight elite commando
servicemen and wounding three more, without ever engaging Iranian
opposition fire.
The next morning, gleeful Iranians broadcast to the whole world live
footages of the smoking remains of the failed US rescue mission on
Iraqi soil, a stark symbol of superpower impotence, if not
incompetence. Having opposed Desert One from the start, Vance, who had
been kept out of the rescue loop, resigned in protest out of principle.
Finally, in September, with the Iran-Iraq war in full steam in favor of
Iraq, Khomeini's government decided it was time to end the hostage
matter. Despite rumors that Carter might pull an "October Surprise", a
term coined by Republican vice presidential candidate George H W Bush,
to get the hostages home before election day, negotiations dragged on
for months, even after Reagan's landslide victory on the first Tuesday
of November.
The rumored "October Surprise" might have been the US hope that Saddam
would act as a US proxy to punish Iran and topple Khomeini with a quick
victory before the US election. Believing Iran to be too weak both
politically and militarily to resist, and emboldened by the certainty
that US weapon systems afforded to the Shah of Iran had been
drastically degraded under Khomeini, Iraq launched a full-scale
invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980 with quiet encouragement from
the US less than two month before the US presidential election, in
which Carter's failure to bring the crisis of US hostages held by Iran
to a satisfactory close had become a key election issue. Iraq won some
initial battles, but a supposedly weak Iranian military managed to
achieve surprising defensive successes and halted Iraqi advance by
October, despite US help to Iraq in providing classified information on
US weapon systems delivered to Iran during the Shah era. While the
start of the Iran-Iraq War did not rescue Carter from election defeat,
it did force Iran to start negotiating to end the hostage crisis.
An extraordinary story was filed a decade later in the April 15, 1991
New York Times by Gary Sick, Carter's national security council staff
responsible for Iran, detailing a three-way bidding contest for the
release of the hostages between Iran and a clueless Carter
administration, and the Reagan campaign headed by William Casey (who
was to become Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director later under
Reagan) through arms dealer/CIA operative Jamshid Hashemi, who had
close contacts in Iranian revolutionary circles. The Reagan campaign
was dealing with Iranian operatives to ensure that no deal would be
reached before the US election, lest Carter should gain political
advantage from a pre-election hostage release. The Reagan people were
topping escalating offers made to Iran by the Carter people to induce
the Iranians to hold off any deal with Carter. After long negotiations
in which Reagan forces agreed to unfreeze Iranian assets, transfer
money, as well as military equipment to Iran for the release of US
hostages, should their man win the election, the hostages in the US
Embassy were released on the inauguration of a victorious Reagan on
January 20, 1981. The Reagan victory was partly paid for by the US
hostages having their freedom delayed for months. The principle of "the
foreign enemy of my domestic opponent is my ally" entered US politics.
The Iran-Iraq War would go on for most of the decade for its own
geopolitical reasons, with the US tilting quietly towards Iraq. Still,
the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to a hostile Iran all
through its bloody war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988, and diverted the
proceeds to the Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the
democratically-elected leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The
arms sales had a dual goal: appeasing a hostile Iran, which had
influence with militant groups that were holding several US hostages in
Lebanon, and funding an anti-communist guerrilla war in democratic
Nicaragua. Both actions were in direct violation of specific acts of
Congress which prohibited the sale of weapons to Iran, as well as in
violation of United Nations sanctions against Iran. The rule of law and
the spread of democracy fell victim to US geopolitical exceptionalism.
Israel's Preemptive Strike in Iraq
On June 7, 1981, during a period in which US-Iraq relations was at an
all-time high, and US and European companies were carrying on highly
lucrative trade deals with an Iraq flushed with Saudi money to finance
the drawn-out Iraq-Iran war, Israeli F-15 bombers and F-16 fighters
bombed and destroyed the French-built Osirak reactor 18 miles south of
Baghdad, on orders from Menachem Begin, who said he believed the
reactor was designed to make nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. It was
the world's first air strike against a nuclear plant. The
billion-dollar 70-megawatt uranium-powered reactor, paid for with Saudi
funds, was near completion, but had not been stocked with nuclear fuel
so there was no danger of radiation leak, according to the French
contractor which sold the reaction to Iraq under an international
non-proliferation regime. The French also maintained that the Osirak
reactor was not capable of producing plutonium for bombs. IAEA
(International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards promised independent
regular inspections and French technicians were required to be present
for five to 10 years following initial operation. It would not have
been possible for Iraq to make an undetected fuel conversion or to
misuse the fuel supplied. General Yehoshua Saguy, head of the
intelligence division of the Israel Defense Force prior to the air
strike, argued for continuing to try to find a non-military solution to
the threat within the five to 10 years he felt Israel still had before
Iraq would have its first nuclear weapons. (Ilan Peleg, Begin's
Foreign Policy, 1977-1983, Israel's Move To The Right - New York:
Greenwood Press, 1987. p 187.) Begin ordered the Osirak reactor bombed
because he feared that his party would lose the next election, and he
did not believe the opposition party would have the toughness to
preempt production of the first Iraqi nuclear bomb. Begin told a close
political advisor, "I know there is an election coming. If they [Labor]
win, I will lose my chance to save the Jewish people." (p 365.) The
Israeli fear of nuclear attack from neighboring Arab countries is
strategically unjustified. A nuclear attack on Israel would also kill
Arabs on a massive scale in the area. Five decades of Cold War
superpower nuclear deterrence has established firmly the effectiveness
of the principle of mutual massive destruction (MAD). The best
insurance against an Arab nuclear attack on Israel is to stop the
forced evacuation of Palestinian Arabs from Israel. The Arabs want the
land occupied by Israel back to enjoy, not destroy it with radiation.
Harvard nuclear physics professor Richard Wilson, who visited the
reactor after the attack, argued that preemption is a dangerous game.
The world faces unprecedented threats from terrorism. If they involve
weapons of mass destruction, many people argue that we cannot wait
until there is a specific threat, but must consider preemptive strikes.
But we must be careful. Non-technical commentators often start with
technically incorrect premises, and build up a case for preemptive
strikes that is as dangerous as it is incorrect. Wilson visited the
nuclear research reactor in Iraq on December 29, 1982 and visually
inspected the reactor (which had been only partially damaged) and its
surrounding equipment. To collect enough plutonium using Osirak would
have taken decades, not years. French nuclear reactor engineer Yves
Girard was aware of the carelessness of the Canadians in supplying a
heavy water reactor to India, and the French in selling the Dimona
reactor to Israel without insisting on any international safeguards to
prevent military application. In 1975, Girard refused to help to supply
a heavy water moderated reactor to Iraq. Instead, the Osirak reactor
was moderated by light water, and therefore deliberately unsuited to
making plutonium for bombs. The day after the bombing, Begin
incorrectly described Osirak with misleading specifications of the
Israeli Dimona reactor.
The chairman of the Board of Governors of the IAEA, Bertrand
Goldschmidt, was reportedly livid about the Israeli bombing, as were
many other experts. While as a French Jew who had worked on the
Manhattan project, he had especial sympathy for Israel, he was
concerned that Israel had damaged attempts by the international
community, with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to control
the nuclear genie which had been let out of the bottle in 1945 by the
US.
The Israeli bombing of the Osirak reactor infuriated the Iraqis. They
had followed international rules openly and accepted international
inspections, and yet were bombed by a country which allowed no
inspections of its own nuclear plants. Wilson reported that Iraqi
fast-track for bomb development began in July 1981, after the Israeli
bombing. The preemptive strike seemed to have had the opposite effect
to that intended. Worse still, Israeli and US intelligence deluded
themselves into thinking that once bombed, the threat of Iraqi
bomb-making was over. The Iraqi bomb program became generally known in
1991, and a number of experts wrote about it in the Israeli journal New
Outlook. The general consensus was that the Israel had no justification
in bombing Osirak.
Iraq, the rogue regime, swallowed the attack stoically. Yet the
incident radicalized Iraqi politics. One shudders to think what the US
would have done if one of its nuclear power plants operating under NPT
rules had been attacked. Yet this precedent of bombing an Iraqi nuclear
power plant built under an operative international non-proliferation
regime by a Western power had been set in the name of proliferation
preemption, giving justification and impetus to secret nuclear programs
that are much more difficult to monitor.
With the widespread acknowledgement by many experts that the components
for assembling a nuclear device can easily be purchased in the open
market for around $2 million, or a fully-assembled device for $20
million, the claim of US Vice President Dick Cheney in his acceptance
speech in the Republican Convention in New York in late August this
year that the illicit global nuclear proliferation network had been
effectively shut down by Bush's "war on terrorism" sounded like a pitch
to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a gullible public. An iron rule of
terrorism is what goes around, comes around from geopolitical blowback.
One cannot exterminate terrorism any more than mosquitoes, except by
reordering the ecosystem. Until the inequities of the socio-political
ecosystem are eliminated, terrorism will continue to exist.
On the state level, one glaring lesson from the second Iraq War is that
non-possession of nuclear weapons has become an open invitation to
enemy invasion. Every government now will realize it is its sovereign
responsibility to avail itself of nuclear capability for the defense of
the nation, because the absence of nuclear capability has been turned
into negative proof of intent to acquire such capability, which in turn
provides the justification of reckless preemptive attack, undeterred by
nuclear retaliation on the attacker. Nuclear proliferation will
continue until all nuclear powers pledge themselves to the doctrine of
no-first-use and the doctrine of no military force against non-nuclear
nations.
An Iranian counter-offensive in 1982, aided by fresh US arms from the
Iran-Contra deal, reclaimed much of the territory lost to Iraq during
the early phase of the war. On November 26, 1983, Reagan signed a
secret order instructing the US government to do "whatever was
necessary and legal" to ensure that Iraq was not defeated in its war
with Iran. At this time, the Reagan administration openly acknowledged
its awareness that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass
destruction and that chemical weapons were used almost daily against
Iranian forces (Washington Post December 30, 2002), but for
geopolitical reasons chose to avoid making an issue out of these
intelligence reports. In December 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, as secretary
of defense, was sent by Reagan to Iraq to meet with Saddam to offer
whatever assistance might be required. In November 1984, Reagan
restored full diplomatic status to Iraq after meeting in Washington
with Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz.
The New York Times reported on August 29, 2002 that from 1982 to 1988,
the US Defense Intelligence Agency provided detailed information to
Iraq on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for
air strikes and bomb damage assessments.
In March 1986, the US and Britain blocked all UN Security Council
resolutions condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons, and on March 21
the US was the only country refusing to sign a Security Council
statement condemning Iraq's use of these weapons. The US Department of
Commerce licensed 70 biological exports to Iraq between May of 1985 and
1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax. In
May 1986, the US approved shipment of weapons-grade botulin poison to
Iraq. In late 1987, Iraq began using chemical agents against Kurdish
separatists in northern Iraq.
Four major battles were fought in the Iran-Iraq war from April to
August 1988, in which the Iraqis effectively used chemical weapons to
defeat the Iranians. Nerve gas and blister agents such as mustard gas
were used, in violation of the Geneva Accords of 1925. By this time,
the US Defense Intelligence Agency was heavily involved with Saddam's
military in battle-plan assistance, intelligence gathering and
post-battle debriefing. In the last major battle of the war, 65,000
Iranians were killed, many with poison gas.
Next: The Burden of being a
Superpower
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