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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iraq
Index
Khalafa Street, Baghdad
Courtesy Ronald L. Kuipers
Rashid Hotel, Baghdad
Courtesy Ronald L. Kuipers
Iraq's relations with other countries and with international
organizations are supervised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 1988 the minister of foreign affairs was Tariq Aziz, who had
served in that post since 1983. Aziz was a member of the RCC and
an influential leader of the Baath Party. Before becoming
minister of foreign affairs, he had been director of the party's
foreign affairs bureau. Aziz, Saddam Husayn, and the other
members of the RCC formulated foreign policy, and the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs bureaucracy implemented RCC directives. The Baath
maintained control over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and over
all Iraqi diplomatic missions outside the country through its
party cells that operated throughout the ministry and in all
embassies abroad.
In 1988 Iraq's main foreign policy issue was the war with
Iran. This war had begun in September 1980, when Saddam Husayn
sent Iraqi forces across the Shatt al Arab into southwestern Iran
(see The Iran-Iraq Conflict
, ch. 1). Although the reasons for Saddam
Husayn's decision to invade Iran were complicated, the leaders of
the Baath Party had long resented Iranian hegemony in the Persian
Gulf region and had especially resented the perceived Iranian
interference in Iraq's internal affairs both before and after the
1979 Islamic Revolution. They may have thought that the
revolutionary turmoil in Tehran would enable Iraq to achieve a
quick victory. Their objectives were to halt any potential
foreign assistance to the Shias and to the Kurdish opponents of
the regime and to end Iranian domination of the area. The
Baathists believed a weakened Iran would be incapable of posing a
security threat and could not undermine Iraq's efforts to
exercise the regional influence that had been blocked by non-Arab
Iran since the mid-1960s. Although the Iraqis failed to obtain
the expected easy victory, the war initially went well for them.
By early 1982, however, the Iraqi occupation forces were on the
defensive and were being forced to retreat from some of their
forward lines. In June 1982, Saddam Husayn ordered most of the
Iraqi units to withdraw from Iranian territory; after that time,
the Baathist government tried to obtain a cease-fire based on a
return of all armed personnel to the international borders that
prevailed as of September 21, 1979.
Iran did not accept Iraq's offer to negotiate an end to the
war. Similarly, it rejected a July 1982 United Nations (UN)
Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire.
Subsequently, Iranian forces invaded Iraq by crossing the Shatt
al Arab in the south and by capturing some mountain passes in the
north. To discourage Iran's offensive, the Iraqi air force
initiated bombing raids over several Iranian cities and towns.
The air raids brought Iranian retaliation, which included the
aerial bombing of Baghdad. Although Iraq eventually pushed back
and contained the Iranian advances, it was not able to force
Iranian troops completely out of Iraqi territory. The perceived
threat to Iraq in the summer of 1982 thus was serious enough to
force Saddam Husayn to request the Nonaligned Movement to change
the venue of its scheduled September meeting from Baghdad to
India; nevertheless, since the fall of 1982, the ground conflict
has generally been a stalemated war of attrition--although Iran
made small but demoralizing territorial advances as a result of
its massive offensives in the reed marshes north of Basra in 1984
and in 1985, in Al Faw Peninsula in early 1986, and in the
outskirts of Basra during January and February 1987. In addition,
as of early 1988 the government had lost control of several
mountainous districts in Kurdistan where, since 1983, dissident
Kurds have cooperated militarily with Iran.
Saddam Husayn's government has maintained consistently since
the summer of 1982 that Iraq wants a negotiated end to the war
based upon the status quo ante. Iran's stated conditions for
ceasing hostilities, namely the removal of Saddam Husayn and the
Baath from power, however, have been unacceptable. The main
objective of the regime became the extrication of the country
from the war with as little additional damage as possible. To
further this goal, Iraq has used various diplomatic, economic,
and military strategies; none of these had been successful in
bringing about a cease-fire as of early 1988
(see Introduction).
Although the war was a heavy burden on Iraq politically,
economically, and socially, the most profound consequence of the
war's prolongation was its impact on the patterns of Iraq's
foreign relations. Whereas trends toward a moderation of the
Baath Party's ideological approach to foreign affairs were
evident before 1980, the war helped to accelerate these trends.
Two of the most dramatic changes were in Iraq's relationships
with the Soviet Union and with the United States. During the
course of the war Iraq moved away from the close friendship with
the Soviet Union that had persisted throughout the 1970s, and it
initiated a rapprochement with the United States. Iraq also
sought to ally itself with Kuwait and with Saudi Arabia, two
neighboring countries with which there had been considerable
friction during much of the 1970s. The alignment with these
countries was accompanied by a more moderate Iraqi approach to
other Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan, which previously
Iraq had perceived as hostile.
Data as of May 1988
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