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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
The Rise of Saddam Hussein
In 1968, the Ba’athists returned to power in Iraq after a relatively bloodless coup. President Arif was deposed and exiled along with his family to London. The fact that the coup was bloodless shows that Ba’athism had won Iraqi hearts and minds and was widely seen as legitimate. Saddam Hussein was still in the background at this time, and like Stalin, he focused on creating a security and intelligence service that was loyal to him. At this time, Saddam worked to remove Iraq of Nasserites and Communists. Ba’athism in Iraq became Arab nationalism with an Iraq First core.[1]
While Saddam was in the background, by 1969 he had clearly become the main driving force in the new government. Throughout the 1970s, Saddam exploited the high price of oil to gain revenues which he then turned into social services, especially in housing and education. By 1979 he was in complete control of the government and forced the resignation of President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.
Saddam was able to achieve power by using the country’s oil revenues to improve the lives of ordinary Iraqis, along with establishing repressive state institutions that spotted and defeated any threats to his order. This worked, but produced order without liberty. On July 22, 1979, Saddam publicly purged the Ba’ath Party of anyone he saw as a threat to his rule. Roughly half of those purged were executed shortly thereafter.
In 1990, when American propaganda against Iraq was at its height, this purge was shown as proof that Saddam was evil. While his actions were the very definition of Stalinism, given the many coups Iraq had experienced, it was nevertheless politically justified. It showed ordinary Iraqis that they could count on Saddam to maintain stability.
With his power consolidated, Saddam was free to fulfill his ambitions.
The Iran-Iraq War and the Invasion of Kuwait
Saddam Hussein’s first ambitious adventure was an attack on Iran in 1980. The plan to chew off a bit of Iran was not entirely without a rationale, as the southwestern part of Iran is Arab-speaking and has oil, plus Iran was in chaos following Khomeini’s revolution. But unfortunately for them, the Iraqi army was ill-prepared for complex offensive operations. Saddam went to war in Iran with the army he had, meaning it was staffed mostly by political supporters who had very little military skill or training. For example, Iraqi divisions were given vague orders to advance into Iran and secure the passes of the Zagros mountains, but there was no plan for communication between adjacent units and no logistical plan.
The Iranians thus rallied and pushed the Iraqis back. The Iran-Iraq War raged for another eight years. Saddam’s army did reform, however, and he replaced its original leadership with men of genuine ability by 1982. His army also received large amounts of equipment supplied by the Soviet Union, and Iraqi industry learned to repair and upgrade tanks and other armored vehicles at a site in Taji. It is even possible that Iraqi industry was able to assemble T-72 tanks locally.
Ba’athism paid dividends during the war in keeping the Arab Iraqi Shi’a loyal to the Iraqi state. When the Iranian military launched a major offensive into southern Iraq, the Iraqi Shi’a fiercely resisted the Persian attack on Arab territory.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqis were well-connected to the international community. Their army was supplied with Soviet weapons, their treasury was bolstered by loans from the Gulf Arabs, and they received first-rate intelligence from the Americans. Italian engineers built their bunkers, and their chemical weapons were supplied by German firms — with American help.
Iraq ended the war deeply in debt to the Gulf Arabs, especially the Kuwaitis. Trouble was bound to follow. In late July 1990, Saddam met with the American ambassador, April Glaspie, and vaguely hinted that he would invade Kuwait. She gave Saddam a vague answer that was roughly in line with American policy at the time: that the US was not interested in interfering in internal Arab affairs. In retrospect, however, it is clear that Glaspie’s vague answer could have been interpreted as a green light for Iraq to invade Kuwait.
Donald Rumsfeld, an envoy from the Reagan administration, met with Saddam Hussein in 1983. Throughout the Iran-Iraq War, the US provided intelligence and other technical support to the Iraqis. Saddam was thus not entirely mistaken in assuming he would receive support from the Americans for his annexation of Kuwait.
Glaspie’s instructions from Washington were not fully considered. It was always clear that Iraqi national aspirations included the goal of annexing Kuwait, as had been seen in the 1961 war scare. Given the apparent American “green light,” on August 2, 1990 the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. The Kuwaitis called on their allies around the world, especially in Britain and America. President George H. W. Bush then assembled a coalition to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait, which was a resounding success.
The war had been unnecessary. Saddam Hussein could have sought to restructure his country’s debt, or else conducted a military exercise short of war that would have shown the Kuwaitis that he could conquer them — and then cut a deal. But that’s how things went, and once the coalition attacked Saddam’s forces, they were defeated in less than six weeks.
Then as now, Israel was a pariah state in the Middle East. Should Israel have attacked Iraq independently during the Persian Gulf War, as Washington feared at the time once Saddam began firing missiles into Israel, the American coalition would have crumbled, and Iraq may have won the sympathies of the rest of the Islamic world. Saddam knew this very well, which is why he began attacking Israel in the first place.
The burned corpse of an Iraqi soldier in 1991. This photograph was banned from publication by the media during the war.
The US stirred up the Kurds and Shi’a in Iraq against Saddam’s government, which was dominated by Arab Sunnis, during the campaign, encouraging them to revolt. With the bulk of Iraq’s military in Kuwait, a full-scale revolution broke out shortly after a ceasefire was declared between Iraq and the US-backed coalition. Although the Iraqi army was badly mauled, enough of it successfully retreated back to Iraq and remained loyal to Saddam for it to quickly suppress these rebellions. The military’s loyalty demonstrates that many Iraqis saw Saddam and his regime as a positive thing, even in the wake of his crushing defeat in Kuwait. This was a lesson the US didn’t heed when it was planning its invasion of Iraq in 2003, when naïve neoconservatives claimed that coalition forces would be greeted by the Iraqis with flowers and music.
Sectarian violence, long suppressed by Saddam’s regime, exploded in Iraq following the US invasion. Out of this violence later emerged an extremely radical and brutal Salafi jihadist movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Soon, the world saw slave auctions and beheadings broadcast via ISIS’s online media arm. ISIS’s rise shows the value of ethnonationalism as an organizing social principle in society. Civic nationalist states often collapse along racial or ethnic lines, and all theocracies run the risk of social disorder when a purifying religious movement or a schism emerges. Ba’athism united Iraqis on the basis of their ethnicity and language, allowing Sunni, Shi’a, Christians, and other religious minorities to live together peacefully. While it is true that there was no place for the Kurds under Ba’athism, it’s impossible for Kurds to comfortably fit into an Arab society under any circumstance.
After Saddam
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
It’s now been 20 years since Saddam was captured. He was hanged after a guilty verdict was reached in an unjust trial in 2006. Saddam got his revenge upon America, however. The last two decades have changed America — and for the worse.
It is commonly said that those who pushed for the Iraq War were never punished. This is mostly true, but not entirely. The highest price paid by any group of the Iraq War’s supporters fell upon the Religious Right, especially Evangelical Protestants. In the lead-up to the war, its leaders went all in for George Bush’s plan for Iraq. Prominent Evangelicals wrote widely-circulated op-ed pieces which called the coming conflict a “just war” in 2002. Bush’s victories in 2000 and 2004 came in large part because of his support for traditional values, which was aimed at the Religious Right.
Unfortunately for American Christianity, the consequences of Bush’s poor decisions manifested almost as soon as he was reelected. The situation in Iraq, which had been steadily deteriorating since the invasion, grew much worse, and Americans were being injured and killed there every day. But that wasn’t all. Bush’s crony who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) turned out to be inept when floodwaters caused by Hurricane Katrina swallowed up New Orleans. Then, in 2008, Bush’s push to increase non-white home ownership by giving mortgages to minorities who had no ability to pay them off wrecked the entire global economy.
The mostly Jewish neoconservatives mostly got away with their efforts to bring about the Iraq disaster. The media never highlighted the fact that they were Jewish, but the Bush administration’s hiding of the fact that American support for Israel was a factor in the Iraq War was amplified in the national conversation. Many of the neoconservatives survived by rebranding. Israel First activists such as Victoria Nuland are today pushing the same poison.
The biggest irony of the last 20 years is the Saddam-like repression perpetrated by the Biden regime — despite the fact that Biden himself was a major promoter of the Iraq War while in the Senate. Within a single generation, those Americans who went to war to end totalitarianism in Iraq have discovered that it can thrive in America, too.
Bibliography
James Barr, Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain’s Secret War in Arabia, 1916-1918 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008).
Youssef M. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism: A History Nation and State in the Arab World (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).
John F. Devlin, The Ba’th Party: A History from its Origins to 1966 (Stanford, Calif: The Hoover Institution Press, 1974).
Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr. & Lawrence Davidson, A Concise History of the Middle East (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2010).
Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Michael J. Totten, Where the West Ends: Stories from the Middle East, the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus (Portland, Oreg.: Belmont Estate Books, 2012).
Notes
[1] The shift to Syria First and Iraq First Ba’athism was the result of Nasser’s failure to successfully unite Egypt and Syria into a cohesive polity. The differences between German and Arab national unification show the difficulties Nasser and the Syrian Ba’athists faced. When German unification efforts began after Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, questions immediately arose, such as whether a unified Germany would include the Austrian Empire or not. In 1849, the unifiers declared for a state without Austria and its Slavic and Hungarian minorities. The body that issued this declaration was not a constitutionally legitimate one, but nevertheless provided metapolitical cover for the Kingdom of Prussia to acquire parts of German-speaking Europe through conquest. Eventually, the Prussian army conquered or peacefully absorbed all of Germany, and then went on to ratify its gains after Germany defeated France in 1871. German unification took place over a longer time, was not dependent upon the fortunes of a single charismatic leader, and was backed by a victorious army and the government of an efficient Kingdom. The would-be Arab unifiers had no such advantages. Additionally, German reunification didn’t involve coups or assassinations. Blood was only spilled against foreign enemies.