Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq is notable not only for its brutality but for its capacity to survive. The regime has endured war with Iran and then with the US, and international sanctions.
The current Ba’thist regime took power in 1968; Saddam himself had concentrated power in his own hands by the end of the 1970s. But this is not a regime which draws its legitimacy from a revolutionary movement. If anything, the opposite. The Ba’th was responsible for a reign of terror which brought to an end the properly revolutionary period in Iraqi history, the regime of Abdul Karim Qassim. Now the internal opposition to Saddam Hussein is extremely weak, and there is hardly any kind of socialist or working class opposition at all. Clive Bradley looks at how Saddam Hussein has managed to survive, and at how he might be got rid of
The 1958 revolution
The Free Officers’ coup of July 1958 brought General Qassim to power in Iraq. It was, like most “revolutions” in the Arab world, in the first place a military coup. But it also had widespread popular support. It carried out serious measures against the old regime, and—remarkably—it rested to a serious extent on a strong and popular Communist Party for its organised base.
The old regime had been a monarchy installed by Britain. It was a repressive, dictatorial monarchy, that presided over a society of gross social inequalities, especially in the countryside. The military coup which brought General Abdul Karim Qassim to power was immensely popular: huge demonstrations greeted the overthrow of the monarchy and the hated government of Nuri al-Said.
In many respects the new, republican regime modelled itself on the Nasser government in Egypt that had come to power six years earlier, and two years earlier had nationalised the Suez canal and fought off an Anglo-French-Israeli invasion. Like the Nasserists, the officers who seized power called themselves “Free Officers”. Like the Nasserists, the new regime embarked immediately on a land reform programme designed to break the power of the big landlords and redistribute the land to the poor peasants, the fellahin.
The regime was to take steps against the domination of the country by the mainly British Iraq Petroleum Company (although these measures fell far short of nationalisation).
There were, however, crucial differences with Nasserism—differences which were to lead the two regimes to become rivals and enemies, an antagonism which eventually exploded in internal Iraqi affairs: Nasserist nationalists were among those who bloodily overthrew Qassim in 1963.
The differences focused around the issue of Arab unity, or wahda, although this apparent ideological dispute masked deeper issues. Egypt, which under Nasser was championing the cause of Arab unity, had recently carried out a literal merger with Syria, forming the United Arab Republic. Already the cracks were showing, however. And, in any case, there was less of a base in Iraq for pan-Arab sentiment, which was (often correctly) perceived as being more to do with Egyptian ambition than with a genuine desire for unity. There was a strong tradition of purely Iraqi nationalism, and it was this that Qassim represented. Many Iraqi nationalists were dubious about submitting themselves to Nasser’s leadership and control.
Other factors fed this more particularist Iraqi nationalism. Iraq stood apart from other Arab countries in several respects, politically, socially and culturally. It did not have the cosmopolitan cities of Syria or Lebanon, out of which pan-Arab nationalism grew. There was, and still is, a large part of the Iraqi Arab population—probably a majority—who are Shi’a Muslims, dubious about the advantages of absorption by the neighbouring Sunni nations. And Iraq has the largest national minorities of any Arab country, certainly in the Arab east, principally the Kurds based in the mountainous north.
But, most significant of all, perhaps the largest organised force in the country in 1958 was the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). In this respect, Iraq was radically distinct from its neighbours. Egypt in 1952, for example, had a feeble Communist movement (the Muslim Brotherhood was more significant). But the ICP was a powerful force, with a real social base, which had been built up during the years of struggle against the monarchy, and with a list of martyred heroes of that struggle. The Free Officers themselves, although they had wide support, were a very small organisation within the armed forces, quite lacking in grassroots mechanisms. Qassim and his team were nervous of rival nationalists, in the army and outside it, who were more sympathetic to Nasser, among these being the (then still very small) Ba’th Party. The ICP offered support to Qassim, and this support was very welcome. It was not rewarded even with government posts for the Communists—or even with the legalisation of the Party—and Qassim was never so much as a fellow-traveller. But, for the first couple of years, the new regime depended to a very significant extent on Communist Party support and organisation.
In turn, the social base of the ICP was the large, relatively well-organised and militant working class. Here, also, Iraq was unusual, if not unique, in the Arab world. In the port of Basra, in the rail industry, and in the all-important oil fields, the working class and its trade unions were a force to be reckoned with. Combined with the urban poor (so-called sarifa, or shanty-town, dwellers), they were a central social base for the regime.
Wahda, unity, quickly became the central issue in Iraqi politics. On the one side, nationalists, Nasserists and Ba’thists inside and outside the armed forces campaigned for Arab unity—though whether with the slightest sincerity is another question. On the other, Qassim, reluctant to be subordinated to Nasser, and the ICP, mindful, for one thing, of Nasser’s severe repression at this time of the Egyptian Communist Party, opposed the call for unity. Two forms of nationalism crystallised, expressed in two Arabic words for nation: qawm, which refers to the wider Arab nation from Morocco to Iraq; and watan, meaning the individual nation state. Nasserists and the Ba’th were in theory qawmist; Qassim and the ICP were resolutely watanist.
The qawmist project failed. Even when the Ba’thists and their allies drowned their enemies in blood in 1963, they did not—then or later—embark on a pan-Arab project. Indeed, the Ba’th were, even by 1963, irrevocably split from the Syrian wing of what was notionally the same party, which took power that year (and as in Iraq, still holds it).
The high-point of ICP influence was between March and July 1959, between a botched attempt at counter-revolution in the city of Mosul, and the severe blood-letting in Kirkuk later in the year. In March, disaffected Free Officers planned an uprising in Mosul, apparently expecting support from Egypt. The plan was foiled, and violently suppressed by mass mobilisations dominated by the ICP. From that point, the Communists’ star was in the ascendant.
For a few months, they were the dominant force in Iraq, and it was widely believed that they could seize power, and that they intended to do so. Qassim was alarmed by the prospect, but he still needed the ICP. Others were more alarmed still. In fact the Communists never considered taking power, as we shall see. But in July, in Kirkuk, one of the main oil-producing centres where the ICP was strong, fighting broke out, fighting which escalated into a massacre.
The Kirkuk conflict was messily mixed up with ethnic antagonisms. The ICP had a base among Kurds, mainly migrant workers. But there had been long-standing communal hostilities with the Turcoman population, which tended to be better off. Perhaps 80 people were killed in the fighting, most of them Turcomans. Although the ICP hadn’t started the bloody rioting, they were widely held responsible for it, and for the Kurdish chauvinism at the heart of it. Qassim certainly used the events to distance himself from his Communist allies. It marked the end of the ICP’s dominant role in Iraq; from then on, the party weakened. When the time came for political parties to register as legal entities, Qassim rewarded the faithful ICP by recognising not them—the mass party of the Iraqi working class—but an entirely bogus “Communist Party” which hardly, if at all, existed.
The ICP consciously chose not to take power in the spring of 1959. On May Day of that year the Party brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets, which was seen by Qassim as a direct challenge to his power. But the ICP did not push the matter: they acknowledged Qassim as “sole leader”. Later they were, in the style of many Stalinist parties, to offer a self-criticism to the effect that they should have been bolder. By then, of course, it was far too late. Indeed, from this high point in 1959, the general curve of development for Iraqi Stalinism was downwards.
Does the fact that the ICP could have taken power in 1959 mean that socialist revolution was a real possibility? Or would this merely have been a Stalinist coup, which if it led to anything would only have been a Stalinist state on the European model? Clearly, given the actual political forces, if the Iraqi Stalinists had seized their moment, there is little reason to believe they would have ushered in a workers’ democracy. Yet in a real sense the ICP, as against Stalinist movements elsewhere in the “third world”, was sociologically a working class party. It organised the Iraqi (and to some extent the Kurdish) working class, through trade unions and so on. The working class was militant as a class—through strikes, and over economic and social questions as well as in support of the Qassim “revolution”. When Qassim was about to be overthrown in 1963 there were mass demonstrations calling for the arming of the people; and throughout the period there were strong elements of genuine popular mobilisation: the masses were more than simply a stage army for the military or the ICP—within which the working class itself was very important.
Probably it is an exaggeration to say that socialist revolution was possible: for one thing there was no class-conscious alternative to the ICP. But the prospects for socialist revolution were certainly better than at any other time in the Arab world.
The coup of 1963: the Iraqi Ba’th Party shows its colours
The “revolution” of 1958 was in many respects a bourgeois revolution, though carried out fundamentally by the army. The army has ruled Iraq ever since; notionally since 1968 and under Saddam, government has been “civilian” (and by a political party, the Ba’th), but in reality it has been a military dictatorship backed up with “civilian” torturers and secret police. There was a never a period even of partial bourgeois democracy.
After the ICP’s influence began to wane in the summer of 1959, Qassim’s own power base essentially started to dwindle. Rivals prepared to move against him. In 1961, Qassim promulgated the immensely popular Law 80, which reclaimed most of Iraqi territory from the control of the Iraq Petroleum Company, who, prior to that, had the right to prospect for oil in 95% of the country (repatriating profits, of course, mainly to Britain).
But in February 1963, his enemies in the military finally moved against him—led by Abd al-Salam Arif, who for a while in 1958 was Qassim’s colleague in power—and backed up by nationalists on the street, and especially the Ba’th Party. Terrible slaughter followed the coup, much of it engineered by the Ba’thists.
The Arab Ba’th (Resurrection, Renaissance) Party was founded in Damascus in 1944 by Michel Aflaq and Salh ad-Din Bitar. In the early 50s it fused with Akram Hawrani’s so-called Socialist Party (and added “Socialist” to the Ba’th Party’s name). Ideologically vague, the gist of the Ba’thist programme was for Arab unity and renewal. Its real base was Syria; at the time of the 1958 revolution in Iraq it was tiny. In Syria, it had some radical incarnations, which broke with its traditional leadership (Aflaq was to settle in Iraq after 1968); in Iraq, the party was only ever a brutally chauvinistic, right-wing nationalist grouping. They were the embittered enemies of Qassim, not least because of his support from the Communists. In 1959 they made an attempt on Qassim’s life—one of the conspirators being a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, one of their first acts was to finish that job, by murdering the president of the Republic. A further Ba’thist coup in 1968 would consolidate their rule.
The slaughter of February 1963 left thousands dead. As the coup was imminent, demonstrators demanded arms, but Qassim refused to hand them over. Responding to a call from the ICP to resist the coup on the streets, thousands tried to fight the army with makeshift weapons, and died in the attempt. Once the new regime was ensconced in Baghdad, although not officially a Ba’thist government, the Ba’thists used every opportunity to round up their enemies. The party had a militia, the National Guard, which functioned, effectively, as a secret police-cum-death squad. Sports grounds were turned into detention centres as thousands were arrested. Eventually, the military government was forced to distance itself from the Ba’th. But the scars on Iraqi society made in those few months still run very deep.
It seems that the ICP, still proclaiming its faith in Qassim as “sole leader”, did not fully expect the coup, or at least not the wanton savagery of the Ba’thists. It was a blow from which the Party never recovered.
In 1978, Saddam turned on the ICP. But they remained steadfast supporters of the Ba’th dictatorship, as part of the so-called National Front, even throughout the war on Kurdistan, including at its peak in 1974–75.
