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Saddam Hussein, a poor and uneducated provincial youth, came to exercise absolute power in Iraq by a mixture of violence and political intrigue. His rise followed a novel and unusual path. Leadership in the Muslim world is traditionally associated with birth or religious status, often both together. Indeed, traditional Muslim society offered the ambitious none of the ways upward customary in the West. Worldly ambition was anyhow not a quality thought proper by pious Muslims. At the heart of the Muslim system lies the idea of the Umma, the community of fellow believers, commanded by the Koran to live in harmony under the authority of the Imam or Caliph, the successor of the Prophet. The succession divided Muslims almost from the beginning, soon after the death of Muhammad, into the Sunni majority, which believed that the Caliph, though he should preferably descend from Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh, was to be elected and accepted by the faithful as long as he showed himself ‘rightly guided’ by the law of God; and a number of minorities, of which the Shi’a was the largest. The Shi’a hold that the succession was flawed from the start, believing that the Caliphate should have passed to the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali. This dispute gave rise to murder and civil war and divides Islam to this day. Nevertheless, neither faction diverged from the central idea, that Muslims live under the law of God, revealed in the Koran and to be upheld by Muhammad’s successor.
Practical difficulties made the idea difficult to sustain; the history of Islam for many centuries is a record of dissent and dispute, often violent, of succession by victory in war, not election, and, at times, of competing caliphates. Internecine violence always, however, affronted pious Muslims, so much so that Islam invented a unique institution, that of slave soldiery, to absolve those in dispute of the sin of fighting fellow believers. A unified Caliphate was only reestablished in comparatively recent times when the Ottoman Turks, a non-Arab people from Central Asia who had been recruited to serve as slave soldiers, imposed their authority over the Arabs by military force and assumed the Caliphate by diktat. From the sixteenth century onwards the history of Islam became largely that of the Ottoman empire, with its seat at Constantinople (Istanbul). Areas of the Islamic world, notably in India and South-east Asia, never formed part of the Ottoman Empire; many of its subjects, in south-eastern Europe and the Near East, remained Christian. The empire, however, embraced the historic heartland of Islam and almost all Arabs were, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, directly or indirectly subjects of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph.
Power in the Ottoman world, both secular and religious, was dynastic; sons succeeded fathers, though favoured wives were often able to evade the principle of primogeniture and new sultans commonly consolidated their accession by murdering brothers en masse. The traditional principle persisted nevertheless; birth and religious status were the bases of worldly authority. Religious status could be quite widely drawn; the servants of the Sultan-Caliph, his ministers and military commanders, derived their authority from association with him. Thus, for example, the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt, whose leaders ruled the country during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were legitimized as the Sultan-Caliph’s viceroys (Khedive). Unnervingly, alternative legitimate power could also arise spontaneously, through the appearance of a Mahdi, a man directly guided by God. The most famous Mahdi of modern times was Muhammad Ahmed, who became ruler of Sudan in the 1880s.
Mahdism, dynastic usurpation, fragmentation of the Caliphate or patronage by it were the only means, until the twentieth century, by which power could be transferred in the Muslim world. The historic ideas of the Umma, the community of believers, of the Caliphate and of the overriding authority of the Supreme Being and his law as revealed in the Koran, impeded the emergency of secular politics. Much was changed in the Islamic and particularly the Arab world, however, by its penetration by European imperial powers in the nineteenth century. The conquest of Algeria by the French after 1830 and the subordination of Egypt to British rule after 1882 subjected large numbers of Muslim Arabs to the processes of European government, based not on the ideas of religious fraternity or divine authority but on those of administrative efficiency and economic development; with them the Europeans brought also secular education and law, both quite alien to the Muslim mind, which for centuries had used schools as a means of Koranic instruction and the courts as a forum for judgement by Sharia, Koranic law.
European imperialism did not extinguish the power of Muslim ideas; in the long run, indeed, by a process of reaction, it was to reenergize Islam and in a highly aggressive form. In the early twentieth century, however, the worldly behaviour of some young Muslims was decisively altered by exposure to European thought and practice. In the Ottoman empire, dissatisfaction at the failure of the Sultan-Caliph’s government to stem the encroachment of European powers prompted a group of army officers, the ‘Young Turks’, to set up a modernizing régime; its leaders were irreligious Turkish nationalists; their tendency to treat the Arabs of the empire as subjects rather than fellow-Muslims led to the beginnings of what has been called ‘the Arab awakening’. The awakening was accelerated by Turkey’s defeat in the First World War which led to the fall of the Sultanate, the abolition of the Caliphate and the attachment of the Ottomans’ Arab provinces to the French and British empires as League of Nations mandated territories. Cast adrift in a world where a supreme Muslim authority no longer existed, the Arabs within the mandates and in the British protectorate of Egypt began to respond to direct rule by Europeans by emulating European political forms. One manifestation, the Muslim Brotherhood, which appeared in Egypt in 1928, was specifically Islamic in character but sought to preserve religious values by adopting such European practices as recruiting young people into a Scout movement, founding schools, hospitals and clinics and building factories, all run on Islamic principles. The Muslim Brotherhood, eventually to be persecuted by Arab régimes of specifically secular character, has survived into modern times; one of its adherents, Sayyid Qutb, conceived the theory of Islamic renewal which inspired the terrorists of 11 September.
Another direction taken by the Arab awakening was the creation in Syria after the Second World War of a political party dedicated by title to ‘resurrection’. The Ba’ath Party, founded in 1944 by a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq, proclaimed the unity of all Arabic-speaking people and their right to live in a unitary state. It specifically denounced the boundaries imposed on the Arab lands by the empires – including the Ottoman. Aflaq went farther; Christian though he was, he invoked the idea of Islam, propounded by Muhammad, as the common inheritance of all Arabs, Muslim or not, and its rise as an historical experience which gave the Arabs a particular mission in the world. The Arabs were to transform themselves first by spiritual renewal and then their political and social systems. Paradoxically, Aflaq was politically a secularist and the Ba’ath was to become the first secular party in the Arab world. It gave no place as leaders to traditional religious figures and emphasized Western rather than Islamic social values: the importance of scientific and technical education and the equality of the sexes. Nevertheless the roots of Ba’athism were metaphysical, which perhaps explains its appeal to the Arab mind. Aflaq was also rigidly anti-Communist, regarding Communism as another form of foreign imperialism.
Ba’athism’s influence was geographically limited. It did not flourish in Egypt where during the 1950s another movement, loosely known as Arab socialism, achieved dominance through a revolution led by young army officers, notably Abdul Nasser. Nasser adopted several of Aflaq’s ideas; he was an egalitarian and a secularist, fervently anti-imperialist and a champion of Arab unity, which he did much to advance by creating a United Arab Republic which briefly joined Egypt to Syria and established a presence in Yemen. Ba’athism’s most notable success was achieved elsewhere. During the 1950s it found followers in Iraq, several of whom were advanced to ministerial positions after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.
A junior Iraqi Ba’athist was Saddam Hussein, twenty-one in 1958. His prospect of advancement then looked slim. He was uneducated, uncouth and without connections; crucially he lacked any military position, a serious deficiency in view of the domination of the Ba’ath both in Iraq and Syria by young army officers, who were also the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Egypt. Saddam had sought admission to the Iraqi military academy but did not take the entrance examination. Frustrated in that ambition, he had become little more than a semi-criminal drifter, with a reputation for troublemaking and a talent for violence. Possessed of exceptional self-confidence and a ruthless will to succeed, qualities contained in a large and strong physical frame, he was nevertheless determined to become a man of power. In doing so, during the decades of the 1960s and ’70s, he single-handedly defined an entirely new form of Arab leadership, dependent neither on birth nor position nor assumption of religious authority but on the use of force and his personal skills in political manipulation. Saddam’s Arabism was irrelevant; had he been born German or Russian in the age of the dictatorships – and he greatly admired Stalin – he would have understood how to exploit disorder and instability to his advantage and could well have risen to dominance in the Nazi or Marxist-Leninist systems.
Saddam was born in the village of al-Ouja, a small and poor village on the Tigris near the provincial centre of Tikrit, sometime between 1935 and 1939; his birth date was not officially recorded and he is believed, in any case, to have altered it on marriage to make himself appear older than his wife. His father may not have been married to his mother, Subha Tulfah, who was the dominant influence on his life. A strong-willed and outspoken peasant woman, who made a living as a clairvoyant, Subha was certainly married after Saddam’s birth to a fellow villager whom Saddam came to hate; he was scorned and mistreated. Subha, however, had a brother, Khairallah Tulfah, who assumed the role of surrogate father to Saddam and guided his early development. Khairallah, despite his humble origins, had been commissioned as an officer in the prewar Iraqi army, a status that greatly impressed Saddam. Khairallah also fixed Saddam’s political outlook. He hated foreigners, particularly the British, declared his admiration for Hitler and the Nazis and was a supporter of Iraq’s wartime ruler, Rashid Ali, who in 1941 had tried to arrange an alliance with Nazi Germany and for a German expeditionary force to enter Iraq. For his complicity in the plot Khairallah had been cashiered from the army and jailed for five years.
During Khairallah’s imprisonment Saddam, still a child and apparently often driven from the hut which was the family home by his stepfather, kept himself alive by thievery and odd jobs. He had, however, conceived the idea of getting an education and when Khairallah was released, joined him in Tikrit, where his uncle got him into school and supported him. Khairallah was a survivor. He found teaching jobs himself, joined the fledgling Ba’ath party and became sufficiently well-regarded as an educationist to be appointed director of education in Baghdad after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. By then he had moved to the Karkh district of the capital, taking Saddam with him. Saddam enrolled at Karkh high school and appears to have applied himself. He was still, however, the local provincial rough who ran a street gang and who fought with anyone who opposed him, mocked his peasant ways or supported the pro-British, monarchical government which represented the established order before the revolution of 1958.
The revolution of July 1958 led to Saddam’s initiation into the culture of political violence and opened his eyes to the possibilities of personal advancement to power by killing. He had joined the Ba’ath party in 1957, apparently for idealistic reasons; since it then had only 300 members in Iraq the move was certainly not opportunistic. It was no doubt, however, influenced by his uncle Khairallah’s espousal of Ba’athism and by the advantage membership of the Ba’ath provided, as shown by his uncle’s appointment as Baghdad’s director of education. But Khairallah did not last long in the job. An Iraqi Communist, Saddoun al-Tikriti, denounced him as a man of unsavoury reputation and he was removed. Shortly afterwards Saddam, apparently at his uncle’s prompting or to avenge family honour, arranged to lie in wait for Saddoun outside his house and murder him by a shot to the head. It was too blatant a crime to be overlooked. Both Saddam and his uncle were arrested and taken into custody, where they remained for six months. In the absence of incriminating evidence, however, they were eventually released.
In another sense, the killing of Saddoun did Saddam no harm, rather the contrary. It conferred on him among fellow Ba’athists a reputation for ruthlessness, at a time when the party was looking for ruthless party loyalists. The Iraqi Ba’athists had been disappointed by the outcome of the 1958 revolution. Its leader, Abd al-Karem Kassem, was a regular officer of conventional views, anti-British and anti-monarchist but equally neither Nasserist nor Ba’athist in outlook. As an Iraqi nationalist, he was unwilling to see Iraq become subordinate to Egypt in an Arab socialist union and was equally resistant to the Ba’athist message of merging Iraq with its neighbouring states in a pan-Arab renaissance.
Had Kassem merely held aloof both from the Nasserists and the Ba’athists, his régime might have survived. Alarmed by the activism of the Nasserists and Ba’athists among the group of so-called Free Officers who had brought him to power, he turned to the Iraqi Communists, who in their enthusiasm for a Soviet alliance necessarily opposed both movements. In March 1959 some of the Free Officers therefore decided to stage a coup. It was an unwise move. The coup was badly organized, lacked popular support and quickly failed. Kassem took a savage revenge. Using the Iraqi Communist Party as his agency of repression, he encouraged it to hunt down and murder all the complicit Free Officers. The avengers went farther; they also killed many of the officers’ nationalist supporters and in Mosul organised a mob reprisal which lasted a week and culminated in mass executions.
The surviving Ba’athists were outraged. Not only had Kassem set back their dream of creating a pan-Arab state, by severing Iraq’s ties with the Egyptian Nasserists. He had also killed many of the men who had risked their lives in rising against the monarchy. The Ba’athists decided on revenge in their turn. Their difficulty was that, as a still tiny party of professional people and students, they lacked members who had any familiarity with violence. A general who had survived Kassem’s purge, Ahmad al-Bakr, was a Ba’athist sympathizer, however, and he had appropriate contacts. As a Tikriti, he knew Khairallah and through the uncle he met the nephew. Recognizing that Saddam could be useful to the party as a thug and enforcer, he introduced him to Ba’athist party members. Saddam was not to be admitted to the party at once but he was selected to take part in the attempted assassination of Kassem which was being prepared in the autumn of 1959.
The attempt was botched, perhaps by Saddam’s hastiness in opening fire on Kassem’s motorcade on 7 October 1959. Kassem was only wounded and recovered. Saddam may have been wounded by return fire; he certainly always claimed to have been so. In the confusion which followed the shooting he made his escape, got home to his native village and then succeeded in crossing the frontier into Syria. Once arrived in Damascus, he was sheltered by local Ba’athists and introduced to the founder of the movement, Michel Aflaq. Aflaq, impressed by what were now Saddam’s credentials as a serious revolutionary, apparently admitted him to full party membership and arranged for him to find safer refuge with other Ba’athists in Egypt.
Saddam was in exile four years, which he spent completing his high school education and mingling with other political revolutionaries. He also enrolled as a law student at Cairo University, though he did not complete his degree, and married his cousin, Sajida, Khairallah’s daughter. Marriages within the family are common practice in the Arab world and it is possible that the two young people had been betrothed since childhood. Saddam also joined the Egyptian Ba’ath party and collected friends. One of his closest comrades in Cairo was a fellow survivor of the plot to assassinate Kassem, Abdul al-Shaikly, who was studying medicine and would later become Iraqi Foreign Minister before the two fell out. It is alleged that Saddam, during his Egyptian exile, became associated both with Egyptian intelligence and with the CIA. Of that there is no proof though he was apparently financially supported by the Egyptian government, which was concerned to foster its political contacts with foreign Ba’athists after Syria withdrew from political union with Egypt in 1961.
Saddam’s chance to return from exile came in 1963 when Kassem was overthrown in a coup, apparently engineered by the CIA and led by Ahmad al-Bakr, Khairallah’s friend and Saddam’s early sponsor. The 1963 coup was particularly bloody. Kassem was removed from power only after prolonged street battles in which hundreds died; he was shot after a peremptory trial and his bulletriddled body was then exhibited on Iraqi television. Bakr became Prime Minister in the change of régime, which effectively established the Ba’ath as the ruling party, and shortly after the transfer of power Saddam, with Abdul al-Shaikly, flew from Cairo to Baghdad, to be welcomed home by a crowd of exultant Ba’athists at the airport. Saddam the pan-Arab revolutionary seemed to be about to enter into his political inheritance.
The reality of his return proved different. Despite his undeniable record as an early enemy of Kassem and as an anti-Communist Arab nationalist, Saddam’s humble origins still told against him in his homeland. To the better-educated, middle-class Ba’athists he looked and sounded like a peasant. He was aware of their contempt and resented it. He also knew, however, that he could compensate for his lowly personal standing by winning respect by force; and in the immediate aftermath of Kassem’s overthrow the political situation in Iraq offered plentiful opportunities for violence. Kassem’s successor, President Arif, filled his government with Ba’athists but failed to quell dissent between its two factions, a civilian group of pan-Arabists and a military group loyal to the army’s traditional ‘Iraq first’ policy. Eventually he expelled all the Ba’athists from their ministerial posts but left the party in being. Bakr, Saddam’s party mentor, exploited the situation to achieve dominance, using Saddam, now head of internal party security, to bully and browbeat his opponents.
Saddam remained committed to seeking personal power. That required the removal of Arif, a risky undertaking as the President had the full support of the army. There were several plots, all premature; nevertheless, Saddam proceeded and, in one of the most mysterious episodes of his career, was identified as a conspirator, arrested and imprisoned in October 1964. How he escaped execution has never been explained; nor was his escape in July 1966, after a period in gaol when he was not harshly treated. How he occupied his time between his escape and the successful removal of Arif’s brother Abd al-Rahman from the Presidency in July 1968 is also unclear, as are his whereabouts. On 17 July 1968, however, he arrived outside the presidential palace, riding on a tank and dressed as a lieutenant. By telephone Bakr ordered Arif to go to the airport; a bloodless change of power was completed by a broadcast announcing that the Ba’ath party had assumed control.
Bakr had engineered the coup by persuading the leading Ba’athists in the army, notably Generals Daud and Nayif, to lend him their support. He had given them his assurance that, once Arif was removed, the army would be accorded ultimate authority within the country. Not only had he no intention of keeping his word; in the aftermath of the coup he had Daud exiled to Morocco and Nayif to London (where, in 1978, Saddam, then President of Iraq, arranged for him to be murdered). The new government was filled with ministers from the civilian wing of the Ba’ath party, relegating the army to a subordinate position. Saddam was not given a ministry; instead he became head of state security, a position of decisive importance which he would use to advance himself to supreme power eleven years later.
He was also appointed deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) of the Iraqi Ba’ath, the supreme party organ in the country; although the Ba’ath had not so far achieved its programme of creating a unitary Arab state, it was organized into Command Councils in each of the countries, notably Syria and Egypt, where it had sizeable numbers of followers, a system devised by Aflaq himself. The success of the 1968 revolution diminished rather than increased, however, Aflaq’s influence in Iraq. Instead it was the Tikrit connection which would now come to dominate. Bakr brought many Tikritis beside Saddam into positions of power after 1968. One was his friend and Saddam’s uncle Khairallah, who became mayor of Baghdad. Khairallah, according to Con Coughlin, Saddam’s biographer, constantly reminded Bakr to depend on Saddam. ‘You need family to protect you, not an army or a party. Armies and parties change direction in this country.’
The relationship between Bakr and Saddam was not one of blood ties. They were unrelated. Bakr nevertheless had from an early stage fostered Saddam, got him into the Ba’ath and sponsored his career. In the years after the 1968 coup, they would work intimately together, Bakr consolidating the Ba’ath’s hold on power, Saddam providing force whenever needed to protect Bakr’s position and intimidate or dispose of his enemies. Saddam was already an accomplished thug and murderer. During the seventies he would become a master of state-directed repression; he ran a pervasive domestic security and intelligence system, supported by an apparatus that incarcerated, interrogated, tortured and killed the régime’s opponents as necessary.
Saddam was also pursuing the parallel policies of extending the Ba’ath’s power into every institution and organ of public life, on the Stalinist model he favoured (though it equally equated to the Nazi programme of Gleichschaltung), meanwhile ensuring that his own personal power was enlarged in unison. Some of his acts of repression were deliberately ostentatious, such as the condemnation to death of fourteen Iraqi Jews in January 1969 and their public hanging in Baghdad’s central space, Liberation Square. The Iraqi Jewish community had once been one of the largest and most emancipated in the Middle East. Saddam had early, however, detected that anti-Semitism, which he represented as anti-Zionism, was popular with the masses, who shared the common Arab hatred of Israel and resented the consistent failure of the Iraqi army’s participation in the Arab–Israeli wars.
Saddam also pursued the régime’s domestic enemies, as he privately characterized them, the non-Arab Kurds of Iraq’s northern provinces and the Shi’a southerners. Historically the Arab Muslim population of Iraq has been dominated by Sunni. Statistically, however, they are a minority within the country, making up only a fifth of the population. Better educated and more successful in every branch of public life, they formed the main body of the Ba’ath party. It was to the disadvantage of both Kurds and Shi’a that they were associated with Iran, Iraq’s neighbour but traditional enemy. Iran is the only Middle Eastern country in which Shi’a predominate; Saddam suspected Iraq’s Shi’a of complicity with the Shah of Iran in his effort to expand his territory by encroachment. He also suspected the Kurds of disloyalty, with some justification. The Kurds, a stateless people whose homeland is divided by the national frontiers of Iran, Syria and Turkey as well as Iraq, have a long history of seeking liberation and unification by playing their host countries off against one another. They had sustained a state of rebellion in the north ever since the creation of Iraq by the British in 1920. This blew sometimes hot, sometimes cool. In the early seventies the Kurds grew troublesome again and were supported both by the Shah and the Soviet Union, which saw in lending them support an opportunity to punish the Ba’ath for its persecution of Iraq’s Communists. The Ba’ath regime could not afford to ignore the problem. The Shah’s support for the Kurds was not wholly opportunistic, since Iranians and Kurds are ethnically linked; more important, some of Iraq’s largest oil resources are centred around Mosul, effectively the capital of Kurdistan.
In an uncharacteristic display of moderation, Saddam decided to deal with the Kurdish rebellion by diplomacy rather than force; he may also have been brought to that decision by the notable failure of the Iraqi army to make headway against the rebels on their own ground. What followed demonstrated that Saddam could be a realist as well as a violent revolutionary. He first approached the Soviet Union, from which Iraq was beginning to buy arms to re-equip its forces. As a valuable commercial client, he got a hearing; Kosygin, then Soviet premier, promised in 1970 to withdraw support from the Kurds, as long as Saddam agreed not to take revenge; on his return from Moscow Saddam actually consented to grant the Kurds a measure of the autonomy they had long been demanding. The catch was that the implementation of the concessions was to be postponed for four years. The Kurds saw the catch and continued to make trouble. Saddam trumped them in 1975 when he submitted to the Shah’s demand that Iraq should renegotiate the 1937 treaty which aligned the Iraqi–Iranian border along the Shatt el-Arab in midstream (the Thalweg). This Algiers Agreement was greatly to Iraq’s disadvantage but, as a short-term means of pacifying Kurdistan, Saddam judged it desirable. So it proved; within two weeks of the new treaty being signed, Iran had withdrawn its support from the Kurds, whose rebellion collapsed. That would not, however, be the end of the Thalweg issue; it was to underlie Saddam’s illjudged decision to attack Iran in 1980, the inception of a war of eight years that would exhaust both countries.
While Saddam was seeking to settle his military difficulties – and though only Deputy President during the seventies he increasingly exercised full executive power – he was also extending and consolidating his control over the party, armed forces and government. President Bakr proved increasingly easy to control. It was his subordinates at Saddam’s nominal level whom he decided it was necessary to eliminate if he were to achieve complete supremacy, which was now his object. The three men he identified as principal obstacles between himself and the Presidency were: General Hasdam al-Tikriti, the air force officer who was armed forces Chief of Staff; Salih Mehdi Ammesh, Deputy Prime Minister; and Abdul Karim al-Shaikly, Saddam’s old friend and political confederate, whom he had once called his ‘twin’, now Foreign Minister. Tikriti was a dedicated Ba’athist, with high standing in the party, and a tough nut; he could read Saddam’s intentions, rightly feared him but exercised sufficient power to keep him in check. In 1969 he persuaded President Bakr to exile Saddam to Beirut; unwisely he allowed him to return. The following year, while away on an official visit to Spain, Saddam arranged for him to remain outside the country as ambassador to Morocco; in 1971 he was murdered by Saddam’s gunmen while visiting his children at school in Kuwait. Ammesh was also shunted into ambassadorial appointments, first in Moscow, then Paris, then Helsinki. He survived to die of natural causes (unless, as is widely believed, he was poisoned). Saddam’s close friend Shaikly was also sent abroad as an ambassador, to the United Nations in New York, his fault apparently having been to refuse to marry Saddam’s sister. He was dismissed as Foreign Minister in 1971, spent many years abroad and was murdered on his retirement to Baghdad in 1980.
Saddam’s brutal measures to assure the security of the regime, which were often also personal score-settling, made him feared and hated by many Ba’athists, particularly those who had been admitted to the party earlier than he. In compensation for what he knew was his personal unpopularity, Saddam set out in his early years as Vice-President to win a following among the masses. The opportunity was provided by Iraq’s enormous oil reserves, the second largest known deposits in the world and only slightly smaller than those of Saudi Arabia. The Arab states had been slow to recognize the potential oil offered to transform their economies and to enlarge their international standing and influence. Many of the governments, dynastic, backward and deeply Islamic, actually did not want to exploit their oil wealth, fearing that money would entail modernization and so a disturbance of their traditional ways. Most in any case lacked an educated class capable of investing revenue productively. As a result, many of the rulers were content with whatever disproportionately small percentage of oil income the great foreign petroleum companies allotted them, taking it for themselves and leaving their subjects to subsist as before in poverty.
The first of the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries to rebel against the foreign petroleum companies was Iran which, under Dr Mussadeq, nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, precipitating a crisis which almost led to war. The crisis was resolved in Britain’s favour but the damage was done. The oil producers had learnt that the petroleum companies, even when acting as a consortium, were not all-powerful and so began to negotiate extraction terms more favourable to themselves. The dynastic governments, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, some of which remained under semi-colonial regimes long after nationalists had come to power in the Mediterranean Arab countries, were timid in their dealings with the great corporations. Post-monarchical Iraq took a more robust line. Kassem took control of the land on which the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) – a consortium of BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil and the French CFP – operated in 1961. President Arif set up the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) in 1964, to develop the fields which the foreign companies preferred to hold in reserve, intending to sell the oil extracted from the new fields on the international market. The consortium reacted by refusing to sell oil they produced, in Iraq or elsewhere, to buyers who dealt directly with INOC.
The quarrel between the consortium and their own government naturally enraged popular opinion in Iraq. It was heightened by the consortium’s introduction of a policy designed to reduce production in the IPC’s fields and so the oil revenues of the Iraqi government. President Bakr’s administration responded by developing the fields the consortium had put into reserve, so expanding output and replacing revenue lost through the consortium’s reduction of extraction by direct sales onto the international market. Iraq was able to pursue this policy because, as a secularist state with a developed educational system, it had, unlike the dynastic Arab countries, enough engineers, technologists and commercial experts to run an exploration and distribution programme of its own. Saddam, who was intimately involved in the programme, also helped to ensure its success by negotiating an agreement under which the Soviet Union guaranteed to buy any unsold Iraqi oil surplus and an agreement with France to respect its interests in return for a promise that it would not join an anti-Iraq boycott.
The pact with Moscow was signed in April 1972. Two months later Saddam took the logical step of nationalizing the Iraq Petroleum Company, after which all its revenues would accrue to the Iraqi state. Short of military intervention, there was little that the foreign governments represented in the Iraq Petroleum Company could do by way of reprisal. Saddam had taken the precaution of acquiring a guarantee of Soviet support, at a time when the Soviet Union was at the height of its postwar power; he knew that Britain was in the doldrums, its economy depressed and its government paralysed by domestic problems; the United States, attempting to extract itself from the misery of Vietnam, was in no position or state to undertake another overseas intervention. France, though its interests were hemmed by the nationalization, was bought off by the promise of a preferential price for oil purchases.
Nationalization transformed Iraq’s economic situation. In 1968, the year the Ba’ath seized power, Iraqi governmental oil revenue amounted to $476 million, or 22 per cent of what was then national income. By 1980, when the benefits of nationalization (multiplied after the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC) had come fully on stream, oil income had risen to $26 billion, representing 50 per cent of the country’s greatly expanded national income. The new money was spent in a way that, as was not the case in so many of the oil-rich dynastic states, would benefit the country at large, to include many of the common people. A large proportion admittedly went on the armed forces, which doubled in size and acquired much modern equipment, including Soviet armoured vehicles and French aircraft. The larger proportion, however, went to modernize the country’s infrastructure and expand its industry. The programme of investment was closely overseen by Saddam, who had had himself made chairman of all the central planning and spending committees. He knew, moreover, what he wanted and, as even his enemies admitted, was a far-sighted and efficient economic manager. Thus he was directly responsible for the electrification of the country, for building large numbers of schools and hospitals, for creating a radio and television network, for adding to the railway system, for building national highways and for setting up industrial and raw-material plants.
Brutal though he was in his persecution of political rivals and enemies of the Ba’athist party, Saddam did not look for victims among those willing to work with him in the modernization programme. The talented and patriotic were identified, encouraged and promoted. Under his leadership during the 1970s the Ba’ath became a popular movement, recognized by many Iraqis as a force for good within the country and enjoying high levels of support. When membership was thrown open to the masses, after Saddam had decided that it should cease to be merely a revolutionary élite, hundreds of thousands joined. Despite his anti-Communism, moreover, Saddam also propagated Ba’athism as a socialist movement, dedicated to distributing wealth and promoting egalitarianism. A major token of his equalizing purpose was shown by his land reform programme, under which state owned land was distributed to 222,000 farmers, who were also provided with agricultural equipment.
Saddam was also a social progressive. He sought to abolish illiteracy, raise educational standards and improve the status of women, in sharp distinction to the policies of many of the rulers of neighbouring states. Thanks to Iraq’s start as a mandate state, under European influence, its population was more evolved and better educated by mid-century than many in the region. The Iraqi élite was often educated abroad and the female members of better-off families enjoyed freedoms denied in traditional Arab societies. Saddam sought to extend the privileges of the few to the many and with success. The Ba’athist revolution created a sizeable middle class and consolidated the country’s educational establishment. By the end of the 1970s Iraq belonged, with Egypt and Syria, to the group of Arab countries which were manifestly emerging into the modern world. Such had been the founding principle of Ba’athism, one which Michel Aflaq, who survived until 1989, lived to see at least half-realized. Had Saddam been content to persist simply as a modernizer, he might have become a widely respected Middle Eastern statesman, with friends throughout the region and in the Western world. Some in the West continue to think indeed that his descent into isolation and obloquy represents a failure of Western diplomacy; that had the United States and its allies pursued different policies at key stages in Iraq’s relations with its neighbours during the last two decades of the twentieth century, Saddam could have been restrained from his excesses and retained as a valuable ally and even a moderating influence in a volatile strategic region.
That may have been to expect too much of his violent and self-centred character. Saddam was apparently able to subordinate his impulse to settle differences by brute force when fully in control of the circumstances in which he operated, as when he was masterminding the Ba’ath investment programme. When opposed, however, he seemed instinctively to resort to the methods by which he had ascended to power in the cruelly competitive world of Arab politics. Saddam was patently not a religious Muslim, not a believer who had imbibed the idea of fraternity and who sought to progress through life by submission to Allah and amity with his fellows. When opposed, Saddam struck out, by the underhand blow if necessary, with outright force if desirable and possible.
During the 1980s and ’90s, Saddam was frequently opposed, always by the Kurds, who remained irreconcilable, from 1980 onwards by Iran, Iraq’s traditional enemy, and during the 1990s and beyond by the West, for reasons for which by then only he could be held to blame.
Before the coming of his time of troubles, Saddam was to achieve one more personal triumph, advancement to the Presidency of Iraq. During the era of modernization, Saddam had displayed sedulous loyalty to President Hasan al-Bakr. Bakr’s growing passivity had made it easy for Saddam to rule in his name while avoiding any confrontation; he had nonetheless taken care to consult the older man at every stage, to submit all matters to him for approval and to withdraw if his chosen solution to a problem failed to meet with Bakr’s approval. By 1979, however, Saddam had decided that the sham by which Bakr remained in office and he, as Deputy President, concealed his effective authority could no longer be sustained. External problems demanded that he should emerge from behind the throne and take full power.
The principal problems concerned Israel, Syria, a fellow Ba’athist state, and Iran. The existence of the state of Israel had unsettled the Middle East since its creation in 1948, giving rise to four wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, in three of which Iraq had been involved. At the end of the 1970s, however, it was the successful American mediation of a peace settlement between Israel and Egypt, the Camp David Accords of September 1978, that provoked Saddam. He had long hankered to inherit the leadership of the Arab world exercised by President Nasser and resented its assumption by Anwar Sadat on Nasser’s death. The Camp David Accords, deeply unpopular with all Arabs outside Egypt and many within, provided Saddam, as he saw it, with the opportunity to displace Sadat, but only if he could get full control of Iraqi foreign policy. That was desirable for another reason. President Bakr was an enthusiast for closer co-operation between Iraq and Syria. Their Ba’ath parties agreed in October 1978 to merge the countries’ ministries of defence, information and foreign affairs. In January 1979 Saddam was sent to see President Assad in Damascus to formalize the arrangement. It was not one which, however, he truly supported, partly because he was an Iraqi nationalist, more importantly because he feared that the alignment – designed to lead swiftly to full union – would frustrate his personal ambitions. Finally, and at the same time, he was growingly concerned by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran. Although Iraq had given Ayatollah Khomeini asylum during his exile from Iran, it had thereby won no gratitude. Khomeini execrated Iraqi secularism and had a particular reason to dislike the Ba’athist regime in its disfavouring of the Shi’a population of the south. The Shi’ites, 200,000 of whom Saddam had expelled from Iraq to Iran as aliens, hated the Ba’athist régime and Saddam was right to fear that, with the most charismatic of the world’s Islamic leaders established as a de facto theocrat just across the border, the situation in the south was likely to become more disturbed.
In any case, he doubted the capacity of a government led by Bakr to deal effectively with the problems. It was this consideration that prompted him to decide, in mid-July 1979, to remove his former patron from office. He correctly judged that, given Bakr’s isolation and enfeeblement, it would not be necessary to stage a coup but that Bakr would go quietly. So he did. On the evening of 16 July, Saddam, his cousin Adnan, the Defence Minister, and Khairallah called on Bakr in his office and told him that his resignation was required. If given, he would be allowed to retire in dignity and comfort. Bakr’s son staged a token protest but was overpowered. Next day, Bakr announced that he was retiring for reasons of ill-health. He lived for another three years and, though mysterious circumstances surrounded his death, it cannot be proved that he was a victim of Saddam’s malfeasance.
Many deaths did follow Saddam’s assumption of the Presidency, deaths that were deliberately publicized. Saddam had prepared the ground for the removal of Bakr by seeking support for the move at a meeting of the Ba’athist Revolutionary Command Council on 11 July. He had not expected to be opposed and was outraged when the secretary-general, Abdul Hussein Mashhidi, insisted that the decision be put to the vote. He had Mashhidi removed within the week but this display of independence may have disquieted him. Either because of it, but probably because he had scores to settle anyhow, his first public act after his accession was to announce and carry out a purge. On 22 July the thousand senior members of the Ba’ath party were summoned to an extraordinary conference in Baghdad. The proceedings were opened by the new Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, who announced the discovery of a plot. The plotters, he went on, were all present in the room. Saddam then took the podium to denounce the plotters and called on the recently dismissed Mashhidi to elaborate the details.
What followed was a grisly compression into a single act of a Stalinist show trial and of its bloody outcome. Mashhidi first explained that he had, since 1975, been a member of a Syrian conspiracy to overthrow both Saddam and Bakr, to bring about the Iraqi-Syrian union. He gave the key dates of the preparatory moves and the names of his confederates. Then Saddam took over again, announced that the enemies of the party had all personally confessed their guilt, had their names read out, sixty-six in all, and ordered those named to leave. Finally, after orchestrated expressions of loyalty from the floor, Saddam called on the audience to join the firing squads that would execute the guilty. A puppet court was immediately convened, twenty-two were condemned to death and, in a carefully filmed event, Saddam led a representative group of senior Ba’athists in carrying out the ‘democratic executions’. The victims were all shot in the head.
The film of the show trial and its aftermath was widely distributed; Saddam made a triumphal speech to the nation later in the day he had taken part in the executions. It was the start of his campaign to bring all activities in national life and all elements of Iraqi society under Ba’athist but more strictly his personal control. Just as Stalin had subordinated all bodies in Soviet Russia to the Communist party, either by deeming them to be organs of state or by inserting party officials into their command structures, Saddam insisted that the Ba’ath should take control or oversee every public body in Iraq and any significant private one also. Teachers were obliged to join the party; after 1980 all journalists, writers and artists were required to join the General Confederation of Academicians and Writers. Although the court system remained intact, it was left to deal only with routine cases; those of importance were referred to the Baghdad Revolutionary Court or to special temporary courts under Presidential control, from neither of which were appeals allowed. The armed forces were kept under the closest supervision and, in a classically dictatorial practice, the Ba’ath ran its own parallel military organization, the Popular Army, which in the first year of Saddam’s Presidency was doubled in size to 250,000.
For ordinary Iraqis content to lead private lives, doing their jobs dutifully and evincing no interest in politics beyond conforming with the official party programme, Saddam’s rule was not burdensome. On the contrary; his régime was popular. Saddam’s Ba’ath ran something like a welfare state, in which all Iraqis got free schooling up to, if they were capable, university level. Health care was free and available to all; food was cheap; the domestic economy, underpinned by the country’s oil income, was buoyant. Women were truly emancipated, free to find work in the professions, educated to the same standard as males, and going unveiled and unharrassed by the sort of religious police so tiresomely intrusive in other Gulf states. In many respects Iraq was a model of what the West hoped modernizing Arab states would become.
The price paid by ordinary Iraqis for their material well-being under Saddam’s régime was the restriction of their political and intellectual liberties, taken for granted in Western countries, and the awful penalties suffered by those who disobeyed or dissented. In a memorandum submitted to the United Nations by a group of exiled Iraqi intellectuals soon after Saddam’s rise to power, they wrote:
The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is one of the harshest, most ruthless and most unscrupulous régimes in the world. It is a totalitarian, one-party system based on the personality cult of Saddam Hussein. The man and his family and relatives have control of the regular army, People’s Army, police and security services. All news media are under the strict control of the régime and there is no opportunity for freedom of expression. Political organization is limited to the Ba’ath party and a number of insignificant, obsequious organizations. Trade Unions do not exist. Membership in any opposition party is punishable by death. Any criticism of the President is also punishable by death. Torture is the norm. The security system is all-powerful, omnipresent and enjoys unlimited powers.
Westerners who hoped for a different Iraq may have been indulging in wishful thinking, misled by the Ba’ath’s commitment to secularism and modernization. The mind of Islam is deeply resistant to the ideas of individual freedom and political diversity which lie at the heart of Western liberalism. Muslim illiberalism is particularly strong in the Arab lands, Islam’s heartland; no Arab country has ever been a true democracy and even in the other secularist states, such as Syria and Egypt, the political tradition favours single parties and strongman leadership. The tradition connects to the most salient elements of Muslim religious belief: the idea of the Caliph, the successor of the Prophet, as ruler of the Umma, the Muslim community; the unique power of the Koran as a guide to human behaviour, not to be challenged by secular writings; and the role of theSharia, religious law, as the code by which communities are to be regulated. The primacy of these elements has been protected since the fourteenth century because the religious leadership of the majority Sunni sect then ‘closed the gates’ of ijtihad, the practice of independent reasoning which had hitherto permitted Muslim scholars to adapt the Sharia to changing circumstances. Thereafter the past, not the present, has determined how Muslims should think.
Secularist though he was, Saddam was enormously assisted in his imposition of a totalitarian system on Iraq by the Islamic adherence to conformity of thought and behaviour. It was farther reinforced by the Ottoman inheritance, which emphasized the dominance of the ruler and the leading roles of the army and state bureaucracy and had institutionalized the practices of draconian punishment of any infringement of that order. Only sixty years, after all, had elapsed between the withdrawal of Ottoman rule and the elevation of Saddam to supreme power. It is not surprising that both he and his subjects should have resumed so easily the respective habits of unquestioned authority and subservience to it that had been second nature to their grandparents’ generation.
Ultimately, however, neither Islamic tradition nor Ottoman inheritance wholly explains the nature of Saddam’s totalitarian authority. The man, by any index of his personal behaviour, public policy and spoken pronouncements, was as President of Iraq a monster of cruelty and aggression. The nature of his régime owed more to twentieth-century ideologies of intolerance and systems of repression than to anything derived from the more distant past. Michel Aflaq, the founder of Ba’athism, had modelled the organization of his party on Hitler’s Nazi movement, of which he was an admirer. Saddam was an acknowledged admirer of Stalin. The examples of those two mass murderers seem the most patent influence on his policies and ambitions. It is commonly said that the principal motive animating Saddam has been the instinct to survive. Saddam seems much more than a survivor. The impulse to dominate appears to have informed all his acts on his way to power and then on his exercise of it. Saddam has sought first to become leader of Iraq, then the chief warlord of the Gulf region, a nuclear warlord if he could assemble the means, with the leadership of the Arab world as his culminating aspiration. If he has been frustrated in his life plan, it is important to know how. The records of his military adventures supply much of the answer.