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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iraq
Index
Figure 1. Administrative Divisions of Iraq, 1988
IN THE LATE 1980s, Iraq became a central actor in Middle Eastern
affairs and a force to reckon with in the wider international
community. Iraq's growing role resulted from the way in which it
was adapting the principles of Baath (Arab Socialist
Resurrection) Party socialism to meet the country's needs and
from its somewhat unexpected success in compelling Iran in August
1988 to request a cease-fire in the eight-year-old Iran-Iraq War.
Iraq's reassertion in the 1980s of its role in the region and
in the world community evoked its ancient history. At one time
Mesopotamia ("the land between the rivers"), which encompassed
much of present-day Iraq, formed the center not only of the
Middle East but also of the civilized world. The people of the
Tigris and Euphrates basin, the ancient Sumerians, using the
fertile land and the abundant water supply of the area, developed
sophisticated irrigation systems and created what was probably
the first cereal agriculture as well as the earliest writing,
cuneiform. Their successors, the Akkadians, devised the most
complete legal system of the period, the Code of Hammurabi.
Located at a crossroads in the heart of the ancient Middle East,
Mesopotamia was a plum sought by numerous foreign conquerors.
Among them were the warlike Assyrians, from the tenth century
through the seventh century B.C., and the Chaldeans, who in the
sixth century B.C. created the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of
the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
In 539 B.C., Semitic rule of the area ended with the conquest
of Babylon by Cyrus the Great. The successors of Cyrus paid
little attention to Mesopotamia, with the result that the
infrastructure was allowed to fall into disrepair. Not until the
Arab conquest and the coming of Islam did Mesopotamia begin to
regain its glory, particularly when Baghdad was the seat of the
Abbasid caliphate between 750 and 1258.
Iraq experienced various other foreign rulers, including the
Mongols, the Ottoman Turks, and the British under a mandate
established after World War I. The British placed Faisal, a
Hashimite claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad, on the
throne in 1921. Popular discontent with the monarchy, which was
regarded as a Western imposition, led in 1958 to a military
revolution that overthrew the king.
Ultimately, the military regime installed a government ruled
by the Baath's Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) and created
the Provisional Constitution of July 16, 1970, that
institutionalized the RCC's role. Within the Baath, power lay
primarily in the hands of Baathists from the town of Tikrit, the
birthplace of Saddam Husayn, who played an increasingly prominent
role in the government in the 1970s. (Tikrit was also the
hometown of his predecessor, Ahmad Hasan al Bakr, who formally
resigned the leadership in 1979).
The Baathist government in 1970 granted the Kurdish minority
a degree of autonomy, but not the complete self-rule the Kurds
desired, in the predominantly Kurdish regions of Dahuk, Irbil,
and As Sulaymaniyah
(see
fig. 1). In the early 1970s, Iraqi
casualties from the renewed warfare with the Kurds were such as
to induce Saddam Husayn to sign an agreement with the shah of
Iran in Algiers in March 1975 recognizing the thalweg, or the
midpoint of the Shatt al Arab, as the boundary between the two
countries. The agreement ended the shah's aid to the Kurds, thus
eventually quelling the rebellion.
Saddam Husayn then turned his attention to domestic matters,
particularly to the economy and to an industrial modernization
program. He had notable success in distributing land, in
improving the standard of living, and in increasing health and
educational opportunities. Rural society was transformed as a
result of large rural-to-urban migration and the decline of rural
handicraft industries. Urban society witnessed the rise,
particularly in the late 1970s and the 1980s, of a class of
Baathist technocrats. In addition, the
Shia (see Glossary)
Muslims, who, although they constituted a majority, had been
largely unrepresented in significant areas of Iraqi society, in
which the minority
Sunni (see Glossary) Muslims were the
governing element, were integrated to a considerable degree into
the government, into business, and into the professions.
Buoyed by domestic success, Saddam Husayn shifted his
concentration to foreign affairs. Beginning in the late 1970s,
Iraq sought to assume a more prominent regional role and to
replace Egypt, which had been discredited from its position of
Arab leadership because of signing the Camp David Accords in
1978. Iraq, therefore, gradually modified its somewhat hostile
stance toward Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, seeking
to win their support. Relations with the Soviet Union, Iraq's
major source of weapons, cooled, however, following the Soviet
invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that began in December
1979. In contrast, Iraqi ties with France improved considerably,
and France became Iraq's second most important arms supplier.
The overthrow of the monarchy in Iran and the coming to power
in 1979 of Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini--whom Saddam
Husayn had expelled from Iraq in 1978, reportedly at the shah's
request--revived the historic hostility between the two
countries. Saddam Husayn feared the impact on Iraqi Shias of
Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalism and resented Iran's attempted
hegemony in the Persian Gulf region. Believing Iran's military
forces to be unprepared as a result of the revolutionary purges,
in September 1980, following a number of border skirmishes, Iraq
invaded Iranian territory. Thus began a bitter, costly, eight-
year-long war in which the strength and the revolutionary zeal of
Iran were clearly demonstrated.
From late 1980 to 1988, the war took precedence over other
matters. The Baath high command succeeded in controlling Iraq's
military institution to a degree that surprised foreign
observers. One of the major instruments for accomplishing this
control was the People's Army, which served as the Baath Party's
militia.
The Baath could do little, however, to counter Iran's
superiority in manpower and materiel. At times when Iraq
considered its situation particularly desperate--for example,
when Iranian forces appeared to be gaining control of substantial
areas of Iraqi territory, such as Al Faw Peninsula in the south
and the northern mountainous Kurdish area--Iraq unleashed a
barrage of missiles against Iranian cities. Further, reliable
reports indicated that Iraq used chemical warfare against the
enemy, possibly in the hope of bringing Iran to the negotiating
table.
To prevent domestic unrest as a result of the war, Saddam
Husayn adopted a "guns and butter" economic policy, bringing in
foreign laborers to replace those called to military service and
striving to keep casualties low. After drawing down its own
reserves, Iraq needed the financial support of its Gulf
neighbors. Of the latter, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates all provided Iraq with loans to help it
prosecute the war. Relations with Egypt also improved
significantly after the war's outbreak. Meanwhile Iraqi hostility
toward Syria, its fellow Baathist government but traditional
rival, increased as a result of Syria's strong support of Iran.
As part of his wartime economic policies, Saddam Husayn in
1987 returned agricultural collectives to the private sector, and
in 1988 he took measures to privatize more than forty state-run
factories because of the inefficiency and unprofitability of
agriculture and industry when under state control. These
privatizing steps reflected a desire for greater economic
efficiency rather than a change in economic ideology. Government
controls on the economy were decreased by cutting subsidies, by
allowing partial foreign ownership, and by reducing bureaucratic
regulation of enterprises, thus reducing labor costs.
Despite the introduction of more liberal economic policies in
Iraq in the late 1980s, few indications suggested that the
political system was becoming less rigid to any significant
degree. Ultimate decisions in both the economic and the political
realms apparently remained in the hands of Saddam Husayn rather
than in those of the constitutionally designated RCC. According
to a statement by Saddam Husayn to the Permanent Bureau of the
Arab Jurists' Federation in Baghdad in November 1988, the Baath
two years previously had approved steps toward democratization,
but these had been delayed by the Iran-Iraq War. The measures
included having a minimum of two candidates for each elective
post, allowing non-Baathists to run for political office, and
permitting the establishment of other political parties. In
January 1989, following an RCC meeting chaired by Saddam Husayn,
the formation of a special committee to draft a new constitution
was reported; according to unconfirmed reports in November, the
new constitution will abolish the RCC. Elections for the National
Assembly were also announced, and this body was authorized to
investigate government ministries and departments. The elections
took place in early April and featured almost 1,000 candidates
(among them 62 women, although none was elected) for the 250
seats; only 160 Baath Party members were elected. A number of
Baathist candidates also were defeated in the September Kurdish
regional assembly elections. The results of both elections
indicated a gradual downgrading of the prominence of the Baath.
The RCC, moreover, directed the minister of information to permit
the public to voice complaints about government programs in the
government-controlled press; and government officials were
ordered to reply to such complaints. The role of Saddam Husayn's
family in government affairs was somewhat muted as well.
Following the helicopter crash in a sandstorm on May 5 that
killed Saddam Husayn's brother-in-law and cousin, Minister of
Defense Adnan Khayr Allah Talfah, a technocrat who did not come
from Tikrit, replaced Talfah.
The internal security apparatus controlled by the Baath Party
continued to keep a particularly close check on potential
dissidents: these included Kurds, communists, and members of Shia
revival movements. These movements, such as Ad Dawah al Islamiyah
(the Islamic Call), commonly referred to as Ad Dawah, sought to
propagate fundamentalist Islamic principles and were out of
sympathy with Baath socialism. Furthermore, in 1988 in the final
stages of the war, both before and after the cease-fire, Iraq was
thought to have engaged in chemical warfare against the Kurds.
Conceivably the regime saw an opportunity to instill such fear in
the Kurds, a significant percentage of whom had cooperated with
Iran during the war, that their dissidence would be discouraged.
In the spring of 1989 the government announced it would
depopulate a border strip thirty kilometers wide along the
frontier with Turkey and Iran on the northeast, moving all
inhabitants, mainly Kurds, from the area; it began this process
in May.
In December 1988, reports surfaced of dissidence within the
army, in which Saddam Husayn lacked a power base. The projected
annual Army Day celebrations on January 6, 1989, were cancelled
and allegedly a number of senior army officers and some civilian
Baathists were executed. In February the regime announced that
all units of the People's Army would be withdrawn from the front
by late March; in July a further announcement disbanded the
three-division strong 1st Special Army Corps, formed in June
1986, but apparently some time would elapse before soldiers
actually returned to civilian status. Such measures were probably
occasioned by the continued success of the cease-fire, initiated
in August 1988. The cease-fire held, although a number of border
incidents occurred, of which the most serious was the Iranian
flooding of a sixty-four-kilometer frontier area northeast of
Basra. Informed observers considered the flooding designed to put
pressure on Iraq to return a strip of approximately 1,000 square
kilometers of Iranian territory on the steppe beyond Baqubah. On
October 27, Iran stopped flooding the area, probably as a prelude
to a new United Nations (UN) and International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC) mediation effort.
The peace talks under UN sponsorship, despite a score of
face-to-face meetings, had made little progress as of mid-
December. A few exchanges of prisoners of war (POWs), largely of
those that were ill or wounded, had taken place, but both Iraq
and Iran still held large numbers of each other's prisoners.
Saddam Husayn, who had agreed on October 5, 1988, to the ICRC
plan for prisoner repatriation, in March 1989 proposed in a
letter to UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar that the
UN guarantee the return of the freed POWs to civilian life.
Saddam Husayn made his proposal in the hope that this guarantee
would reassure Iran, which held approximately 70,000 Iraqi POWs--
whereas Iraq held about half that number of Iranians--that the
balance of power would not be disturbed. Iran has refused to
exchange prisoners or to implement any of the ten points of UN
Security Council Resolution 598 dealing with the dispute until
Iraq returns all Iranian territory.
A major source of disagreement in the peace negotiations was
Iraq's insistence on sovereignty over the Shatt al Arab, as
opposed to the divided ownership created under the 1975 Algiers
Agreement. Failing such a settlement, Iraq threatened to divert
the waters of the Shatt al Arab above Basra so that it would
rejoin the Gulf at Umm Qasr, a port that Iraq had announced it
would deepen and widen. Iraq was eager to have Iran allow the UN
to begin clearing sunken ships from the Shatt al Arab so as to
permit Iraqi access to the sea.
Iraq, meanwhile, had launched a diplomatic campaign to
improve its relations with other countries of the region,
particularly with Jordan and Egypt. In the last half of 1988,
beginning even before he accepted the cease-fire, Saddam Husayn
met five times with King Hussein and three times with Egyptian
president Husni Mubarak. These high-level meetings included
symbolic elements, such as Saddam Husayn's accompanying Hussein
on a visit in Baghdad to the graves of Faisal and Ghazi, the
Hashimite kings of Iraq, an indication of a considerably more
moderate Iraqi Baathist attitude toward monarchy than had been
evident in the past. The meetings were designed to bolster
political and economic support for Iraq (in December 1988 Iraq
concluded a US$800 million trade agreement with Jordan for 1989),
as well as to coordinate Arab policy toward the Palestine
Liberation Organization and toward Israel, a revision of Iraq's
previous rejection of any Arab-Israeli settlement. In addition,
Saddam Husayn sought to reassure Saudi Arabia, from which Iraq
had received substantial financial support during the Iran-Iraq
War, that Iraq had no intention of dominating or of overthrowing
the Persian Gulf monarchies.
In its relations with the Western world, Iraq also exhibited
greater moderation than it had in the 1970s or early 1980s. For
example, the United States Department of State indicated in late
March 1989 that Iraq had agreed to pay US$27.3 million
compensation to relatives of the thirty-seven American naval
personnel killed in the 1987 Iraqi attack on the USS
Stark. During the war with Iran, Iraq had borrowed
extensively from France, Britain, Italy, and to a lesser extent
from the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and Japan.
These countries would doubtless play significant roles in Iraq's
reconstruction and rearmament; in view of their commercial
interest, Iraq has succeeded in having its loan repayments
rescheduled. For example, Iraq signed an agreement with France in
September 1989 allowing it to repay its indebtedness, due in
1989, over a six- to nine-year period, and completing
arrangements for Iraq's purchase of fifty Mirage 2000s.
Since the cease-fire in August 1988, Iraq has undertaken an
extensive rearmament program involving foreign arms purchases and
the intensified development of its domestic arms industry to
generate export income as well as to meet domestic needs. The
First Baghdad International Exhibition for Military Production
took place from April 28 to May 2, 1989, featuring numerous types
of Iraqi arms. Among weapons Iraq produced in 1989 were a T-74
tank, called the Lion of Baghdad, and an Iraqi version of the
airborne early warning and control (AWACS) aircraft, developed
from the Soviet Ilyushin Il-76. Iraq named the plane the Adnan-1
after late Minister of Defense Adnan Khayr Allah Talfah. A
military development that aroused considerable concern in Israel
was Iraq's launching from its Al Anbar space research center in
early December of a forty-eight ton, three-stage rocket capable
of putting a satellite into space orbit. The minister of industry
and military industrialization also announced that Iraq had
developed two 2,000-kilometer range surface-to-surface missiles.
Apart from the need to replace lost armaments, the war
imposed a heavy reconstruction burden on Iraq. To rebuild the
infrastructure and to prevent disaffection among the population
of the south who had suffered particularly, the government gave a
high priority to the rebuilding of Basra. On June 25, Iraq
published the completion of the basic reconstruction of Basra at
a cost of approximately US$6 billion, stating that work was then
beginning on rebuilding Al Faw, which prior to wartime evacuation
had about 50,000 inhabitants. The government has also announced
programs to create heavy industry, such as new iron and steel and
aluminum works, to build another petrochemical complex, to
upgrade fertilizer plants, and to reconstruct the offshore oil
export terminals at Khor al Amaya and Mina al Bakr. In June 1989
Iraq reported its readiness to accommodate very large crude oil
carriers at a new terminal at Mina al Bakr.
Iraq has taken other economic measures to stimulate oil
production and to control inflation. Since the cease-fire, Iraq
has pumped nearly its full OPEC quota of 2.8 billion barrels of
oil per day. In September 1989, Iraq completed its second crude
oil pipeline across Saudi Arabia, with a capacity of 1,650,000
barrels per day, terminating at the Red Sea just south of the
Saudi port of Yanbu. These major economic ventures have led to
inflation. To counter price rises, the regime has set weekly
prices on fruit and vegetables and in late June instituted a
price freeze for one year on state-produced goods and services.
Concurrently it authorized an additional monthly salary of 25
Iraqi dinars (approximately $US80) for all civil servants and
members of the police and military forces.
The negative economic consequences of the war extended beyond
the reconstruction of cities and war-damaged infrastructure to
include postponed development projects. For example, the massive
rural-to-urban migration, particularly in southern Iraq, caused
by the war had intensified a process begun before the war and had
created an urgent need for housing, educational, and health
facilities in urban areas. The war also had serious effects on
Iraqi society, exacerbating the strained relations of Iraqi Arabs
with the leading minority, the Kurds. The war, however, exerted a
positive influence by promoting a greater sense of national
unity, by diminishing differences between Shias and Sunnis, and
by improving the role of women. The aftermath of the war
permitted modification of traditional Baathist socialist
doctrines so as to encourage greater privatization of the
economy, although the degree to which the government would
maintain its reduced interference in the economic sphere remained
to be seen.
The end of the war left a number of unknown factors facing
the Iraqi economy and society. One was the size of the postwar
world petroleum demand and whether Iraq could sell its potential
increased output on the international market. An important
unanswered social question was whether women who had found
employment during the war would return to domestic pursuits and
help increase the birthrate as the government hoped. Although
women might remain in the work force, presumably, work permits of
most foreign workers brought in during the war would be
terminated.
An immediate result of the war was an attempt by the
government at political liberalization in allowing multiple
candidates for elected posts and by offering an amnesty for
political, but not for military, offenders. A test of this
liberalization will be whether the reforms promised by the end of
1989--the new constitution, legalization of political parties
other than the Baath, and freedom of the press-- occur. Measures
taken as of mid-December reflected only minimal lessening of the
personal control of President Saddam Husayn over the decision-
making process in all spheres of the country's life.
The end of the war left many security issues unresolved.
Although the regime had disbanded some armed forces units, would
Iraq maintain a strong, well-trained army, posing a potential
threat to its neighbors and to Israel? Also, what of the Iraqi
POWs returning home after several years' indoctrination in POW
camps in Iran--could the government of Saddam Husayn rely on
their loyalty? Finally, Iraq faced the problem of its traditional
Sunni-Shia dichotomy. The war had demonstrated the ability of
Iraqi Shias to put nationalist commitment above sectarian
differences, but the influence of fundamentalist Shia Islam in
the area, represented by the Iranian regime, would continue to
threaten that loyalty.
December 15, 1989
Helen Chapin Metz
Data as of May 1988
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