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Saddam Husain and War
From: Cambridge University Press
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Charles Tripp |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Throughout most of the 1980s, Iran and Iraq were engaged in a bitter and bloody war, provoked by Iraqi president Saddam Husain. He subsequently invaded Kuwait, fomenting the Gulf War. What has motivated Saddam Husain to engage in repeated conflicts? In this extract from A History of Iraq, Charles Tripp outlines some of the hows and whys. |
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| Saddam Husain sought to impose a political unity on Iraq that found its expression chiefly in his person; he therefore created a personality cult of awesome proportions around himself. | |
 nce he assumed the presidency [in July 1979], a personality cult of awesome proportions was created around Saddam Husain. It portrayed him as the representative of all the peoples of Iraq, both in their particular identities as members of different communities, and in their common condition as subjects of the Iraqi government. National institutions were created to sustain the national myths. The Ba'th Party was now a countrywide organisation, reaching down to the smallest village and most modest neighbourhood in an unprecedented way. Universal conscription drew in increasing numbers of Iraqis as the expanding defence budget allowed for a spectacular growth in the size of the armed forces. In addition, the Popular Army and the youth organisation brought ever larger numbers into the paramilitary formations established by the regime. Finally, Saddam Husain established a National Assembly in March 1980, setting up the first parliament since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. The assembly was a symbolic facade--it was powerless and its members were vetted by the security services. However, it was meant to create the impression of popular supervision of government, to provide another symbol of national unity and to give Saddam Husain another forum for presenting himself as the national leader. |
Saddam's patronage
The creation and maintenance of these institutions displayed the ambivalence of the Iraqi state--an ambivalence which Saddam Husain was adept at exploiting. They existed in their present form at the behest of Saddam Husain and his narrow circle of associates. They were 'national' in that they involved people from all sections of Iraqi society and were surrounded by a myth-making apparatus that underlined their national character. For some this did indeed create common experiences. However, they were also instruments of patronage, whereby large numbers of people from different communities could be rewarded with positions of influence, special access to housing and material resources that bound them to the leadership. |
For those who refused such patronage, doors were closed and the only alternative for some was to leave Iraq. It is during these years that the exodus of Iraqi professionals and intellectuals began to take on significant proportions, with possibly as many as half a million leaving by the mid-1980s to pursue lives elsewhere free of the intrusive supervision of Saddam Husain's state. The so-called national institutions, therefore, on closer inspection revealed themselves to be webs of patron-client networks, sustained by the violence used against those who challenged the system, dispensing the ruler's patronage along lines which gave the lie to the official myth of a distinctive, unifying Iraqi identity. |
This ambiguity pervaded all aspects of associational life, from the trades unions and the peasants' organisations to the General Federation of Iraqi Women. As far as the latter was concerned, it had been established soon after the Ba'thist coup d'état of 1968 ostensibly to voice the concerns and interests of Iraqi women, much on the pattern of the women's organisation al-Rabita in the early 1960s. Insofar as the developmental preoccupations of the government coincided with those of Iraqi women--particularly in the spheres of literacy, education and the opportunity to enter the non-agricultural labour force (of which women had always formed a key part)--the federation was successful. State-sponsored membership grew spectacularly, as did the resources and facilities dedicated to women's education and health. In 1978 the change in the personal status laws which gave courts the power to overrule male members of a woman's family in certain areas appeared to be a substantial advance for women. Some believed that it would allow the long-suppressed public narrative of women in Iraq to emerge from the dominant patriarchal values so closely associated with the development of the state. However, on closer inspection, the concessions were not so dramatic. Nor were women empowered to consolidate the positions granted to them in this law. Like all other Iraqis, they and their interests could be suppressed if it seemed useful to Saddam Husain to do so. In the case of Iraqi women, this was most notoriously expressed in the law of 1988, which not only recognised but also legalised the so-called honour killings in Iraqi society, permitting men to kill their wives or female relatives if they were judged to have dishonoured the family name by committing adultery. (The 1988 law itself was repealed a couple of years later, but the authorities continued to turn a blind eye to honour killings.) |
In constructing the core of their power in the state Saddam Husain and his associates looked first to the values and personnel of their own communities, but they also looked beyond this narrow social base. Their patronage was not confined to the clans of the Sunni Arab north-west, although the commanding positions in the regime and the security services without exception went to men from such backgrounds. In areas such as the officer corps, where the Sunni Arab preponderance was an outcome of its history and that of the state itself, it would have been perverse and dangerous to have favoured other groups at their expense. Nevertheless, in many symbolically prominent positions, as well as in local organisations, the whole range of Iraq's diverse population was well represented. |
This was very much part of Saddam Husain's strategy. In drawing the people of Iraq under his personal domination, he was seeking to create among the Iraqis a dependent client base that would have a stake in the survival of his regime. In doing so, he hoped both to displace some communal leaders who had hitherto commanded obedience, and to recruit others who could 'deliver' the clan or community which they headed. This gave him a unique position and reassured his intimates that he too could guarantee the social order that allowed them to enjoy their privileges undisturbed. This was all the more important in view of the fears of ethnic and sectarian challenges in 1979. |
The Kurds
In the Kurdish areas there was renewed guerrilla activity, organised in the main by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which had confirmed Idris and Masoud Barzani's dominance at its congress of November 1979 (Mulla Mustafa had died earlier that year). Some of the KDP's energies were diverted by clashes with the rival Popular Union of Kurdistan (PUK), but a growing number of attacks on government targets indicated that the Kurdish region was once again bestirring itself. More ominously for Baghdad, as its relations with the new regime in Tehran began to deteriorate, the KDP looked to the Iranian government for support. Because the Barzani brothers were willing to help the Iranian government in its fight against the Kurdish movement in Iranian Kurdistan--the KDP-I under 'Abd al-Rahman Qassemlou--the KDP enjoyed increasingly good relations with Tehran. Jalal Talabani, on the other hand, because of the PUK's links with Qassemlou, could not be a party to this and reopened contacts with Baghdad. Saddam Husain encouraged these overtures, exploiting divisions among the Kurds, extending his patronage among many of the tribal leaders and among the urban, educated classes who had been drawn into the burgeoning bureaucracy of the Iraqi state, either directly or through the machinery of the 'autonomous region'. |
More troubling for the regime was the continued organisation of opposition activity amongst the urban Shi'a of Iraq and the encouragement they seemed to receive from the new Iranian government. Confrontations between the security forces and members of the Shi'i community had continued throughout the summer of 1979, encouraged by the revival of some of the militant Islamist underground organisations, sometimes working in tandem, sometimes acting on their own initiative. Al-Da'wa, Jund al-Imam and the Islamic Task Organisation all agreed on the need for violent action against the regime and in October 1979 this attitude was endorsed by Jama'at al-'Ulama (the Society of Religious Scholars, founded by Ayatollah al-Hakim in 1958), overcoming its earlier scruples. The government responded with mass arrests and executions which were given a semblance of legality by a retroactive decree of March 1980 making membership of al-Da'wa punishable by death. Undeterred, a member the Islamic Task Organisation tried to kill the deputy prime minister, Tariq 'Aziz, in Baghdad in April. This public attempt on the life of so prominent a member of Saddam Husain's circle unleashed a furious government response. |
Within days Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and his sister, Bint al-Huda, an influential scholar in her own right, were taken from Najaf to Baghdad where they were hastily executed. This was the first time in the history of Iraq that so senior a cleric had been killed and was an ominous indicator of the regime's determination to force the Shi'i leaders into a posture of obedience. At the same time, the most senior mujtahid, Ayatollah al-Kho'i, was placed under virtual house arrest in Najaf and the government stepped up its deportations of so-called Iranian Shi'a, expelling an estimated 40,000 during 1980 alone. Their property was confiscated and in many cases auctioned off, making others effectively complicit in their dispossession. For Saddam Husain this was important, since he was trying to draw as many as possible into the complex network of patronage and obligation that permeated all communities in Iraq. It made the formation of coalitions, grouped around distinctively community-based interests, extraordinarily difficult. The new hierarchies of power and wealth among those Shi'a who depended upon the regime created alternative leaders to the clerics and laymen who had proved so intractable. Many of these had either been executed, imprisoned or had fled into exile in Iran, which was now to become the chief focus of the Iraqi government's attention. |
Iran and Iraq
Relations between the two regimes had been deteriorating since 1979. The Iraqi government had initially made friendly overtures to the Bazargan government. However, the antipathy between the new Islamic regime in Shi'i Iran and the Iraqi government which was ruthless in its treatment of Iraq's Shi'i Islamists could not long remain concealed. In Iran the Iraqi regime was portrayed as the embodiment of all that needed to be swept away if the region was to be transformed. For Saddam Husain, this confirmed both the aggressive and sectarian nature of the Iranian regime. It also underlined the questionable loyalties of much of the Iraqi population, reinforcing the insecurity of the narrow circles of the Iraqi regime. Nor could the question of Iran be simply ignored or relegated to a position of relative insignificance. Quite apart from the effect on Iraq's Shi'a, Saddam Husain had to take into account two other factors. |
The first was the question of his authority as an Arab leader and the second stemmed from the nature of his authority as head of the territorial state of Iraq. Since at least 1978 Saddam Husain had been manoeuvring to position Iraq under his leadership as the pivotal Arab state. The summits of 1978 and 1979 had been followed in February 1980 by the publication of the Arab Charter in Baghdad, to which most of the states which had attended the Baghdad summits subscribed. It was a restatement of common Arab goals, but the substance of the charter was of less importance than Saddam Husain's sponsorship of it. He was clearly projecting an image of Iraq as a leading power--perhaps the leading power--in the Arab world: wealthy, militarily powerful, politically stable, on relatively good terms with most Arab states and a champion of recognised Arab causes from the Mediterranean to the Gulf. |
It was on the Gulf in particular that Saddam Husain focused since it was here that the new, radical regime in Iran seemed to present the greatest threat to the existing order. The assertion of Iraq's leadership of the Arab world was important for Saddam Husain's self-image as a historical Arab leader, but it also helped to secure the allegiance of much of the Sunni Arab population on whose support the extensive networks of his inner circle ultimately depended. Saddam Husain had shown that he was no believer in abstract visions of pan-Arabism. Rather, he saw the Arab world as a stage on which the Iraqi state, constructed as an emanation of his will, should play the leading role, for the benefit of himself and those who sustained his rule in Iraq. Concentrating on the Iranian danger allowed him to assert his dedication to an Arab cause without running the risk of entanglements with Syria. It also allowed him to pose as the protector of the Arab Gulf states which could yield dividends in the future. In particular, increasing trust between Iraq and Kuwait could lead to a territorial settlement favourable to Iraq as it moved to develop the port of Umm Qasr. It was in this context, therefore, that Saddam Husain revived the question of the 'Arab islands' in the Gulf which Iran had annexed in 1971, and reasserted the Arab character of the Iranian province of Khuzestan, suggesting that the time had come for its liberation. |
As relations with Iran deteriorated, the question of the fulfilment and status of the treaty of 1975 surfaced. The treaty was a particular problem for Saddam Husain. Few in Iraq knew or cared about its redrawing of the frontier of the two states in the Shatt al-'Arab, but Saddam Husain was well aware both of the concessions forced upon Iraq by Iran's power and of the possibility that these concessions might be used as a potent symbol of his own readiness to sacrifice Iraq's national interests. The latter point became more acute with his assumption of the presidency in 1979. He was now posing as the champion of all Iraq and was repeatedly asserting the distinctive Iraqi character of the population, binding them together in a single political community, dominated and protected by Saddam Husain alone. As he emphasised Iraq's national identity, so it was inevitable that greater attention should be paid to the territory of the state. Consequently, the conflict with Iran began to find territorial expression, focusing on the Shatt al-'Arab in particular, where Iraq revived its claim to exercise full sovereignty over the whole of the waterway. |
During the first part of 1980 a few border clashes took place--always a barometer of the poor state of relations. At the same time, the outlines of an unparalleled opportunity began to appear before Saddam Husain and the Iraqi leadership. Revolutionary Iran was volatile and aggressive but it also seemed weak. Beset by provincial unrest and factionalism at the centre, the regime did not look secure. Furthermore, the notorious mistrust between the revolutionary regime and Iran's armed forces had led to purges of thousands of officers and to administrative chaos in the military. In addition, the break in relations with the United States had severed Iran's main supply of arms and had helped to isolate the new regime internationally. From the perspective of Baghdad, the regime in Tehran looked weak, disorganised and isolated--in some respects a mirror image of the condition of the Iraqi regime in the late 1960s which had so encouraged the shah to press for the concessions which he had eventually won in 1975. |
Saddam Husain, by contrast, was confident of his own and his state's strength and relative power. He had destroyed his most intimate opponents to gain undisputed mastery of the Iraqi state, safe for the moment from the factional infighting which had undermined previous Iraqi leaders. The armed forces had been massively reinforced and rearmed as a result of the great increase in the military budget since the mid-1970s, and there was no war in Kurdistan to distract them. Furthermore, Iraq's international relations were in a better condition than they had been for some time: its pre-eminence in the Arab world and in the Gulf was increasingly recognised; its relations with the superpowers were promising, if not particularly cordial, in that the Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with the USSR remained in force, whilst Iraq had established good trading relations with the Western powers. |
The outbreak of war
It is against this background that Saddam Husain saw a limited war against Iran as a way of forcing the Iranian regime to acknowledge that the balance of power had shifted in favour of Iraq. Tangible proof of such an acknowledgement was to be the scrapping of the 1975 treaty and the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty over the whole of the Shatt al-'Arab. Territorially of little significance in itself, this concession was intended not only to efface Iraq's--and Saddam Husain's--weakness of the mid-1970s, but also to demonstrate that the new and threatening regime in Iran had been brought to heel by the power of Iraq. In terms of symbolic value and thus of the authority of the Iraqi government and the power of Iraq, there was a great deal invested in this desired concession--so much so that Saddam Husain thought it was worth going to war to achieve it. |
In a dramatic gesture Saddam Husain publicly abrogated the 1975 treaty and asserted Iraqi sovereignty over the whole of the Shatt al-'Arab before a meeting of the National Assembly on 17 September 1980. This was followed on 22 September by a series of pre-emptive attacks by the Iraqi air force on Iran's military airfields and by the invasion of Iranian territory by Iraqi forces at a number of points. Some Iraqi units had specific targets, such as the towns of Abadan and Khorramshahr on the Shatt al-'Arab, whilst others had orders simply to occupy as much Iranian territory as they could. The campaign was being used as a show of force which would oblige the Iranian government to negotiate a rapid end to the hostilities on terms favourable to Iraq, through territorial concessions and the public acknowledgement of Iraq's superiority. |
Saddam Husain believed that the insecure and enfeebled Iranian regime would have to disengage in order to survive. This was a catastrophic miscalculation. Not only were the Iraqi armed forces considerably less competent than Saddam Husain had anticipated, but, more importantly, the Iranian government saw the attack as a test of the revolution itself. Defence of the country and of the revolution became the focus of popular mobilisation in Iran, used by the regime to rally support and to consolidate its control. Within weeks it was clear that the short, demonstrative war planned by Saddam Husain had become something very different and, in a rare moment of public frankness, he admitted as much (in a November 1980 speech to the Iraqi National Assembly). |
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