The Iraq War by John Keegan Read Free Book Online

overcome, captured and shot.
    Power now seemed to belong to the Ba’ath but the leaders of the coup appointed the non-Ba’athist Abd al-Salim Arif as President, with the Ba’athist Hasan al-Bakr as Vice-President. There ensued a troubled period of disputed authority. The Ba’ath had become the most important political force in Iraq but its factions could not agree, the points of difference, as usual, being over the relative weight to be given to the pursuit of Iraqi and wider Arab nationalism. Arif, who enjoyed wide support in the army, eventually used his military position to quash the Ba’ath, ruling thereafter as a military dictator. He created the Republican Guard as an inner army, recruited from dependable tribal allies, and he trod a narrow path between Nasserism and straightforward Iraqi nationalism. He proved a skilful politician and might have enjoyed a long period of power had he not been killed in a helicopter crash in 1966, apparently a genuine accident. Power then passed to his brother Abd al-Rahman Arif, another soldier, who attempted to perpetuate his system of personal rule. The second Arif, however, lacked the former’s skills and encountered more difficult problems, including the aftermath of the Arab disasterof 1967 in the war with Israel, a deteriorating situation in Kurdistan and the outbreak of a Communist-led revolt in the south. Under his uncertain hold on power, the Ba’ath was able to reorganize and to extend its tentacles, notably into units of the army and the Republican Guard. In July 1968 the Ba’ath staged a semicoup, which disposed of President Arif by putting him on an aircraft out of the country. It was subsequently unable, however, to agree on the division of power with the non-Ba’athists in the army who had joined in Arif’s removal and a fortnight later, on 30 July, it staged a second coup, which appointed the veteran Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr President, with his young kinsman Saddam Hussein as his deputy. Bakr’s base of power, though he held the post of secretary-general of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, was in the army. Saddam’s power, which he was already and secretly dedicated to making absolute, derived from his role as a Ba’athist, an experienced conspirator and a member of an extended family, clan and tribal network centred on the provincial centre of Tikrit. Hasan al-Bakr has been described by Charles Tripp, a leading historian of modern Iraq, as ‘a typical regimental officer, solicitous of the welfare of his subordinates and able to use the language of military collegiality to create a certain bond with fellow officers. Despite the radical Ba’athist rhetoric that he used when occasion demanded, his views were conservative and rather typical of his provincial background: pan-Arab to some degree, but also imbued with a keen awareness of status distinctions between different lineages and clans among the Sunni Arabs … of Iraq.’ Saddam, by contrast, was a completely uncollegial figure, solicitous of no one’s welfare but his own and animated by a Stalinist ruthlessness to acquire and maximize personal power.

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Saddam Hussein
    S addam Hussein, a poor and uneducated provincial youth, came to exercise absolute power in Iraq by a mixture of violence and political intrigue. His rise followed a novel and unusual path. Leadership in the Muslim world is traditionally associated with birth or religious status, often both together. Indeed, traditional Muslim society offered the ambitious none of the ways upward customary in the West. Worldly ambition was anyhow not a quality thought proper by pious Muslims. At the heart of the Muslim system lies the idea of the
Umma
, the community of fellow believers, commanded by the Koran to live in harmony under the authority of the Imam or Caliph, the successor of the Prophet. The succession divided Muslims almost from the beginning, soon after the death of Muhammad, into the Sunni majority, which believed that the Caliph, though he should