UNDERSTANDING THE MIDDLE EAST:
History, Religion, and the Clash of Cultures
400 pages
Copyright © 2007 by Beechmont Crest Publishing
First edition, 2007
0-9748330-6-1
C H A P T E R 10:
Saddam Hussein's Iraq
Saddam takes control of oil and the military
In 1977, Saddam took two actions that tightened his grip on the Iraqi state:
Saddam Hussein personally took over the entire Iraqi petroleum industry. He set oil output volumes, and managed the disbursement of oil revenues. This effectively gave Saddam control of the Iraqi economy.
He outlawed non-Ba’athist political parties. Saddam knew that previous Iraqi regimes had been toppled when the military turned against them. He intended to make sure that this would never happen to his regime. Saddam banned all non-Ba’athist political activity within the armed forces. In fact, it became a capital crime for a member of the armed forces to belong to any political party but the Ba’ath Party.
(The Iraqi state practiced nearly universal conscription; almost every able-bodied adult male was either a member of the armed forces, a reservist, or a member of a paramilitary group. So Saddam’s new rule effectively made it illegal for any Iraqi man to join an opposition party. )
Saddam's foreign policy moves
While still holding the office of vice president, Saddam Hussein (acting through al-Bakr when necessary) made some significant foreign policy moves in 1977 and 1978:
Saddam’s ongoing persecution of the Iraqi Communist Party was beginning to attract high-level attention in Moscow. Reversing an Iraqi foreign policy trend that had been in place since General Qasim’s day, Saddam distanced Iraq from the Soviet Union. However, he maintained the Iraqi-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, and he continued to rely on the Soviets as Iraq’s chief arms suppliers.
After Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem in 1977, Saddam angrily cut ties with Egypt. Saddam Hussein was always a die-hard enemy of Israel (and remained so until the end of his regime). Peace between Egypt and Israel was more than just an ideological blow: Saddam had been counting on Egypt as an ally in the event of a future war with Israel.
In October 1978 Saddam began a policy of rapprochement with Syria. (Although both countries were Ba’athist and fervently anti-Israeli, Iraq and Syria had been estranged since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Damascus and Baghdad had each accused the other of cowardice and duplicity during the war with Israel.)
Of all these foreign policy initiatives, the relationship with Syria was perhaps the most urgent. The 1978 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt gave the two Ba’athist states an incentive to mend their fences. With Egypt out of the anti-Israel bloc, Iraq and Syria suddenly needed each other.
In the most optimistic days of the Iraq-Syria rapprochement, there were even public discussions about the possibility of Iraq and Syria forming a union along the lines the now defunct United Arab Republic. Neither Saddam Hussein nor Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad had any serious intention of joining the two countries. But for Saddam, the exercise had an ulterior motive.
The pan-Arab nationalism vs. Iraqi nationalism debate was a contentious issue within the Ba’ath Party. Saddam was personally opposed to merging Iraq with any other country. But the discussions about a possible union gave him an opportunity to observe where individual members of Iraq’s Ba’ath Party stood on the matter. Some Iraqi Ba’ath Party members would pay with their lives for the opinions that they expressed during this period.
Copyright 2005 Beechmont Crest Publishing
