The Iraq War (6 page)

Practical difficulties made the idea difficult to sustain; the
history of Islam for many centuries is a record of dissent and dispute, often violent, of succession by victory in war, not election, and, at times, of competing caliphates. Internecine violence always, however, affronted pious Muslims, so much so that Islam invented a unique institution, that of slave soldiery, to absolve those in dispute of the sin of fighting fellow believers. A unified Caliphate was only reestablished in comparatively recent times when the Ottoman Turks, a non-Arab people from Central Asia who had been recruited to serve as slave soldiers, imposed their authority over the Arabs by military force and assumed the Caliphate by diktat. From the sixteenth century onwards the history of Islam became largely that of the Ottoman empire, with its seat at Constantinople (Istanbul). Areas of the Islamic world, notably in India and South-east Asia, never formed part of the Ottoman Empire; many of its subjects, in south-eastern Europe and the Near East, remained Christian. The empire, however, embraced the historic heartland of Islam and almost all Arabs were, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, directly or indirectly subjects of the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph.

Power in the Ottoman world, both secular and religious, was dynastic; sons succeeded fathers, though favoured wives were often able to evade the principle of primogeniture and new sultans commonly consolidated their accession by murdering brothers en masse. The traditional principle persisted nevertheless; birth and religious status were the bases of worldly authority. Religious status could be quite widely drawn; the servants of the Sultan-Caliph, his ministers and military commanders, derived their authority from association with him. Thus, for example, the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt, whose leaders ruled the country during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were legitimized as the Sultan-Caliph’s viceroys (Khedive). Unnervingly, alternative legitimate power could also arise spontaneously, through the appearance of a Mahdi, a man directly guided by God. The most famous Mahdi of modern times was Muhammad Ahmed, who became ruler of Sudan in the 1880s.

Mahdism, dynastic usurpation, fragmentation of the Caliphate
or patronage by it were the only means, until the twentieth century, by which power could be transferred in the Muslim world. The historic ideas of the
Umma
, the community of believers, of the Caliphate and of the overriding authority of the Supreme Being and his law as revealed in the Koran, impeded the emergency of secular politics. Much was changed in the Islamic and particularly the Arab world, however, by its penetration by European imperial powers in the nineteenth century. The conquest of Algeria by the French after 1830 and the subordination of Egypt to British rule after 1882 subjected large numbers of Muslim Arabs to the processes of European government, based not on the ideas of religious fraternity or divine authority but on those of administrative efficiency and economic development; with them the Europeans brought also secular education and law, both quite alien to the Muslim mind, which for centuries had used schools as a means of Koranic instruction and the courts as a forum for judgement by
Sharia
, Koranic law.

European imperialism did not extinguish the power of Muslim ideas; in the long run, indeed, by a process of reaction, it was to reenergize Islam and in a highly aggressive form. In the early twentieth century, however, the worldly behaviour of some young Muslims was decisively altered by exposure to European thought and practice. In the Ottoman empire, dissatisfaction at the failure of the Sultan-Caliph’s government to stem the encroachment of European powers prompted a group of army officers, the ‘Young Turks’, to set up a modernizing régime; its leaders were irreligious Turkish nationalists; their tendency to treat the Arabs of the empire as subjects rather than fellow-Muslims led to the beginnings of what has been called ‘the Arab awakening’. The awakening was accelerated by Turkey’s defeat in the First World War which led to the fall of the Sultanate, the abolition of the Caliphate and the attachment of the Ottomans’ Arab provinces to the French and British empires as League of Nations mandated territories. Cast adrift in a world where a supreme Muslim authority no longer existed, the Arabs within the mandates and in the British protectorate of Egypt began to respond to direct rule by
Europeans by emulating European political forms. One manifestation, the Muslim Brotherhood, which appeared in Egypt in 1928, was specifically Islamic in character but sought to preserve religious values by adopting such European practices as recruiting young people into a Scout movement, founding schools, hospitals and clinics and building factories, all run on Islamic principles. The Muslim Brotherhood, eventually to be persecuted by Arab régimes of specifically secular character, has survived into modern times; one of its adherents, Sayyid Qutb, conceived the theory of Islamic renewal which inspired the terrorists of 11 September.

Another direction taken by the Arab awakening was the creation in Syria after the Second World War of a political party dedicated by title to ‘resurrection’. The Ba’ath Party, founded in 1944 by a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq, proclaimed the unity of all Arabic-speaking people and their right to live in a unitary state. It specifically denounced the boundaries imposed on the Arab lands by the empires – including the Ottoman. Aflaq went farther; Christian though he was, he invoked the idea of Islam, propounded by Muhammad, as the common inheritance of all Arabs, Muslim or not, and its rise as an historical experience which gave the Arabs a particular mission in the world. The Arabs were to transform themselves first by spiritual renewal and then their political and social systems. Paradoxically, Aflaq was politically a secularist and the Ba’ath was to become the first secular party in the Arab world. It gave no place as leaders to traditional religious figures and emphasized Western rather than Islamic social values: the importance of scientific and technical education and the equality of the sexes. Nevertheless the roots of Ba’athism were metaphysical, which perhaps explains its appeal to the Arab mind. Aflaq was also rigidly anti-Communist, regarding Communism as another form of foreign imperialism.

Ba’athism’s influence was geographically limited. It did not flourish in Egypt where during the 1950s another movement, loosely known as Arab socialism, achieved dominance through a revolution led by young army officers, notably Abdul Nasser.
Nasser adopted several of Aflaq’s ideas; he was an egalitarian and a secularist, fervently anti-imperialist and a champion of Arab unity, which he did much to advance by creating a United Arab Republic which briefly joined Egypt to Syria and established a presence in Yemen. Ba’athism’s most notable success was achieved elsewhere. During the 1950s it found followers in Iraq, several of whom were advanced to ministerial positions after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.

A junior Iraqi Ba’athist was Saddam Hussein, twenty-one in 1958. His prospect of advancement then looked slim. He was uneducated, uncouth and without connections; crucially he lacked any military position, a serious deficiency in view of the domination of the Ba’ath both in Iraq and Syria by young army officers, who were also the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Egypt. Saddam had sought admission to the Iraqi military academy but did not take the entrance examination. Frustrated in that ambition, he had become little more than a semi-criminal drifter, with a reputation for troublemaking and a talent for violence. Possessed of exceptional self-confidence and a ruthless will to succeed, qualities contained in a large and strong physical frame, he was nevertheless determined to become a man of power. In doing so, during the decades of the 1960s and ’70s, he single-handedly defined an entirely new form of Arab leadership, dependent neither on birth nor position nor assumption of religious authority but on the use of force and his personal skills in political manipulation. Saddam’s Arabism was irrelevant; had he been born German or Russian in the age of the dictatorships – and he greatly admired Stalin – he would have understood how to exploit disorder and instability to his advantage and could well have risen to dominance in the Nazi or Marxist-Leninist systems.

Saddam was born in the village of al-Ouja, a small and poor village on the Tigris near the provincial centre of Tikrit, sometime between 1935 and 1939; his birth date was not officially recorded and he is believed, in any case, to have altered it on marriage to make himself appear older than his wife. His father may not have been married to his mother, Subha Tulfah, who
was the dominant influence on his life. A strong-willed and outspoken peasant woman, who made a living as a clairvoyant, Subha was certainly married after Saddam’s birth to a fellow villager whom Saddam came to hate; he was scorned and mistreated. Subha, however, had a brother, Khairallah Tulfah, who assumed the role of surrogate father to Saddam and guided his early development. Khairallah, despite his humble origins, had been commissioned as an officer in the prewar Iraqi army, a status that greatly impressed Saddam. Khairallah also fixed Saddam’s political outlook. He hated foreigners, particularly the British, declared his admiration for Hitler and the Nazis and was a supporter of Iraq’s wartime ruler, Rashid Ali, who in 1941 had tried to arrange an alliance with Nazi Germany and for a German expeditionary force to enter Iraq. For his complicity in the plot Khairallah had been cashiered from the army and jailed for five years.

During Khairallah’s imprisonment Saddam, still a child and apparently often driven from the hut which was the family home by his stepfather, kept himself alive by thievery and odd jobs. He had, however, conceived the idea of getting an education and when Khairallah was released, joined him in Tikrit, where his uncle got him into school and supported him. Khairallah was a survivor. He found teaching jobs himself, joined the fledgling Ba’ath party and became sufficiently well-regarded as an educationist to be appointed director of education in Baghdad after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. By then he had moved to the Karkh district of the capital, taking Saddam with him. Saddam enrolled at Karkh high school and appears to have applied himself. He was still, however, the local provincial rough who ran a street gang and who fought with anyone who opposed him, mocked his peasant ways or supported the pro-British, monarchical government which represented the established order before the revolution of 1958.

The revolution of July 1958 led to Saddam’s initiation into the culture of political violence and opened his eyes to the possibilities of personal advancement to power by killing. He had joined
the Ba’ath party in 1957, apparently for idealistic reasons; since it then had only 300 members in Iraq the move was certainly not opportunistic. It was no doubt, however, influenced by his uncle Khairallah’s espousal of Ba’athism and by the advantage membership of the Ba’ath provided, as shown by his uncle’s appointment as Baghdad’s director of education. But Khairallah did not last long in the job. An Iraqi Communist, Saddoun al-Tikriti, denounced him as a man of unsavoury reputation and he was removed. Shortly afterwards Saddam, apparently at his uncle’s prompting or to avenge family honour, arranged to lie in wait for Saddoun outside his house and murder him by a shot to the head. It was too blatant a crime to be overlooked. Both Saddam and his uncle were arrested and taken into custody, where they remained for six months. In the absence of incriminating evidence, however, they were eventually released.

In another sense, the killing of Saddoun did Saddam no harm, rather the contrary. It conferred on him among fellow Ba’athists a reputation for ruthlessness, at a time when the party was looking for ruthless party loyalists. The Iraqi Ba’athists had been disappointed by the outcome of the 1958 revolution. Its leader, Abd al-Karem Kassem, was a regular officer of conventional views, anti-British and anti-monarchist but equally neither Nasserist nor Ba’athist in outlook. As an Iraqi nationalist, he was unwilling to see Iraq become subordinate to Egypt in an Arab socialist union and was equally resistant to the Ba’athist message of merging Iraq with its neighbouring states in a pan-Arab renaissance.

Had Kassem merely held aloof both from the Nasserists and the Ba’athists, his régime might have survived. Alarmed by the activism of the Nasserists and Ba’athists among the group of so-called Free Officers who had brought him to power, he turned to the Iraqi Communists, who in their enthusiasm for a Soviet alliance necessarily opposed both movements. In March 1959 some of the Free Officers therefore decided to stage a coup. It was an unwise move. The coup was badly organized, lacked popular support and quickly failed. Kassem took a savage revenge. Using the Iraqi Communist Party as his agency of repression, he
encouraged it to hunt down and murder all the complicit Free Officers. The avengers went farther; they also killed many of the officers’ nationalist supporters and in Mosul organised a mob reprisal which lasted a week and culminated in mass executions.

The surviving Ba’athists were outraged. Not only had Kassem set back their dream of creating a pan-Arab state, by severing Iraq’s ties with the Egyptian Nasserists. He had also killed many of the men who had risked their lives in rising against the monarchy. The Ba’athists decided on revenge in their turn. Their difficulty was that, as a still tiny party of professional people and students, they lacked members who had any familiarity with violence. A general who had survived Kassem’s purge, Ahmad al-Bakr, was a Ba’athist sympathizer, however, and he had appropriate contacts. As a Tikriti, he knew Khairallah and through the uncle he met the nephew. Recognizing that Saddam could be useful to the party as a thug and enforcer, he introduced him to Ba’athist party members. Saddam was not to be admitted to the party at once but he was selected to take part in the attempted assassination of Kassem which was being prepared in the autumn of 1959.

The attempt was botched, perhaps by Saddam’s hastiness in opening fire on Kassem’s motorcade on 7 October 1959. Kassem was only wounded and recovered. Saddam may have been wounded by return fire; he certainly always claimed to have been so. In the confusion which followed the shooting he made his escape, got home to his native village and then succeeded in crossing the frontier into Syria. Once arrived in Damascus, he was sheltered by local Ba’athists and introduced to the founder of the movement, Michel Aflaq. Aflaq, impressed by what were now Saddam’s credentials as a serious revolutionary, apparently admitted him to full party membership and arranged for him to find safer refuge with other Ba’athists in Egypt.