Fattah H., Caso F. A Brief History Of Iraq

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF IRAQ

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vast sums of money, calculated by the Iraqi expert Abbas Alnasrawi to

have been in the realm of $521 million in 1970 and upward of $26 bil-

lion in 1980 (Alnasrawi 2001, n.p.). It was, in Alnasrawi’s words, “Iraq’s

prosperous decade.”

Oil earnings became one of the most important factors undergirding

Iraq’s relations with the Arab and Islamic worlds and with the West.

Ominously, 40 percent of that revenue went toward the buying of arma-

ments from Western (mostly French) and Soviet suppliers, with that

ﬁ gure further increasing at the onset of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88).

Just as signiﬁ cantly, oil revenues gave a sizable boost to the Iraqi econ-

omy. In the years between the nationalization of all of Iraq’s operational

oil ﬁ elds and the eruption of the Iran-Iraq War, the high price of oil

ﬁ nanced the large-scale growth of the health, education, and public

works sectors and made construction one of the prized occupations of

the burgeoning middle class. Because of the vast amounts of money at

its disposal, the Iraqi government expanded social services, increased

spending on development, recruited more men into the army, and aug-

mented the sum of its currency reserves to about $40 billion. By the late

1970s, oil formed 98 percent of the country’s exports, prompting the

growth of total state investments, which rose from 72 million dinars in

1968 to 1.2 billion dinars in 1975 (Salucci 2003, 2005, 76).

One of the outcomes of the rise of oil revenues was the growth of the

Iraqi middle class. Although this class was heavily dependent on the state

and included a number of different sectors (state employees of national-

ized industries, state-afﬁ liated rural landowners, and a cadre of profes-

sionals, such as teachers and medical personnel), it was a vital source

of administrative talent and managerial expertise. Interestingly, the phe-

nomenal growth of private construction ﬁ rms far outstripped the expan-

sion of state industrial or agricultural concerns. Although construction

ﬁ rms—of which the most prominent emerged in Baghdad, Tikrit, Najaf,

and Basra—depended on government projects funded by oil money, they

were also important to the realization of ambitious development proj-

ects requiring foreign expertise. This was especially the case from 1970

onward, when the government contracted with large Western multina-

tionals to buy and set up petrochemical plants and new transportation

systems (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 1990, 238–250). Thus, the

new totalitarian, single-party system succeeded in promoting

a state-run industrial sector, mobilizing and developing social

services, reducing unemployment and providing better chances

for the rising middle classes, which grew from 34 percent of

the urban population in 1968 to more than 50 percent in

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1980. General prosperity and progress in social and economic

development were palpable indeed (A. Jabar in Potter and Sick

2004, 126).

State investment in the social sector also brought about important

gains. In the late 1970s, the Iraqi state pushed aggressively to promote

universal literacy, claiming, by the end of the 1980s, to have reached an

astounding literacy rate of 95 percent, up from approximately 55 per-

cent in the late 1970s. The Iraqi commitment to raising the literacy rate

resulted in the expansion of the educational system in the 1970s, espe-

cially in the larger cities. For example, technical education increased

three-fold since 1977, to more than 120,090 students in 1986. Baghdad

University, with its different campuses, had 34,555 students in 1988,

Mustansiriya University attracted 11,686 students, and the University

of Technology served 7,584 students. Universities in Basra, Mosul, and

Irbil (Iraqi Kurdistan) “enrolled 26 percent of all students in higher

education in the academic year 1983–84” (al-Hariri 1988, n.p.). This

was all the more impressive because education, including higher edu-

cation, was for the most part free, and up to 1982, many postgradu-

ate students and professors were sent to study abroad on government

scholarships and fellowships (Watenpaugh et al, 2003, n.p.).

Oil revenues were also plowed into the health sector; medical care

was free. By 1988, Baghdad had more hospitals than any other city in

the country, approximating nearly 37 percent of the total. Rural clinics

were also set up by the state, in which medical residents had to serve

up to four years before returning to their hometowns. Finally, social

security, workers’ compensation, and pensions were regularly paid to

retirees and elderly people.

However, the almost total reliance on the state left large sectors of

the Iraqi economy, both public and private, wide open to governmental

manipulation. More signiﬁ cantly, under the government of Saddam

Hussein, the conﬁ scation of fortunes and the imprisonment and some-

times execution of Iraqi merchants, industrialists, and heads of private

construction ﬁ rms occurred with a depressing regularity. As a result,

political as well as ﬁ nancial insecurity continued to dog the Iraqi mid-

dle class well throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The Communist Challenge

In 1968, when the Baathist government headed by al-Bakr came to

power, the Iraqi Communist Party still had inﬂ uence in the larger cit-

ies of Iraq. Although its membership had dwindled because of arrests,

THE GROWTH OF THE REPUBLICAN REGIMES AND THE EMERGENCE OF BAATHIST IRAQ

A BRIEF HISTORY OF IRAQ

214

imprisonment, and executions, the ICP retained a solid base among

workers’ groups and coalitions of students and women’s associations.

However, a new political generation, made up of surviving veterans

and younger political strategists who had risen through the ranks,

was divided over which strategy to espouse. One group advocated the

unleashing of social revolution through the creation of a mass urban

party, while the other promoted the pursuit of a massive educational

campaign in the countryside to pave the way for radical change. But

there was little that the Communists could do in the late 1960s; the

ICP’s leadership was largely based in Iraqi Kurdistan, away from the real

center of power, and its base was fragmented, with many of its members

in hiding or languishing in prison.

It was at this juncture that the newly ascendant Baath Party, hop-

ing to bolster its revolutionary credentials as well as to create a rap-

prochement with the USSR, asked the Communist leadership to join

it in a National Progressive Front. The invitation put the Communists

in a quandary. Though recognizing the anti-imperialist inﬂ uence of

Baathist doctrine, they were not at all taken in by its antidemocratic

practices (Salucci 2003, 2005; 60). And while relations between the

Communists and the ruling Baathist clique strengthened as a result of

the 1972 nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company, the promo-

tion of a new land reform decree, and the USSR’s openly supportive ties

to the government, the Communists were not completely immune from

the Baathist rule of terror. Alternately imprisoning and torturing ICP

members while pledging undying friendship to the Communist leader-

ship at the same time, Baathist “persuasion,” by means subtle or overt,

eventually brought the ICP into a tactical alliance with the government,

an action which the Communists were later to regret.

Entering the National Progressive Front in 1973, the Communists

were immediately confronted with having to support the 1974–75 war

against their erstwhile allies, the Kurdish people and their chief, Mulla

Mustafa al-Barzani. Meanwhile, the once-impregnable Communist hold

on peasant cooperatives, women’s and students’ associations, and labor

unions was being challenged by the Baathists, even as Communist cad-

res were increasingly being thrown in jail or liquidated.

The Kurdish Predicament

After a 1969 speech in which the cofounder of the Arab Socialist Baath

Party in Syria, Michel Aﬂ aq, stated that the party had no reservations

with regard to Kurdish autonomy, President al-Bakr began a series of

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conﬁ dence-building moves to allay Kurdish suspicions of the Iraqi cen-

tral government. Secret negotiations between al-Barzani and the vice

president of the RCC, Hussein, ensued. According to a veteran observer

of Kurdish affairs, Edmund Ghareeb,

[t]he March 1970 Agreement . . . was one of the most extraor-

dinary accords reached between a government and its Kurdish

opponents. This agreement recognized Kurdish identity, an

admission that the Iraqi peoples consisted of two nationalities,

Arab and Kurdish . . . autonomy was promised to the Kurds

within four years in a Kurdish region made up of the areas

where they formed a majority [and] the Kurdish language was

given official status . . . [plus] a Kurdish vice president and five

Kurdish ministers were to be appointed to the government

(Ghareeb in Inati 2003, 171–72).

Moreover, reconstruction in Kurdish areas was to begin at once.

Kurdish leaders pledged to hand over their heavy weapons and stop

being allies of foreign governments. The Kurds under al-Barzani broke

their links with Iran, the principal supplier of arms and matériel to the

Kurdish side.

In retrospect, the March 1970 agreement was signiﬁ cant because of

a number of factors. First, it granted the Kurds far more than they had

ever been given by any previous Iraqi government. Second, it was nego-

tiated by that most intractable of politicians, Saddam Hussein, whose

ﬂ exibility on the terms of the agreement was considered even then an

unparalleled act of statesmanship.

Barely a year later, an attempted assassination of Mulla Mustafa al-

Barzani took place, with the Kurdish leadership suspecting that it had

been ordered by none other than Hussein himself. To make matters

worse, the regime began moving Arabs, initially Christians but later

on other components of Iraqi society, to Kirkuk. This policy of making

Kurds a minority in a city they coveted further stoked Kurdish resent-

ment; it was also totally contrary to the 1970 agreement, in letter and

spirit.

By the early 1970s, the Baath Party was reaching out to leftist par-

ties to garner legitimacy in its ﬁ ght against foreign interests; in order

to wean itself away from the multinational oil companies, Iraq began

to cement its ties with the USSR. In 1973, as a result of the breakdown

of the agreement in all but name, al-Barzani repudiated it and made

plans to defend his hard-won gains in northern Iraq. The Slugletts

suggest that one of the consequences of Iraqi rapprochement with

the Communist Party and the Soviet Union was that the shah of Iran,

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF IRAQ

216

alarmed at Iraq’s newfound stability, rushed to bolster the Kurds with

arms and material help (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 1990, 151). In

fact, Mulla Mustafa “quickly established ever more cordial relations,

overt and covert, with the three archenemies of Iraq—Iran, Israel, and

the United States” (Izady in Potter and Sick 2004, 79). Abandoning his

former protector, the USSR, al-Barzani met with Henry Kissinger, the

U.S. national security adviser, who assured him that the United States

would stand by him in his efforts to win Iraqi Kurdistan’s independence

(Sluglett and Sluglett 1987, 1990, 159). The upshot of these conversa-

tions was a peremptory move away from the March Agreement of 1970

and a resumption of war in 1974.

The war between the Kurdish peshmergas (guerrillas) and the Iraqi

army was costly both in men and matériel. While the Kurdish forces

were able to attract a large number of Kurdish partisans to their side

and were able to hold off the much larger Iraqi army for a considerable

period, the Iraqi side doggedly kept up its operations in the north. The

Kurds received antiaircraft systems and 122-mm guns from Iran, tying

them more ﬁ rmly within the Iranian orbit, while Iranian jets bombed

Iraqi positions on the Kurdish front, threatening that the conﬂ ict would

escalate into a full-blown war between Iraq and Iran (Sluglett and

Sluglett 1987, 1990, 169). The Iraqi treasury was fast being depleted,

and the central government’s position was so dire that Iraq’s foremost

ally, the USSR, tried to intervene to stop hostilities.

Finally, at the all-Arab Rabat Summit bringing to an end the October

war of 1973 (also known as the Ramadan War, in which Iraq joined

Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in a war against Israel), King Hussein of Jordan

was successful in getting the Iraqis and Iranians to talk. The Algiers

Agreement of 1975 concluded between Iran and Iraq solidiﬁ ed Saddam

Hussein’s position. A permanent demarcation of the Iran-Iraq boundary,

an issue that had bedeviled both countries for centuries, was agreed to.

The boundary was established at the thaiweg, a median line measuring

the deepest part of the Shatt al-Arab, a 120-mile long river that ﬂ ows by

the important trading ports of Basra in Iraq and Abadan in Iran. With

the signing of this agreement the Kurdish independence movement lost

its military and economic lifeline:

Within forty-eight hours of the signature of the Agreement, the

Iranians removed their 155 mm field guns, and the Kurdish

resistance collapsed; the Iranians even threatened to join the

Iraqis in a combined attack on the Kurds if the latter refused to

accept the terms of the Agreement (Sluglett and Sluglett 1987,

1990, 170).

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Confrontation with the Shii Learned Community

The Baathist regime was extremely wary of the marjaiyya’s (“the

sources of emulation,” the most learned of the Shii clergy) hold on

the Iraqi Shia, as well as its transnational links with the Shii clergy

in Iran. This suspicion was amply returned in kind by the students

and scholar-preachers of the Shii shrine cities. From as early as 1968,

the latter had begun a series of strikes and protests in Najaf aimed at

curtailing government intervention in Shii affairs. The religious lead-

ership had long been alarmed by the continued growth of Communist

inﬂ uence in the shrine cities and the spread of communist doctrine

among disaffected Shii youth. To bring Najaﬁ youth back into the

fold, a number of mujtahids, or Shii scholars, began a counterof-

fensive. Among the most prominent leaders of this movement was

an important theoretician and activist in Najaf, Ayatollah Sayyid

Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1935–80), who wrote two books and one

unpublished manuscript on the theory and practice of philosophy,

economics, and society in Islam, as well as numerous tracts on Islamic

law and banking.

In 1969, in the wake of the confrontation over the establishment

of a university in Kufa, Imam Ali’s historic capital, the government

began to arrest a number of important community leaders who had

backed the university’s establishment, which Baathists saw as a threat

to their control. In 1977, al-Sadr, one of the founders of the militant

Islamic party al-Daawa, led a large demonstration against the Baath in

the holy month of Muharram in which thousands of Shiis in Karbala

and Najaf participated, deeply shaking the regime. In fact throughout

the 1970s, al-Sadr was arrested several times and thrown in prison, the

last time along with his sister Bint al-Huda and other activists (Mallat

1993, 7–19). At about the same time that al-Sadr was being harassed by

agencies of the security state, the government began its policy of forced

transfer of hundreds of Iraqi Shii families, ostensibly of Persian origin,

to Iran; the nightly roundups and hurried collection of individuals and

groups was to accelerate with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War. On

April 1, 1980, members of the clandestine Daawa Party attacked Tariq

Aziz, then a rising government ofﬁ cial, at Mustansiriya University.

Although Aziz survived, the regime immediately took its revenge on al-

Sadr by executing him, along with his sister. According to Eric Davis,

the spiraling violence between the government and its opponents in the

Shii holy cities could have been averted but for government mistrust of

traditional Shii autonomy in their own internal affairs: “It was not that

organizations such as al-Da’wa were that powerful but rather that they

THE GROWTH OF THE REPUBLICAN REGIMES AND THE EMERGENCE OF BAATHIST IRAQ

A BRIEF HISTORY OF IRAQ

218

represented oppositional poles around which the discontented Shi’a

could potentially organize” (Davis 2005, 190–191).

Conclusion

On the eve of the Iran-Iraq War, the government’s perturbed relations

with leftist organizations, the Kurdish leadership, and the Shii com-

munity signaled festering domestic problems that spelled ominous

trouble ahead. The war was not only to test severely Iraqi society

throughout the long eight years of its duration but also to consume all

the advances that had marked “Iraq’s prosperous decade.” Moreover, it

is wise to remember that while many Iraqis today consider the 1970s a

golden age, the afﬂ uence and abundance of those years were not evenly

distributed. Alongside the thriving middle class existed a number of

groups that were isolated from the general prosperity because they were

deemed of marginal importance to the state. For example, although

state investment was plowed into the rural sector, at least in the early

1970s, agriculture, like industry, did not experience the same boom as

the construction sector. Moreover, while the hold of the old landown-

ing class was shattered, a new class of Baathist-allied landlords replaced

them soon after. Throughout this decade of prosperity, warning signs

of dissidence and revolt troubled the equanimity of the state and its by

now all-powerful leader, Saddam Hussein. And so, on the eve of one of

the most draining military conﬂ icts, the Iran-Iraq War, a confrontation

that was to presage a cycle of endless war thrust upon Iraqi society,

the state decided to confront its critics, to co-opt those it could, and to

silence the rest.

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THE RULE OF SADDAM

HUSSEIN AND THE

DIFFICULT LEGACY OF THE

MUKHABARAT STATE

(1979–2003)

rom 1979 until 2003, Saddam Hussein ruled supreme, controlling

the country through different institutions, most of them linked

to the mukhabarat, or “intelligence,” state, which he helped develop.

Power also remained ﬁ rmly tied to an elite composed of family members

and tribal supporters. From 1980 to 1988, the Iraq-Iran War exacted a

huge toll; the country’s resources were stretched to the maximum, and

its people were drained, because of the hemorrhage of casualties at the

front and the air raids on Baghdad and Basra. One of the consequences

of the war was that the regime amassed a foreign debt so staggering that

it teetered on bankruptcy. In the two-year interlude between the Iran-

Iraq War and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the regime deployed the

army against its internal enemies, especially the Kurds. In the aftermath

of the Persian Gulf War and the defeat of Iraq by an international coali-

tion force, the world was stunned to see the swift retribution meted

out to insurrectionists by a still-intact Iraqi army in the southern and

northern parts of the country. After the imposition of a devastating

array of sanctions on the country, the most severe ever devised by the

international community (supported in whole or in part by the United

States and the United Kingdom), Hussein’s government grew ever more

deﬁ ant, manipulating the embargo to reward allies and friends. After

September 11, 2001, U.S. president George W. Bush galvanized the

United Kingdom and other countries to attack Iraq and to occupy the

country. We are still facing the consequences of this move today, a move

A BRIEF HISTORY OF IRAQ

220

that was decried by the United Nations as illegal. As of this writing,

the U.S. Army is still stationed in Iraq, ﬁ ghting a growing and deadly

insurgency.

The Mukhabarat State

The growth of Saddam Hussein’s power occurred in conjunction

with the creation and rapid expansion of an interconnected system of

military and civilian intelligence agencies directly answerable to the

president. The intelligence and security organizations Hussein created

from as early as 1968 onward were designed as institutions of state

control and became the vital building blocks of the mukhabarat state

that supported his later rule. In the early years, as vice president of

the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), Hussein’s primary task

had been to serve as President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr’s chief enforcer;

Hussein had been the man who arrested and ordered the assassination

of a number of the country’s political forces, including Communists,

Nasserites, and lapsed Baathists. Alternately wooing or imprisoning

and executing Communist as well as “radical” Baathists leaders, al-Bakr

and Hussein were able to purge all those independent elements that

could pose a threat to the new regime. Relying on men of Tikrit, Bakr

and Hussein’s birthplace, Hussein recruited kinsmen he could trust and

eventually positioned them to be subordinate to him on the RCC, the

security organs of the state, and in the Baath Party itself.

The controlling aspect of the Iraqi intelligence network went by

the formal name of Jihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Ama (General Directorate

of Intelligence) and held a power in Iraq similar to that of the KGB of

the former Soviet Union: It collected information both externally and

internally and held the power of arrest. Rooted in precursor Baathist

security and intelligence organizations led by Hussein, the Mukhabarat

was divided into three bureaus—political, administrative, and “spe-

cial”—that contained a combined 28 directorates whose purviews

included electronic surveillance, secret operations, counterintelligence,

propaganda, surveillance, and military industrial security. There were

also four directorates concentrating on Iraq’s four main regions. These

were located in Mosul, Basra, Ramadi, and Karbala. Considering the

enormous power such a position held, Hussein took care to place the

leadership of the Mukhabarat in the hands of a Tikriti, usually a close

family member.

While skillfully balancing different elements within the country

through co-optation and ﬁ nancial incentives, Hussein also relied on

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patronage networks (especially those emanating from within his own

family and clan), tribal loyalties, and the power of the purse in main-

taining authority. But overall, it was the security agencies that ensured

the early detection of potential coup plotters, counteracted internal

resistance, planned and carried out action against foreign countries or

leaders, and protected the president from enemies near and far. The

result was an oppressive system that sustained and privileged Saddam

Hussein’s rule for 35 years. “It is estimated that between twenty thou-

sand and thirty thousand people [most of whom were Communists]

were arrested in the period 1979–81 . . . while hundreds ‘disappeared’

or were killed” (Salucci 2003, 2005, 64).

A PRISONER’S STORY: 13 YEARS

IN SADDAM HUSSEIN’S JAILS

n array of human rights abuses—including arrests and impris-

onment without trial, forced expulsions, torture, summary

executions, and ethnocide—were leveled against the government of

Saddam Hussein starting well before the war in 2003. After the U.S.

occupation of Iraq, those charges reached a crescendo. This is the

story of one famous prisoner of the regime.

Ata Abdul-Wahhab was a Baghdad-based lawyer and judge from

a well-known Arab Sunni family who went on to become a diplomat

at the United Nations and, in 1957, personal secretary to King Faisal

II and Prince Abdulillah of Iraq. After the revolution of July 1958

took place, Abdul-Wahhab became a businessman. In that capac-

ity, he visited Kuwait in 1969 to establish an insurance company. It

was while he was in Kuwait that he was seized by Iraqi intelligence

agents, bundled into the trunk of a waiting car, and sent to Baghdad.

There, he was imprisoned in the terrifying Palace of the End (Qasr

al-Nihaya), one of the palaces of the last monarchs of Iraq, which

had been turned into a prison. Repeatedly tortured by Iraqi authori-

ties over many months and placed on death row for ﬁ ve years, his

sentence was ﬁ nally commuted to solitary life imprisonment. His

brother Zaki Abdul-Wahhab, however, who had been imprisoned

alongside him, was executed in 1970. In 1982, Ata Abdul-Wahhab, by

then imprisoned in the infamous Abu Ghraib, was ﬁ nally freed. The

following are translated excerpts of his autobiography, recounting

his 13 years of incarceration.

(continues)

THE RULE OF SADDAM HUSSEIN AND THE DIFFICULT LEGACY OF THE MUKHABARAT STATE