The Iraq War (7 page)

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 bullet-riddled 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 ill-judged 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.