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.
TOMORROW: The burden of being a
superpower
