Struggles for Iraq
Iraq since 1958, Marion Farouk-Sluglett & Peter Sluglett, I B Tauris: London, 3rd edition 2001, 2003. pp390
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Clockwise from top left: some of the men fighting for Iraq: King Faisal II and Prince Abdel-Ilah; Abdel-Karim Qasem; Abdel-Salam Aref and Saddam Hussein
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First published in 1987, Iraq since 1958 by Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett has established itself as the best short history of post-revolutionary Iraq. Revised and brought up to date by Peter Sluglett for a third edition in 2001, this expanded version has now been reissued in a smart new paperback format by London publisher I B Tauris. For all those looking for background in English on current events in Iraq and on the country's modern development, the Slugletts' book is an ideal place to start.
In their "Foreword" to the first edition, the authors sketch some of the features of the social transformation and decolonisation that took place across the Middle East during the 1950s, forming the backdrop to the July 1958 revolution in Iraq that forms their book's starting point and that ended the country's ancien régime. These features included "the overthrow of the old landowning and politically dominant classes and their replacement by social strata drawn largely from the ranks of the lower middle classes; the dismantling of the political systems installed by the British or French [and] ...a growing concentration of economic activity in the hands of the state".
In addition, there was a "great acceleration in rural to urban migration", leading to falling agricultural production and the creation of "crises in housing, employment, transport and other services" in many cities, as well as, later, "changes in the balance of power in the Arab world since the oil price rise in the 1970s", leading to the massive enrichment of previously poorer countries, such as Iraq, giving possibilities for development undreamed of even a decade earlier.
These general features need to be kept in mind, the authors suggest, when interpreting modern Iraqi history, the general pattern of which has included them, as it has the sometimes decisive role of the military in politics and the increasing significance of the country's growing urban population, giving Iraqi politicians a potentially powerful weapon in orchestrating street shows of public support. Indeed, it has often been how well the succeeding regimes in Iraq since 1958 have handled these features, together with the opportunities and threats they have introduced, that has determined these regimes' success or failure.
However, a further feature of the last three decades in Iraq has been the development of a Ba'thist one-party political system, handing the reins of power to Saddam Hussein and apparently making him invulnerable to the coups that ended the regimes of his predecessors, while also greatly weakening the power of the country's officer class. As the Slugletts write towards the end of their book, a poisonous legacy of the Saddam regime in Iraq has been the suffocation of Iraqi civil society and of meaningful political participation, which was still high as late as the 1970s. Thus, they write, the challenge for post-Saddam Iraq will lie in restoring the rule of law and some measure of democratic pluralism, while at the same time reinvigorating Iraqi civil society, either suffocated or corrupted by the Saddam regime.
Following an introductory sketch of Iraq under the ancien régime, the authors begin their narrative of modern Iraq with the July 1958 coup that ushered in five years of high hopes and widespread change under the leadership of Brigadier Abdel-Karim Qassem.
Though a series of coups had been carried out in Iraq between 1936 and 1941, the British intervening in that year to put their candidate back in control of the country, the 1958 coup marked a clear break in the history of Iraq. Earlier coups, the Slugletts write, had been "essentially struggles for power between different factions" of the small circle of military officers and politicians that shared power under the monarchy, each aiming to hijack the state and gain access to the patronage that came with it. The 1958 coup by contrast, explicitly modelled on that carried out by the Free Officers in Egypt in 1952, "was specifically intended to overthrow the ancien régime", opening up the closed circles of power that had ruled Iraq since the foundation of the state under British tutelage in the 1920s and placing the country at the forefront of the transformations then taking place across the Middle East.
However, though the new republican regime abolished the main institutions of the former system, also distancing itself from Britain and establishing relations with China and the Soviet Union, "fundamental issues of principle, such as who should be in command, and what form of government and political system should be adopted, remained unresolved". Throughout 1958 and 1959, the authors write, "there was still a variety of possible trajectories", and the change of regime, together with the hopes for thoroughgoing social and economic change that this provoked, swiftly led to a dangerous polarity in Iraqi politics between the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), never as powerful again as it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and various nationalist, Ba'thist and other groups.
Qassem's regime, though apparently popular, did not succeed in establishing itself, and, perhaps as a result of Qassem's natural caution, alienated both the communists and the nationalists, satisfying the demands of neither. The Slugletts' opinion is that though the republican regime "devoted considerable resources to increasing the numbers of places available at all levels in the educational system, to improving health care, and enacting progressive labour legislation", as well as to "breaking the political power of the large landowners", thus going some way towards transforming Iraqi economy and society, Qassem refused either to ally himself with the powerful ICP or to adopt a Ba'thist, nationalist line, thus leaving himself without allies when the 1963 coup came that ended his rule.
Indeed, the authors write, Qassem's "over- confidence was expressed in a series of erratic and reckless acts that gave rise to serious doubts about his sanity. His extraordinarily quixotic attempt to annex Kuwait in the summer of 1961", something later carried out in fact of course by the Saddam regime in 1990, "is an example of the atmosphere of almost total unreality that pervaded these last years." Would-be assassins involved in an attempt on Qassem's life in October 1959 included the 23 year-old Saddam Hussein.
The beneficiary of a military coup that had established him in power, Qassem did not manage to legitimate the new regime, or his place in it, though "his failings ... can scarcely be discussed in the same terms as the venality, savagery and wanton brutality characteristic of the regimes which followed." As a result, the regime collapsed in the face of a military-backed Ba'thist coup in February 1963, a "textbook example" of its kind, leading to "acts of wanton savagery and brutality ... perpetrated by the Ba'th [sic] and their associates on a scale that no assertions... could possibly justify."
After an interim period under the rule of first Abdel-Salam 'Arif and then of his brother Abdel-Rahman, two army officers, the Ba'th returned to power in 1968, this time in the familiar guise of the "Hassan Al-Bakr- Saddam Hussein group" that one way or another was to rule Iraq until this year's US-led invasion.
The Slugletts devote considerable space to the Ba'th, notably in sections of their book entitled "The Origins of Ba'thism" and "The Ba'th in Iraq". The Ba'th Party, they write, "founded in Damascus in 1944 by three French-educated Syrian intellectuals, ... developed first as a national liberation movement in opposition to the French...[and] in common with other nationalist ideologies, Ba'thism is vague, romantic and mystical, and makes constant reference to an idealised version of the past." In Iraq in the 1960s, "the Ba'th was not a homogeneous body, and it was made up of a number of elements that could not always be relied upon to act in concert...In fact, these groups consisted largely of gangs of thugs." By the 1980s, if not before, "'politics' [in Iraq] had become so bound up with the cult of personality surrounding Saddam Hussein that it becomes difficult even to identify any specifically Ba'th 'ideology', let alone attempt any coherent analysis of it."
That being so, in the chapters of their book dealing with Iraqi history from the 1970s on, the Slugletts stress how effectively the ruling group, centred on Saddam, was able to consolidate and hold onto power, despite disastrous wars first against Iran, from 1980 to 1988, and then against the international coalition brought together after the 1990 Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait, followed by 12 years of UN-imposed sanctions. The personal ruthlessness of Saddam Hussein played a part, as did the unprecedented funds available to the state, or the Ba'th, to buy support and provide development. In a valuable chapter on "Economy and Society 1958 -- 1980", the Slugletts describe the oil-driven transformation of Iraq in the 1970s, giving the Ba'th leadership "a degree of power and independence never enjoyed by any previous government", and, through the construction boom this oil money funded, providing "tremendous opportunities for 'instant' enrichment and the accumulation of wealth" for a new class closely tied to the regime.
By 1980, and with the resignation of President Al-Bakr in favour of his second-in-command Saddam Hussein, that regime might be better described as the Saddam regime, since what the Slugletts describe as the "Ba'thisation of the state apparatus, of the means of coercion and of every sphere of political life, together with the marginalisation or outlawing of all other political forces", that took place in Iraq in the 1970s was accompanied by "a complex struggle for power and positions within the Ba'th leadership" eventually won by Saddam. Indeed, by 1977, the Iraqi Ba'th Party "was no longer -- if, indeed, it ever had been -- a body in which policy discussions and debate took place, and became simply a further means of asserting the authority of ... Saddam Husayn."
Today, post-Saddam, Iraq has emerged from a period during which there was, to borrow a phrase used by the Slugletts for Iran in the 1970s, "an almost total lack of ...conventional 'political' alternatives for the expression of dissent", serving to glamourise religious forms of politics. Saddam Hussein, writes Peter Sluglett in a final chapter dating from 2001, "is able to stay in power because of his total monopoly of the means of coercion, power and patronage"; at that date so depraved had the Saddam regime become that it "is not inconceivable that the present arrangements [of UN sanctions] suit the regime's Machivellian purposes, since it can always claim that its own benevolent intentions are being thwarted by the evil designs of the international community".
Following the regime's fall, fervently wished for by the Slugletts in the first edition of their book in 1987 as in the last in 2001, there are attractive options: "a federal structure for post- Ba'thist Iraq does not seem...unthinkable or unattractive." The book ends by noting that "it cannot be stressed sufficiently that the introduction of democratic accountability and the rule of law in an Iraq after Saddam Husayn will act as powerful factors for national integration: the longer this is delayed, the harder the achievement of that integration will be."
Reviewed by David Tresilian
