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Iraq
Introduction
IN THE LATE 1980s, Iraq became a central actor in Middle Eastern
affairs and a force to reckon with in the wider international
community. Iraq's growing role resulted from the way in which
it was adapting the principles of Baath (Arab Socialist Resurrection)
Party socialism to meet the country's needs and from its somewhat
unexpected success in compelling Iran in August 1988 to request
a cease-fire in the eight-year-old Iran-Iraq War.
Iraq's reassertion in the 1980s of its role in the region and
in the world community evoked its ancient history. At one time
Mesopotamia ("the land between the rivers"), which encompassed
much of present-day Iraq, formed the center not only of the Middle
East but also of the civilized world. The people of the Tigris
and Euphrates basin, the ancient Sumerians, using the fertile
land and the abundant water supply of the area, developed sophisticated
irrigation systems and created what was probably the first cereal
agriculture as well as the earliest writing, cuneiform. Their
successors, the Akkadians, devised the most complete legal system
of the period, the Code of Hammurabi. Located at a crossroads
in the heart of the ancient Middle East, Mesopotamia was a plum
sought by numerous foreign conquerors. Among them were the warlike
Assyrians, from the tenth century through the seventh century
B.C., and the Chaldeans, who in the sixth century B.C. created
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the
Ancient World.
In 539 B.C., Semitic rule of the area ended with the conquest
of Babylon by Cyrus the Great. The successors of Cyrus paid little
attention to Mesopotamia, with the result that the infrastructure
was allowed to fall into disrepair. Not until the Arab conquest
and the coming of Islam did Mesopotamia begin to regain its glory,
particularly when Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid caliphate
between 750 and 1258.
Iraq experienced various other foreign rulers, including the
Mongols, the Ottoman Turks, and the British under a mandate established
after World War I. The British placed Faisal, a Hashimite claiming
descent from the Prophet Muhammad, on the throne in 1921. Popular
discontent with the monarchy, which was regarded as a Western
imposition, led in 1958 to a military revolution that overthrew
the king.
Ultimately, the military regime installed a government ruled
by the Baath's Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) and created
the Provisional Constitution of July 16, 1970, that institutionalized
the RCC's role. Within the Baath, power lay primarily in the hands
of Baathists from the town of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam
Husayn, who played an increasingly prominent role in the government
in the 1970s. (Tikrit was also the hometown of his predecessor,
Ahmad Hasan al Bakr, who formally resigned the leadership in 1979).
The Baathist government in 1970 granted the Kurdish minority
a degree of autonomy, but not the complete self-rule the Kurds
desired, in the predominantly Kurdish regions of Dahuk, Irbil,
and As Sulaymaniyah . In the early 1970s, Iraqi casualties from
the renewed warfare with the Kurds were such as to induce Saddam
Husayn to sign an agreement with the shah of Iran in Algiers in
March 1975 recognizing the thalweg, or the midpoint of the Shatt
al Arab, as the boundary between the two countries. The agreement
ended the shah's aid to the Kurds, thus eventually quelling the
rebellion.
Saddam Husayn then turned his attention to domestic matters,
particularly to the economy and to an industrial modernization
program. He had notable success in distributing land, in improving
the standard of living, and in increasing health and educational
opportunities. Rural society was transformed as a result of large
rural-to-urban migration and the decline of rural handicraft industries.
Urban society witnessed the rise, particularly in the late 1970s
and the 1980s, of a class of Baathist technocrats. In addition,
the Shia (see Glossary) Muslims, who, although they constituted
a majority, had been largely unrepresented in significant areas
of Iraqi society, in which the minority Sunni (see Glossary) Muslims
were the governing element, were integrated to a considerable
degree into the government, into business, and into the professions.
Buoyed by domestic success, Saddam Husayn shifted his concentration
to foreign affairs. Beginning in the late 1970s, Iraq sought to
assume a more prominent regional role and to replace Egypt, which
had been discredited from its position of Arab leadership because
of signing the Camp David Accords in 1978. Iraq, therefore, gradually
modified its somewhat hostile stance toward Saudi Arabia and the
Persian Gulf states, seeking to win their support. Relations with
the Soviet Union, Iraq's major source of weapons, cooled, however,
following the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that
began in December 1979. In contrast, Iraqi ties with France improved
considerably, and France became Iraq's second most important arms
supplier.
The overthrow of the monarchy in Iran and the coming to power
in 1979 of Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini--whom Saddam
Husayn had expelled from Iraq in 1978, reportedly at the shah's
request--revived the historic hostility between the two countries.
Saddam Husayn feared the impact on Iraqi Shias of Khomeini's Islamic
fundamentalism and resented Iran's attempted hegemony in the Persian
Gulf region. Believing Iran's military forces to be unprepared
as a result of the revolutionary purges, in September 1980, following
a number of border skirmishes, Iraq invaded Iranian territory.
Thus began a bitter, costly, eight- year-long war in which the
strength and the revolutionary zeal of Iran were clearly demonstrated.
From late 1980 to 1988, the war took precedence over other matters.
The Baath high command succeeded in controlling Iraq's military
institution to a degree that surprised foreign observers. One
of the major instruments for accomplishing this control was the
People's Army, which served as the Baath Party's militia.
The Baath could do little, however, to counter Iran's superiority
in manpower and materiel. At times when Iraq considered its situation
particularly desperate--for example, when Iranian forces appeared
to be gaining control of substantial areas of Iraqi territory,
such as Al Faw Peninsula in the south and the northern mountainous
Kurdish area--Iraq unleashed a barrage of missiles against Iranian
cities. Further, reliable reports indicated that Iraq used chemical
warfare against the enemy, possibly in the hope of bringing Iran
to the negotiating table.
To prevent domestic unrest as a result of the war, Saddam Husayn
adopted a "guns and butter" economic policy, bringing in foreign
laborers to replace those called to military service and striving
to keep casualties low. After drawing down its own reserves, Iraq
needed the financial support of its Gulf neighbors. Of the latter,
Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all
provided Iraq with loans to help it prosecute the war. Relations
with Egypt also improved significantly after the war's outbreak.
Meanwhile Iraqi hostility toward Syria, its fellow Baathist government
but traditional rival, increased as a result of Syria's strong
support of Iran.
As part of his wartime economic policies, Saddam Husayn in 1987
returned agricultural collectives to the private sector, and in
1988 he took measures to privatize more than forty state-run factories
because of the inefficiency and unprofitability of agriculture
and industry when under state control. These privatizing steps
reflected a desire for greater economic efficiency rather than
a change in economic ideology. Government controls on the economy
were decreased by cutting subsidies, by allowing partial foreign
ownership, and by reducing bureaucratic regulation of enterprises,
thus reducing labor costs.
Despite the introduction of more liberal economic policies in
Iraq in the late 1980s, few indications suggested that the political
system was becoming less rigid to any significant degree. Ultimate
decisions in both the economic and the political realms apparently
remained in the hands of Saddam Husayn rather than in those of
the constitutionally designated RCC. According to a statement
by Saddam Husayn to the Permanent Bureau of the Arab Jurists'
Federation in Baghdad in November 1988, the Baath two years previously
had approved steps toward democratization, but these had been
delayed by the Iran-Iraq War. The measures included having a minimum
of two candidates for each elective post, allowing non-Baathists
to run for political office, and permitting the establishment
of other political parties. In January 1989, following an RCC
meeting chaired by Saddam Husayn, the formation of a special committee
to draft a new constitution was reported; according to unconfirmed
reports in November, the new constitution will abolish the RCC.
Elections for the National Assembly were also announced, and this
body was authorized to investigate government ministries and departments.
The elections took place in early April and featured almost 1,000
candidates (among them 62 women, although none was elected) for
the 250 seats; only 160 Baath Party members were elected. A number
of Baathist candidates also were defeated in the September Kurdish
regional assembly elections. The results of both elections indicated
a gradual downgrading of the prominence of the Baath. The RCC,
moreover, directed the minister of information to permit the public
to voice complaints about government programs in the government-controlled
press; and government officials were ordered to reply to such
complaints. The role of Saddam Husayn's family in government affairs
was somewhat muted as well. Following the helicopter crash in
a sandstorm on May 5 that killed Saddam Husayn's brother-in-law
and cousin, Minister of Defense Adnan Khayr Allah Talfah, a technocrat
who did not come from Tikrit, replaced Talfah.
The internal security apparatus controlled by the Baath Party
continued to keep a particularly close check on potential dissidents:
these included Kurds, communists, and members of Shia revival
movements. These movements, such as Ad Dawah al Islamiyah (the
Islamic Call), commonly referred to as Ad Dawah, sought to propagate
fundamentalist Islamic principles and were out of sympathy with
Baath socialism. Furthermore, in 1988 in the final stages of the
war, both before and after the cease-fire, Iraq was thought to
have engaged in chemical warfare against the Kurds. Conceivably
the regime saw an opportunity to instill such fear in the Kurds,
a significant percentage of whom had cooperated with Iran during
the war, that their dissidence would be discouraged. In the spring
of 1989 the government announced it would depopulate a border
strip thirty kilometers wide along the frontier with Turkey and
Iran on the northeast, moving all inhabitants, mainly Kurds, from
the area; it began this process in May.
In December 1988, reports surfaced of dissidence within the army,
in which Saddam Husayn lacked a power base. The projected annual
Army Day celebrations on January 6, 1989, were cancelled and allegedly
a number of senior army officers and some civilian Baathists were
executed. In February the regime announced that all units of the
People's Army would be withdrawn from the front by late March;
in July a further announcement disbanded the three-division strong
1st Special Army Corps, formed in June 1986, but apparently some
time would elapse before soldiers actually returned to civilian
status. Such measures were probably occasioned by the continued
success of the cease-fire, initiated in August 1988. The cease-fire
held, although a number of border incidents occurred, of which
the most serious was the Iranian flooding of a sixty-four-kilometer
frontier area northeast of Basra. Informed observers considered
the flooding designed to put pressure on Iraq to return a strip
of approximately 1,000 square kilometers of Iranian territory
on the steppe beyond Baqubah. On October 27, Iran stopped flooding
the area, probably as a prelude to a new United Nations (UN) and
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) mediation effort.
The peace talks under UN sponsorship, despite a score of face-to-face
meetings, had made little progress as of mid- December. A few
exchanges of prisoners of war (POWs), largely of those that were
ill or wounded, had taken place, but both Iraq and Iran still
held large numbers of each other's prisoners. Saddam Husayn, who
had agreed on October 5, 1988, to the ICRC plan for prisoner repatriation,
in March 1989 proposed in a letter to UN Secretary General Javier
Perez de Cuellar that the UN guarantee the return of the freed
POWs to civilian life. Saddam Husayn made his proposal in the
hope that this guarantee would reassure Iran, which held approximately
70,000 Iraqi POWs-- whereas Iraq held about half that number of
Iranians--that the balance of power would not be disturbed. Iran
has refused to exchange prisoners or to implement any of the ten
points of UN Security Council Resolution 598 dealing with the
dispute until Iraq returns all Iranian territory.
A major source of disagreement in the peace negotiations was
Iraq's insistence on sovereignty over the Shatt al Arab, as opposed
to the divided ownership created under the 1975 Algiers Agreement.
Failing such a settlement, Iraq threatened to divert the waters
of the Shatt al Arab above Basra so that it would rejoin the Gulf
at Umm Qasr, a port that Iraq had announced it would deepen and
widen. Iraq was eager to have Iran allow the UN to begin clearing
sunken ships from the Shatt al Arab so as to permit Iraqi access
to the sea.
Iraq, meanwhile, had launched a diplomatic campaign to improve
its relations with other countries of the region, particularly
with Jordan and Egypt. In the last half of 1988, beginning even
before he accepted the cease-fire, Saddam Husayn met five times
with King Hussein and three times with Egyptian president Husni
Mubarak. These high-level meetings included symbolic elements,
such as Saddam Husayn's accompanying Hussein on a visit in Baghdad
to the graves of Faisal and Ghazi, the Hashimite kings of Iraq,
an indication of a considerably more moderate Iraqi Baathist attitude
toward monarchy than had been evident in the past. The meetings
were designed to bolster political and economic support for Iraq
(in December 1988 Iraq concluded a US$800 million trade agreement
with Jordan for 1989), as well as to coordinate Arab policy toward
the Palestine Liberation Organization and toward Israel, a revision
of Iraq's previous rejection of any Arab-Israeli settlement. In
addition, Saddam Husayn sought to reassure Saudi Arabia, from
which Iraq had received substantial financial support during the
Iran-Iraq War, that Iraq had no intention of dominating or of
overthrowing the Persian Gulf monarchies.
In its relations with the Western world, Iraq also exhibited
greater moderation than it had in the 1970s or early 1980s. For
example, the United States Department of State indicated in late
March 1989 that Iraq had agreed to pay US$27.3 million compensation
to relatives of the thirty-seven American naval personnel killed
in the 1987 Iraqi attack on the USS Stark. During the
war with Iran, Iraq had borrowed extensively from France, Britain,
Italy, and to a lesser extent from the Federal Republic of Germany
(West Germany) and Japan. These countries would doubtless play
significant roles in Iraq's reconstruction and rearmament; in
view of their commercial interest, Iraq has succeeded in having
its loan repayments rescheduled. For example, Iraq signed an agreement
with France in September 1989 allowing it to repay its indebtedness,
due in 1989, over a six- to nine-year period, and completing arrangements
for Iraq's purchase of fifty Mirage 2000s.
Since the cease-fire in August 1988, Iraq has undertaken an extensive
rearmament program involving foreign arms purchases and the intensified
development of its domestic arms industry to generate export income
as well as to meet domestic needs. The First Baghdad International
Exhibition for Military Production took place from April 28 to
May 2, 1989, featuring numerous types of Iraqi arms. Among weapons
Iraq produced in 1989 were a T-74 tank, called the Lion of Baghdad,
and an Iraqi version of the airborne early warning and control
(AWACS) aircraft, developed from the Soviet Ilyushin Il-76. Iraq
named the plane the Adnan-1 after late Minister of Defense Adnan
Khayr Allah Talfah. A military development that aroused considerable
concern in Israel was Iraq's launching from its Al Anbar space
research center in early December of a forty-eight ton, three-stage
rocket capable of putting a satellite into space orbit. The minister
of industry and military industrialization also announced that
Iraq had developed two 2,000-kilometer range surface-to-surface
missiles.
Apart from the need to replace lost armaments, the war imposed
a heavy reconstruction burden on Iraq. To rebuild the infrastructure
and to prevent disaffection among the population of the south
who had suffered particularly, the government gave a high priority
to the rebuilding of Basra. On June 25, Iraq published the completion
of the basic reconstruction of Basra at a cost of approximately
US$6 billion, stating that work was then beginning on rebuilding
Al Faw, which prior to wartime evacuation had about 50,000 inhabitants.
The government has also announced programs to create heavy industry,
such as new iron and steel and aluminum works, to build another
petrochemical complex, to upgrade fertilizer plants, and to reconstruct
the offshore oil export terminals at Khor al Amaya and Mina al
Bakr. In June 1989 Iraq reported its readiness to accommodate
very large crude oil carriers at a new terminal at Mina al Bakr.
Iraq has taken other economic measures to stimulate oil production
and to control inflation. Since the cease-fire, Iraq has pumped
nearly its full OPEC quota of 2.8 billion barrels of oil per day.
In September 1989, Iraq completed its second crude oil pipeline
across Saudi Arabia, with a capacity of 1,650,000 barrels per
day, terminating at the Red Sea just south of the Saudi port of
Yanbu. These major economic ventures have led to inflation. To
counter price rises, the regime has set weekly prices on fruit
and vegetables and in late June instituted a price freeze for
one year on state-produced goods and services. Concurrently it
authorized an additional monthly salary of 25 Iraqi dinars (approximately
$US80) for all civil servants and members of the police and military
forces.
The negative economic consequences of the war extended beyond
the reconstruction of cities and war-damaged infrastructure to
include postponed development projects. For example, the massive
rural-to-urban migration, particularly in southern Iraq, caused
by the war had intensified a process begun before the war and
had created an urgent need for housing, educational, and health
facilities in urban areas. The war also had serious effects on
Iraqi society, exacerbating the strained relations of Iraqi Arabs
with the leading minority, the Kurds. The war, however, exerted
a positive influence by promoting a greater sense of national
unity, by diminishing differences between Shias and Sunnis, and
by improving the role of women. The aftermath of the war permitted
modification of traditional Baathist socialist doctrines so as
to encourage greater privatization of the economy, although the
degree to which the government would maintain its reduced interference
in the economic sphere remained to be seen.
The end of the war left a number of unknown factors facing the
Iraqi economy and society. One was the size of the postwar world
petroleum demand and whether Iraq could sell its potential increased
output on the international market. An important unanswered social
question was whether women who had found employment during the
war would return to domestic pursuits and help increase the birthrate
as the government hoped. Although women might remain in the work
force, presumably, work permits of most foreign workers brought
in during the war would be terminated.
An immediate result of the war was an attempt by the government
at political liberalization in allowing multiple candidates for
elected posts and by offering an amnesty for political, but not
for military, offenders. A test of this liberalization will be
whether the reforms promised by the end of 1989--the new constitution,
legalization of political parties other than the Baath, and freedom
of the press-- occur. Measures taken as of mid-December reflected
only minimal lessening of the personal control of President Saddam
Husayn over the decision- making process in all spheres of the
country's life.
The end of the war left many security issues unresolved. Although
the regime had disbanded some armed forces units, would Iraq maintain
a strong, well-trained army, posing a potential threat to its
neighbors and to Israel? Also, what of the Iraqi POWs returning
home after several years' indoctrination in POW camps in Iran--could
the government of Saddam Husayn rely on their loyalty? Finally,
Iraq faced the problem of its traditional Sunni-Shia dichotomy.
The war had demonstrated the ability of Iraqi Shias to put nationalist
commitment above sectarian differences, but the influence of fundamentalist
Shia Islam in the area, represented by the Iranian regime, would
continue to threaten that loyalty.
December 15, 1989
Helen Chapin Metz
Data as of May 1988
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