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‘Iraq’ in Arabic means the shore of the great river and the fertile land surrounding it. The word has been used since at least the eighth century AD to describe the alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates valley, known in Europe since Antiquity by the Greek term ‘Mesopotamia’, the land between the rivers.
Long before the Greeks, the land between the rivers was of local, and far wider than local, importance. Mesopotamia has genuine claims to be the cradle of civilization. There are other river valleys to dispute the title. The Indus is one, the Nile another, and in both power rested with rulers who controlled or appeared to control the life-bringing flood. Geography made Mesopotamia different. The central valley is so flat, descending only 34 metres in 338 kilometres (112 feet in 210 miles), that the annual snowmelt from the surrounding highlands spreads across the whole face of the land and can be utilized only by constantly renewed irrigation work. The ‘irrigation societies’ which consequently grew up were eventually unified under a succession of dynasties, Akkadian, Sumerian and Assyrian. Assyria became a great power and it was under the Assyrian kings that the magnificent works of temple and palace architecture, some still surviving, were created. Assyria was eventually overthrown in the seventh century BC by barbarian invaders from the Central Asian interior but Mesopotamia was restored to civilization by incorporation in the Persian Empire.
Briefly Hellenized under Alexander and his successors, Mesopotamia became a borderland between the later Persian Empire and Rome and thus remained until conquered by the Arabs in the early expansion of Islam in the eighth century AD. After the transfer of the seat of the Islamic Caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad in the tenth century, Iraq became the centre of the most powerful state west of China and Baghdad a city of wealth and splendour under its Abbasid rulers, particularly under the famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk. This was the era of the Arabian Nights and the Thousand and One Tales, when Abbasid life was a byword for luxury and extravagance wholly at variance with the austerity of the early Muslim régime. Baghdad’s time of glory was brought abruptly to an end in 1258 when the Mongols, the latest wave of interlopers from the Steppe, terrorized the last Abbasid Caliph into surrender and had him strangled within his own city.
Mongol power did not last and Iraq, having temporarily fallen under the power of Tamerlane, last of the great Steppe conquerors, reverted to Persia. Persian rule was ended at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the arrival of the Ottoman Turks, under whom Iraq was to be governed until the beginning of the twentieth century. The Ottomans, though originally a horse people of the Steppe, had absorbed from the Byzantines, after their capture of Constantinople in 1453, a sophisticated understanding of statecraft and ran their enormous empire, stretching from the Red Sea to the Balkans, on lines that owed much to those descendants of Rome. They understood the mechanisms of taxation, they were masters of the principle of divide and rule and they made the maintenance of an efficient imperial army the basis of their authority.
The Ottomans divided Iraq into three vilayets, or governorships, centred on Mosul, in the Kurdish north; Baghdad, a largely Sunni city in the centre; and Basra, in the Shi’ite south. Iraq was readymade for the exercise of their skills in manipulating minorities. In both the Mosul and Basravilayets a traditional tribal society predominated and the Ottomans ruled indirectly through chieftains and heads of leading families. The situation was further complicated in the Baghdad vilayet because of the city’s proximity to the Shi’a holy places of Najaf and Karbala. The Shi’a religious leaders, though disfavoured by the Sunni Ottomans, had to be respected because of the readiness of the Shah of Persia, the most important Shi’a ruler in Islam, to intervene on their behalf. In the Basra vilayet, from the seventeenth century onwards, the most significant locals were the merchants trading with the British East India Company. Throughout the country there was a scattering of religious and ethnic minorities, including Eastern Rite Christians, heretical Muslims, such former Steppe people as the Turkomans and an ancient and large Jewish community, present since the Babylonian captivity.
A final complexity of the Ottoman system in Iraq was that rule was exercised, until the nineteenth century, through a slave, or mameluke, class. The mameluke principle had been devised in early Islam to evade the Koranic prohibition on Muslim fighting Muslim; since conflict is an irrepressible feature of human life, pious Muslims sought to get round the ban by buying slaves to fight for them. Boys were purchased from the Steppe horse people, trained as soldiers and inducted into the Caliph’s army; after the conquest of the Balkans boys were forcibly recruited there from Christian families and taken to Constantinople, where they formed the formidable Janissary corps. Inevitably slave soldiers soon came to exercise power. In Constantinople the Janissaries dominated the court; in Egypt and Iraq, farther from the centre, the mamelukes achieved autonomous power. Outwardly obedient to the Caliph, effectively they governed in their own right. It was a peculiarity of the mameluke régime in Iraq that its members were brought from the mountain region of Georgia, to which the recruiters constantly returned to refresh their numbers. The position ofmameluke was not hereditary.
Even though not hereditary power-holders, Ottoman government slaves, Janissaries and mamelukes alike, were deeply reactionary in outlook. Their position depended upon resisting change of any sort and theirs was the principal influence which kept Ottoman society static and increasingly backward. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, after several hundred years of military success, the Ottoman Empire – Turkey as it was now often called – faced defeat by the Christian world. The Caliphs bestirred themselves. In 1826 the Janissary corps was bloodily disbanded and Western institutions introduced. The reforms spread progressively to the empire’s outer provinces. In Iraq, in 1831, the mameluke governor of Baghdad was turned out of office for disobedience and by 1834 all three provinces, Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, had been brought under the direct rule of Constantinople. The new Ottoman officials brought with them procedures designed to recruit soldiers to the imperial army by conscription, to superimpose secular courts over those of the religious and tribal authorities and to organize land-holding, the basis of the economy, through a government-controlled land register. All these reforms met local resistance, often local revolt, but the tanzimat (reforms) proceeded inexorably and by the last decades of the nineteenth century the Nizam-i Celid (New Order) was established.
What impeded its complete realization was reaction at the centre, as so often the response of traditional power to a reform movement. Abdul Hamid II, who became Sultan-Caliph in 1876, was temperamentally absolutist and resented the rate at which central power was slipping from the absolute ruler’s hands. He attempted a confrontation with the reforming Young Ottomans, as the reformists were known, and suspended the constitution his predecessor had been obliged to grant. Too late; in 1908 a new group of reformists, the Young Turks, members of the undercover Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), formed largely of Ottoman subjects from the European provinces, staged a revolution and seized power. They accelerated the pace of reform but without conceding power to the empire’s non-Turkish subjects. That was to prove a mistake. The Young Turks looked to Europe for example, to Germany for alliance and sought to heighten the Westernization of the empire. They were secularists, not practising Muslims, were ethnic Turkish nationalists devoted to the idea of a greater Turkey pushed into Central Asia (Turanianism) and they adopted an imperialist policy towards the empire’s Arab subjects. As Ottoman Arabs equalled or even outnumbered the empire’s Turks, the policy was unpopular and was particularly resented by the educated Arabs who, though few in number, were influential, particularly in Syria and Lebanon. There lay the heartland of what was to become known as ‘the Arab Awakening’, a movement mounted by idealists who looked forward to the reunification of the Arab lands as a single political unit, to the liberation of the Arabs from imperialist rule, Ottoman, British, French and Italian, and to their intellectual emancipation through the pursuit of Western education but within Muslim belief. Many of the nationalists were Ottoman officers who by 1914 had formed a secret society within the army’s ranks, al-‘Ahd (the Covenant). To it belonged several men destined to become prominent in post-Ottoman Iraq, notably Nuri al-Sa’id.
The first stage in the detachment of Iraq from Turkish rule came in November 1914 when, following the Ottoman entry into the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Britain despatched an expeditionary force from India to seize Basra. The move had two aims: to open a front against the Turks to assist the Russians, but also to protect British oil interests at the head of the Gulf. The expeditionary force was well received in Basra, where many of the merchant houses had a long association with their British and Indian equivalents, going back to the Honourable East India Company. The ease of occupation tempted the British to push farther and by November 1915 the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force (MEF) had advanced to within fifty miles of Baghdad. There it was counter-attacked and pushed back to Kut on the Tigris and besieged. Kut proved a humiliating disaster. After four months the garrison was starved into surrender. Not until 1917 did the advance resume. Progress then accelerated and by October 1918, when the Ottomans agreed to an armistice, the whole of Iraq came under British occupation, including the oil-rich north around Kirkuk and Mosul, ethnically Kurdish territory.
In the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman collapse the British imposed a military and semi-colonial administration, proclaiming regulations based on those operating in the Indian empire. It was clear that the arrangement would be only temporary, though there was a nascent acceptance among many Arab Iraqis of the idea of Iraq becoming a unitary state. It was not shared by the Kurds who quickly began to demand separate political status. The most prominent Kurdish leader, Shaikh Mahmud Barzani, was appointed governor of part of Kurdistan but proclaimed independence in May 1919. After his removal by military force, the British resumed control.
In Baghdad and the surrounding central provinces, the al-‘Ahd society, of which the Iraqi branch was now localized in the city, attracted considerable support from the urban notables, who were anti-British and opposed also to the aspirations of both the Kurds and the southern Shi’a; another Sunni faction, however, of which Nuri al-Sa’id was a leader, while better disposed to the British, advocated unification under Faisal, one of the sons of the Sharif of Mecca who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Nuri and many of his associates had served under the Sharif and looked to his Hashemite family to head the future Arab kingdoms. Nuri enjoyed the advantage of intimacy with the officials of the British administration, from whom he had detected that they too were divided over the future of Iraq. While some favoured maintaining direct rule, others hoped to elevate the Hashemites to kingship, chiefly as a means of curbing the Islamicism of the southern Shi’a.
Ironically what precipitated the decisive postwar crisis was not division between the Sunni and Shi’a but a sudden recognition by some of them of shared interests. During 1919 the victorious Allies, meeting at the Versailles conference, had begun to formalize plans for imposing European rule on the former possessions of the German and Ottoman empires, under authority devolved by mandate from the new League of Nations. The mandate for Iraq was to be allotted to the British. Foreseeing a return to imperial subject status in a new guise, the southern Shi’a, under their religious leaders, and then the Baghdad Sunni, showed their opposition. There were large scale demonstrations which led to armed resistance. British garrisons were brought under attack. By June 1920 the revolt affected most of the Sunni centre and the Shi’a south, while there was a recurrence of rebellion in the Kurdish north.
Support for the revolt, however, proved patchy; many notables and tribal leaders were chiefly concerned to safeguard their traditional position. By July the revolt had largely subsided, though at the cost of 6,000 Iraqi deaths and 500 in the British and Indian Army garrison. The Shi’a had suffered the brunt of the repression, an experience that heightened their disaffection from the Sunni minority in and around Baghdad.
The British, now empowered by the League of Nations to administer the Iraq mandate, chose to react to the revolt by establishing a form of indirect rule, which it was hoped the population would find more acceptable than the military administration. A council of Iraqi ministers was appointed, with Iraqis also replacing British political officers in the old Ottoman districts. Perhaps inevitably, however, a majority of the appointees at all levels were chosen from the Sunni minority, since they were identified by the British as more dependable and experienced than Shi’a or Kurds. Sunni domination was particularly evident in the new Iraqi army, which was officered almost exclusively by men who had held rank in the Ottoman army; the Chief of Staff was none other than Nuri al-Sa’id, the most prominent Sunni in the old al-‘Ahd society.
In a typical exercise of imperial divide-and-rule practice, moreover, the British decided to create a parallel army to the new national force, which would be under their direct control. The Iraq Levies, which during the first decades of the mandate would be the real instrument of central power, were raised not from the major but the marginal Iraq communities. Those chosen were Kurds, Marsh Arabs and Assyrians, a Nestorian Christian people who had fled Turkey during the First World War and were not Iraqi at all. The Assyrians nevertheless made excellent soldiers and proved fiercely loyal to the British. Eventually history caught up with them and almost all left post-mandate Iraq, where they had acquired a reputation as colonial lackeys, to make a new communal life in the United States.
The creation of the council of ministers and the national army did not solve the principal problem in postwar Iraq: sovereignty. The mandate system was posited on the principle that the countries adopted by the League of Nations for mandate rule were already sovereign and, as soon as sufficiently developed, should emerge into independence. The most evolved were to be furnished with appropriate heads of state from the outset. In the case of Iraq, by reason of the sophistication of its urban population and its potential wealth clearly a candidate for early release from mandate rule, the choice fell upon the Amir Faisal, a Hashemite prince and son of the Sharif of Mecca, who had taken part in the Arab Revolt and had originally been appointed to the throne of Syria (until the French, who administered the Syrian mandate, fell out with him). There was much to favour him as a future king of a sovereign Iraq. He descended from the family of the Prophet and so, though a Sunni, enjoyed respect among the Shi’a; he had authentic nationalist credentials, as a leader of the Arab Revolt; and he was well-known to the British, among whom he had friends. He was, moreover, personable, charming and politically astute. Nevertheless he was not by birth or affiliation Iraqi; by origin he was an Arab of the distant deserts, by upbringing a child of Ottoman society in Istanbul.
Little wonder, therefore, that he was to find it difficult to establish the legitimacy of Hashemite authority over the old land between the two rivers. In the eyes of Iraqi nationalists he was too closely associated with the British; to Kurds and Shi’a he depended too heavily for domestic support on his comrades of the Arab Revolt, who were overwhelmingly Sunni and often former officers of the Ottoman army. Under the mandate constitution Iraq became notionally a democracy, with an elected parliament; but the franchise was indirect and the vote consistently manipulated both by the British and the royal government to assure a compliant majority. Manipulation ensured that the constituent assembly, forerunner of the national parliament, voted in 1922 to ratify an Anglo-Iraqi treaty giving Britain executive authority over the foreign and security policies of a nominally co-equal Iraqi kingdom.
Britain’s desire to secure the passage of the treaty was greatly assisted by two extraneous factors, one of which was to persist in importance – apparently in perpetuity. The first was Turkish intervention in Iraqi affairs. The new Turkey, since the collapse of Ottomanism, was an ethnically exclusive Turkish state, but it retained territorial ambitions. They included that of incorporating northern Iraq’s oil-bearing regions, with their Kurdish population, into Turkish national territory. Britain was unwilling to see Iraqi territory ceded to a foreign power, even though its holdings in the Turkish Petroleum Company (soon to be the Iraq Petroleum Company) would ensure its access to the oil reserves. Iraqis of most communities recognized that acquiesence in the passage of the treaty offered the best means of blocking Turkish predation. The second factor was Kurdish rebellion. Seeing in Turkey’s intervention an opportunity to further their ambition for independence, some Kurds rose against the mandate administration, forcing the British first to stage a costly campaign of repression and then to install the chief Kurdish strongman as regional governor. The expedient did not endure. Shaikh Mahmud, the new governor, rapidly demonstrated that he intended to make himself Kurdish King, forcing the British to take military action in Kurdistan again, which resulted in Mahmud’s flight to Iran.
Turkish aggression and Kurdish rebellion had the combined effect, paradoxically, of bringing about the settlement Britain sought. Because the southern Shi’a themselves were simultaneously refusing co-operation in the passage of the treaty, their religious chiefs judging that it threatened their privileges, both the King and the Sunni leaders were brought to conclude that acceptance of the treaty, repugnant as they found it, was a lesser evil. Without it they could not count on British support and without that support they risked losing the north and the south becoming a chronically dissident region. The King meanwhile announced important electoral concessions which granted the Shi’a notables a commanding position in the projected parliament. The result was that a constituent assembly was successfully convened in March 1924 which ratified the treaty and led swiftly to the election – by indirect and carefully controlled means – of a sovereign parliament later that year.
The independent Iraqi government, nominal as its independence was, swiftly declared its position on two key points of policy. It sought to raise a conscripted national army and it pressed repeatedly for a declaration by the British of a date at which the mandate would be surrendered, allowing Iraq to become a full – and so fully independent – member of the League of Nations. In the first policy it was only partially successful. Conscription, which recalled the bad old days of Ottoman imperialism, was deeply unpopular with the Iraqi people; moreover, the British did not believe that the Iraqi treasury could afford the cost of a large army. The new Iraqi army which emerged was therefore neither to be a conscript force nor as large as the court, dominated as it was by ex-Ottoman officers, wished. Over the termination of the treaty the government was more successful. In 1929 a new British administration, formed by the Labour Party, more sympathetic to nationalist aspirations in the territories for which it held responsibility overseas than the Conservatives, promised independence by 1932. Its implementation was dependent on the Iraqis agreeing provisions acceptable to Britain. That condition was achieved thanks to the political skills of the new Iraqi prime minister, appointed in March 1930, Nuri al-Sa’id. Nuri, who was to dominate Iraq until the fall of the monarchy in 1958, was an archetype of the Arab leader in the late colonial era. A traditionalist, he was pro-Western for strictly realistic reasons, but sincerely patriotic. As an ex-Ottoman officer, but a member of the al-‘Ahd association of Arab nationalists, he had excellent credentials as a military leader but was also quickly able to demonstrate governmental capacity. His wider vision was of an Arab world dominated by states under Hashemite leadership; his domestic policy was for Iraq to be ruled by a military administration which held popular loyalties by wise distribution of its oil wealth.
The British liked Nuri and he appeared to like them. Under his premiership it was therefore not difficult to negotiate a new Anglo-Iraqi treaty that would form the basis for emergence from mandate status. Its key provisions were that, while full responsibility for external defence and the maintenance of internal order should be vested in the Iraqi government, the British should be given rights of military transit through Iraq if necessary, while two bases, including the great air base at Habbaniyah, should remain in British hands. That presumed Britain’s right to maintain the Iraq Levies as a base protection force. The treaty was ratified, after Nuri had called a general election to endorse his policy, in November 1930. Predictably the Kurds objected, protesting that it did not meet the obligations allegedly undertaken by the British to protect their special status, but the rebellion was put down, with British help. In October 1932 Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as a sovereign and independently governed state.
Independent Iraq was destined, during the first twenty-six years of its existence, to be neither a democratic polity nor a truly autonomous state; the achievement of democracy, indeed, was to elude its people long beyond 1958. Domestically, Iraqi politics during the years of the Hashemite monarchy were to be the arena of élites, of which the urban Sunni grandees and landowners were to be the most active, grouped into parties which frequently re-formed and changed their names. The more successful parties, such as al-Ikha, also, however, included representatives of the better-educated and more prosperous Shi’a. The role of the parties was to preserve the élites’ privileges, particularly by the denial of all but the most modest land reform and by monopolizing access to paid government appointments. Behind the parties, at all times, stood the army, whose officers were cultivated by the court and who could assert their power at any time when regional or minority disorder threatened, as it frequently did in Kurdistan, the authority of the centre. Many of the officers were originally Sharifian, having risen to prominence under the Hashemites during the Arab Revolt. The most important group formed the Circle of Seven, an inner grouping of four the Golden Square. Nuri al-Sa’id did not belong but remained nonetheless a permanent and dominant political figure, frequently in power as Prime Minister and, even when not, the rock on which royal rule rested.
Externally, Iraqi politics were constrained by the continuing fact of British power in the Middle East, which persisted even after the grant of independence to India in 1947 and the withdrawal from Palestine in 1948. The Royal Navy controlled the Gulf and Indian Ocean, while the British army maintained garrisons, directly or indirectly, in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Libya until the mid-fifties. During the Second World War the Middle East was base area for the largest of Britain’s overseas garrisons. As Nuri al-Sa’id recognized, British power had therefore to be accommodated at all times. He was content that it should be, since he regarded the British as most dependable guarantors of the power of the Hashemites, to which he was committed. Nuri was conscious of the growing power of Arab nationalism, particularly in Egypt and Syria, and he was himself a supporter of the idea of pan-Arabism; but he hoped that a unified Arab polity would emerge in a monarchical form under Hashemite leadership. He was also disturbed by the rise of Jewish power in Palestine and, after 1948, became an active opponent of Zionism, while fearing the effects that militant anti-Zionism would have on stable Arab societies. At heart he was an Iraqi patriot, of a moderate and pro-Western cast of mind. For all his undeniable political skills, his essentially traditionalist attitude would eventually doom him to defeat by younger Arabs possessing fiercely anti-Western, anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist beliefs.
Economically Nuri was a modernizer who would seek, through the investment of Iraq’s growing oil revenues, to better the lot of the people and to improve the resources and efficiency of the state. He was not helped by the characters of the monarchs he had to serve, or by the monarchy’s erratic fortunes. Faisal, a charming and intelligent man, died in 1933. He was succeeded by Ghazi, whose vaguely pan-Arab and anti-British feelings attracted support from nationalists; he associated himself too closely with Sunni favourites, however, to foster national unity. His reign, like his father’s, was brief (1933–39), ended by a car crash. He was succeeded by his son, also Faisal, but, as he was only three years old at his accession, the monarchy became a regency, exercised by Prince Abd al-Ilah, brother of the infant King’s mother. Abd al-Ilah, who was to be Regent until 1953, shared Nuri’s pro-British outlook but unfortunately did not possess his political subtlety. His main interest lay in securing the future of the Hashemite dynasty, of which he saw the British as the best guarantors. That priority separated him from the Arab nationalist officers of the army – a force of increasing size, 41,000 by 1941 – whom he farther alienated by failing to disguise the social disdain he felt for them.
That was bad politics. The officer corps, which had staged a minor coup d’état in 1936 to bring about a change of cabinet, was now the effective force in the country; no government could be formed without its approval and any government was obliged to promote the policies it favoured, pan-Arabism and, increasingly, friendship for the totalitarian régimes of Western Europe foremost. Matters came to a head in 1941. The Regent had attempted to reassert the principle of civilian control, with the object of strengthening the connection with Britain, by appointing his chief courtier, Rashid Ali al-Kailani, as Prime Minister, with Nuri as his Foreign Minister. The move was less well-judged than it appeared. Rashid Ali, like many Arab politicians of the period, admired Hitler and Mussolini and expected their victory. He also resented Britain’s preponderant role in Iraqi affairs, which the outbreak of the Second World War had emphasized. Britain demanded strict adherence to the Anglo-Iraqi treaty and, in particular, confirmation of its right to move troops through the country. By the end of 1940 Britain was also demanding Rashid Ali’s removal. He was determined not to resign and, during early 1941, set in train a series of events which led to the flight of the Regent and Nuri to Transjordan and to a military coup d’état. A new Regent was installed, Rashid Ali reappointed as Prime Minister and, when the British insisted on extracting permission to send troops into the country, a military confrontation staged outside the British base at Habbaniyah.
A curious little campaign then ensued. While Britain organized an intervention, to be launched from India and Transjordan, the Habbaniyah garrison attacked the Iraqi forces deployed outside the base on 2 May. The attackers consisted largely of RAF aircraft, which bombed and strafed the Iraqi ground troops to great effect; they were supported by a battalion of the Iraq Levies and two companies of the King’s Own Royal Regiment. Startled by the strength of the British resistance, the Iraqis fell back on Baghdad. Meanwhile Rashid Ali had indicated to Germany that he would welcome assistance and some thirty German aircraft, staging through Vichy French Syria, arrived at Mosul. The appearance of Habforce, the column that had driven across the desert from Transjordan, consisting of mechanized units of British Cavalry and the Arab Legion, settled the issue. Rashid Ali and his supporters fled, the Germans withdrew. By June the Regent and Nuri had returned and a pro-British government was restored; in the interregnum, however, disgruntled nationalists had vented their anger at the British intervention on the Baghdad Jewish community, killing over 200. This farhud was the precursor of events which, in 1950, would cause almost all Iraq’s 100,000 Jews to leave for the new state of Israel, thus ending a presence of over two thousand years and one of the richest minority cultures to be found anywhere in the Middle East.
The restoration of 1941 was a restoration not merely of the legitimate regency, but also of the primacy of Nuri al-Sa’id. With intermissions, he was to hold the premiership thenceforth until 1958, making Iraq, in outward appearance, one of the most stable states in the Middle East. Internal problems persisted, particularly those of Kurdish separatism and of Shi’a discontent, caused by the persistent denial to the Shi’ite majority of the political power their numbers demanded. Nuri had also to deal with the problem of a growingly important Communist movement, strongly supported by the Soviet Union, and with nationalist hostility to the establishment and consolidation of the Israeli state. He found means, however, to placate or diffuse internal dissent, to contain the Communists and to persuade the nationalists of his anti-Israeli credentials.
His most substantive anti-Israeli gesture was the despatch of Iraqi troops to fight Israel during its war of independence (1948–49). In 1948 a contingent of 18,000 was sent to Transjordan (soon to be Jordan) to defend the annexed Palestinian West Bank. Its intervention was successful but Iraq was later accused by Egypt of operating too passively, acting merely as a defender of Jordanian territorial acquisitions and failing to mount an offensive which might have diverted Israel from its conquests of Galilee and the Negev. Nevertheless the Iraqi contingent was for a time the largest Arab force in Palestine, a commitment which invested Nuri with influence in the attempts to negotiate a postwar settlement. His solution was to recognize the existence of Israel in return for its surrender of much of the territory conquered during the war. It was rejected by all parties and the great powers as well, a reaction which provided him with the opportunity to bring the Iraqi troops home.
Nuri’s principal initiative to limit the Communist political threat, and the influence of the Soviet Union, was his creation of the Baghdad Pact in February 1955. It came at the end of a disturbed period in domestic politics which had seen him often out of office, manipulating power from the sidelines rather than as head of government. In 1948 he had renegotiated the Anglo-Iraq Treaty of 1930 in what ought to have been a popular move; the Portsmouth Treaty was judged by many, however, still to concede too much to the old mandate power. During 1954, when premier once again, he was attracted by the example of Turkey and Pakistan, who had entered into a mutual assistance treaty. Nuri first succeeded in bringing Turkey to sign a similar agreement with Iraq, later extended to include Pakistan, Iran and Britain. The signing of the Baghdad Pact, besides creating a formidable anti-Soviet bloc in the region, also had the effect of cancelling out the domestic harm done by the Portsmouth Treaty, since by it Britain agreed at last to surrender its rights at Habbaniyah and other bases in Iraq without securing other concessions from Iraq.
The signing of the Baghdad Pact was greeted with enthusiasm in the West; though the United States was not a signatory, it associated itself with Britain’s commitment to equip and train the Iraqi armed forces. Nuri, however, either failed to see or chose to ignore its negative effects at home. The Soviet Union, as a self-proclaimed anti-imperialist force in the world, was regarded as a friend and ally by most Arab nationalists, particularly the younger officers in most Arab armies and above all by the Free Officers who had overthrown the Egyptian monarchy in 1952. Because Nuri believed that his relationship with Iraq’s generals ensured his control of the army, he seemed indifferent to the growth of an undercover Free Officer movement in its junior ranks. Communist subversion was what worried him; and, from his resumption of the premiership in 1954 onwards, he conducted a campaign of repression against the Iraqi Communist Party, but also against all dissidents, wherever disorder or its threat was evident. He was also, meanwhile, attempting to invest Iraq’s growing oil revenues, so as to raise the level of general prosperity, create work and increase material wealth.
The trend of events, however, was against him. Nuri was now increasingly seen as a figure of the past. The Arab Revolt and the overthrow of Ottomanism no longer seemed the central events of modern Arab history, as they had done to the ageing generation of Sharifian officers who had ridden with Lawrence of Arabia. The younger generation looked to leaders untainted by association with the British and French, who had won their spurs in the war against Israel, even at the cost of defeat in the field, and who saw the Soviet Union as a better source of support for a united Arab nation than the old régimes of the West. Egypt’s Colonel Nasser was their beau idéal. He was outspokenly anti-Western, pragmatically pro-Soviet and a champion of Arab independence in every form. His nationalization of the Suez Canal won him adulation throughout the Arab world. When it provoked France and Britain to conspire with Israel in an attack on Egypt in November 1956, even Nuri aligned himself with Arab protest, breaking off relations with France and excluding Britain from meetings of the Baghdad Pact. However, he also took action against anti-Western street protesters in the major cities and displayed in other ways his continuing pro-Western stance.
His opponents responded by forming a National Front in February 1957, combining the older domestic parties and the Communists with the new Ba’ath (Renaissance) Party, a secular and modernizing organization founded in Syria in the previous decade by the Arab Christian Michel Aflaq. The Front quickly established close connections with the Iraqi Free Officers movement, an undercover organization which modelled itself on the Egyptian Nasserists. Nuri again failed to detect or else ignored these developments, apparently believing that his management of Iraqi foreign policy during the Suez crisis had secured his domestic position. In June 1957 he retired from the premiership once more, though continuing to control the government from behind the scenes. He remained ostensibly outside politics until March 1958 when, following the union of Egypt and Syria in a United Arab Republic (UAR), he resumed the premiership, on this occasion as head of an Arab Union of Iraq and Jordan, hastily formed as a riposte to the creation of the UAR in the last days of the previous administration.
The logic of the Arab Union was that both of its component states were Hashemite monarchies. Monarchy, however, outside Jordan, was almost as discredited in the eyes of nationalists as the pro-Western régimes that underpinned it. It attracted no support from the Free Officers who were instigating their own measures to secure Iraq’s future. Under the leadership of Brigadier Abd al-Karem Kassem and Colonel Abd al-Salim Arif, they had decided to overthrow the Hashemite dynasty, declare a republic and form a government drawn from the ranks of the army. They had also decided to act quickly since they foresaw that the growing discontent within the officer corps could not much longer be disguised. The opportunity to act was given them by Nuri himself who, alarmed by an American intervention in Lebanon, to avert a civil war, and by the evident hostility of Nasser’s United Arab Republic to the Arab Union, decided to send elements of the Iraqi army to the Jordanian border as a measure of support to Jordan’s King. The deployment was seen by Kassem and his military allies as providing the opportunity to mount a coup and on 14 July 1958 army units moving towards Jordan entered Baghdad and attacked the royal palace. The young King, Faisal II, and the Regent, Abd al-Ilah, and other members of the royal family were shot in the courtyard. Nuri, allegedly attempting to escape the city disguised in woman’s clothing, was shot in the street the following day.
Immediately after this bloody end to Iraq’s royal government, the country was proclaimed a republic and Kassem Prime Minister, Minister of Defence and Commander-in-Chief. Supreme power was vested symbolically in a three-man sovereignty council. Arif was appointed Deputy Prime Minister. Tension between the two soldiers revealed itself at once. Arif belonged to the Nasserist school of nationalists whose overriding aim was to create a single Arab nation within which the states descending from the old imperial system would lose their identity. Kassem was an Iraqi nationalist, committed to Iraq’s economic development and its evolution as a rich and powerful independent state. Half Sunni, half Kurdish Shi’a by birth, he was presumably well positioned to foster national unity. Temperamentally, however, he was an authoritarian, whose inclination, when he encountered opposition, was to use force to resolve his difficulties. He genuinely sought to build a homogenous Iraqi society and tried to integrate both Kurds and Shi’a with Sunni, promising prosperity and permitting the public organization of political and interest groups – women, youth, nationalists, the Muslim Brotherhood – hitherto suppressed. He recognized Kurdish separateness, though not the right to separatism, revoked the Iraq Petroleum Company’s oil exploration rights and announced a scheme of radical land reform, designed to end the days of absentee landlordism over wide areas of agricultural holdings.
Kassem’s policies, combined with his undoubted personal magnetism, brought him widespread popularity. It was a shallow popularity, however, dependent on his ability to mobilize crowds in the street; his role as ‘Sole Leader’ was ultimately supported, as the previous régime had been, by the intelligence and security forces and the army. Shallow popularity was opposed, moreover, by the hostility of displaced rivals and well-organized covert groups, Nasserist Free Officers who rejected his policy of ‘Iraq First’, the Ba’ath, which was growing in strength, and the Communists.
He was obliged early on to remove Arif, his co-conspirator, whom he imprisoned but did not execute; Rashid Ali, who had led the military revolt of 1941 and who returned from exile expecting to enter into his inheritance, he did execute. He was also driven to fall out with the Communists; after a preliminary attempt to draw them into his scheme for broadening his political support, he found their determination to work for their own ends a threat to his position and he progressively withdrew the privileges he had begun by granting them, without actually coming to an open breach. His management of the Communist problem was the most successful strand in his dictatorship.
He also began well in his attempt to palliate the Kurdish problem. In 1960, as part of his liberalization programme, he allowed the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) to organize openly. Its co-operation with the Communists and its efforts to draw the Soviet Union into Iraqi domestic politics understandably alarmed Kassem, however, and he rejected its over-bold demand for the grant of regional autonomy. That move provoked armed protest in Kurdistan and by the autumn of 1961 serious fighting had broken out in the north, engaging the army in a campaign of repression. The leader of the most important Kurdish group, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, a long-time opponent of the Baghdad government, returned to the field with his peshmerga guerrillas, who were to become a permanent cause of internal disorder during Kassem’s period in power and under Saddam.
Kassem’s most dedicated opponents, however, came from the groups apparently closest to him, the Arab nationalists and the army. His foreign policy pleased both, for he reasserted Iraq’s rights over Iran’s in the Shatt el-Arab and he revived the claim to Kuwait, so menacingly in June 1961 that Britain, Kuwait’s traditional protector, was prompted to send an expeditionary force to the emirate, from which it had only just been withdrawn. Because so much of the Iraqi army was committed to Kurdistan, Kassem was unable, however, to respond with a corresponding military deployment to the Kuwait border. At British representation, the Arab League, to which all Arab states belonged, recognized Kuwait as an independent country and on the withdrawal of the British troops replaced them with others of their own, largely drawn from the army of the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria).
Kassem’s response was to remove Iraq’s representation from the Arab League and to break off relations with several Arab states that had recognized Kuwait’s independence. These were empty gestures. Within Iraq the Free Officers and other nationalists, and the Ba’ath, took the view that he had humiliated Iraq, left it isolated in the Arab world and, most critically of all, caved in to British imperialism.
The Kuwait affair left Kassem in a precarious position. Outwardly he retained his popularity; his use of oil revenues for the general good, particularly by the improvement and expansion of the electrical and health care system, was widely welcomed and his reduction of the rights enjoyed by the Iraq Petroleum Company was seen as proper and patriotic; but his hold on power was maintained only by a balancing act. Believing he was accepted as ‘Sole Leader’ by the masses, he had failed to protect himself by creating a real network of power groups loyal to himself. Other power groups, covert and conspiratorial, resented his refusal to position Iraq at the centre of the Arab nationalist movement and his determination to pursue a policy of ‘Iraq First’. He had already survived several attempts to unseat him: a crude conspiracy led by the returned Rashid Ali in 1958, a rising in the north in 1959 and an assassination attempt in October of that year, in which the young Saddam Hussein had fired on his car. The decisive stroke, however, was to be launched by the Ba’ath, now a well-established and efficient force in Iraq’s unofficial politics. Its leaders, particularly Kassem’s former confederate Arif and Brigadier Hasan al-Bakr, were dissatisfied by Kassem’s isolation of Iraq within the Arab world and by his dependence on the Communists for support. They also hated his insouciant belief in his own popularity as a safeguard of his personal security. That was perceptive. Kassem, though apparently aware that trouble was brewing, merely arrested some of the leading Ba’athists. He did not deploy dependable units of the army to protect himself. On 9 February 1963 others in the Ba’ath struck against the air force, which was loyal to Kassem and also had Communist connections. Meanwhile they brought their supporters into the streets in Baghdad and sent army units they controlled to the Ministry of Defence. Had Kassem armed the Communists he might have survived but he disdained to do so. In the prolonged street battle that followed he and his supporters were eventually overcome, captured and shot.
Power now seemed to belong to the Ba’ath but the leaders of the coup appointed the non-Ba’athist Abd al-Salim Arif as President, with the Ba’athist Hasan al-Bakr as Vice-President. There ensued a troubled period of disputed authority. The Ba’ath had become the most important political force in Iraq but its factions could not agree, the points of difference, as usual, being over the relative weight to be given to the pursuit of Iraqi and wider Arab nationalism. Arif, who enjoyed wide support in the army, eventually used his military position to quash the Ba’ath, ruling thereafter as a military dictator. He created the Republican Guard as an inner army, recruited from dependable tribal allies, and he trod a narrow path between Nasserism and straightforward Iraqi nationalism. He proved a skilful politician and might have enjoyed a long period of power had he not been killed in a helicopter crash in 1966, apparently a genuine accident. Power then passed to his brother Abd al-Rahman Arif, another soldier, who attempted to perpetuate his system of personal rule. The second Arif, however, lacked the former’s skills and encountered more difficult problems, including the aftermath of the Arab disaster of 1967 in the war with Israel, a deteriorating situation in Kurdistan and the outbreak of a Communist-led revolt in the south. Under his uncertain hold on power, the Ba’ath was able to reorganize and to extend its tentacles, notably into units of the army and the Republican Guard. In July 1968 the Ba’ath staged a semicoup, which disposed of President Arif by putting him on an aircraft out of the country. It was subsequently unable, however, to agree on the division of power with the non-Ba’athists in the army who had joined in Arif’s removal and a fortnight later, on 30 July, it staged a second coup, which appointed the veteran Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr President, with his young kinsman Saddam Hussein as his deputy. Bakr’s base of power, though he held the post of secretary-general of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, was in the army. Saddam’s power, which he was already and secretly dedicated to making absolute, derived from his role as a Ba’athist, an experienced conspirator and a member of an extended family, clan and tribal network centred on the provincial centre of Tikrit. Hasan al-Bakr has been described by Charles Tripp, a leading historian of modern Iraq, as ‘a typical regimental officer, solicitous of the welfare of his subordinates and able to use the language of military collegiality to create a certain bond with fellow officers. Despite the radical Ba’athist rhetoric that he used when occasion demanded, his views were conservative and rather typical of his provincial background: pan-Arab to some degree, but also imbued with a keen awareness of status distinctions between different lineages and clans among the Sunni Arabs … of Iraq.’ Saddam, by contrast, was a completely uncollegial figure, solicitous of no one’s welfare but his own and animated by a Stalinist ruthlessness to acquire and maximize personal power.