Broken
Promises by Amatzia Baram
The history of contemporary Iraq is usually seen
as the tale of a single tyrant, but it is also the story of an
idea and an ideology. The idea is pan-Arab nationalism, and
the particular ideology that gave it form in Iraq, and in
neighboring Syria, is Baathism. From its founding in Damascus
by French-educated intellectuals during the 1940s, the Baath
Party propounded the doctrines that would guide and inspire
Syrian and Iraqi leaders, including Saddam Hussein, through
decades of tumultuous and ultimately tragic history. Long
before Saddam’s downfall in the spring of 2003, the Baath
program had betrayed and devoured its own ideals: The quest
for Arab unity led to wars of conquest, freedom became
oppression, and socialism descended into exploitation and
poverty. Saddam Hussein may be gone, but the pan-Arab and
Baath legacies remain forces with which anyone contemplating
the future of Iraq must reckon.
During the 1930s, when
they were still young high school teachers in Damascus, Michel
Aflaq (1910–89) and Salah ad-Din al-Bitar (1912–80), the two
men who would go on to create the Baath Party in 1940, had few
fully formed ideas. One idea, though, was as unambiguous as it
was powerful: the need to unify all the Arab lands into one
political entity. In what would become the party’s holy
trinity of principles—Unity, Freedom, Socialism—unity would be
by far the most cherished.
Much like the German
romantic nationalist ideologue Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762–1814), whom they admired, Aflaq and Bitar saw language
as the basis of national identity. All Arabic speakers, they
argued, must go through a mental revolution, forsake all
selfishness, and dedicate themselves to the great Arab
national cause. This would bring about a “resurrection”
(baath)
that would awaken the Arab nation from its slumber and lead to
the birth of a united Arab state stretching from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Persian Gulf. Through such a state, and only
through it, the Arabs would be able to end their long decline,
retake their rightful place among the nations, and carry “an
eternal message” to humanity.
There’s no reason to doubt the genuine commitment
of these teachers and their early disciples to the goal of
Arab unity. Indeed, when Syria experienced political turmoil
in late 1957 and early 1958, Syria’s Baath party, with Bitar
in the post of foreign minister, pushed the rest of the
country’s political elite toward unification with Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s Egypt. It wasn’t only ideological zeal for Arab unity
that inspired the Baath. The political crisis in Syria
threatened them, and they believed that Nasser would provide
them with protection, while they would provide him with
ideological guidance. Yet their commitment should not be
underestimated. When the Egyptian president demanded a fully
integrated Arab state rather than the federal one they
preferred, the Baath leaders immediately consented. When
Nasser insisted that he serve as the sole president, they
agreed. They even volunteered to disband the Baath Party and
integrate it into Nasser’s mass political organization. A deal
was struck in 1958, but the resulting United Arab Republic had
a short and stormy life, lasting only until 1961. Yet when it
dissolved, Aflaq, still fully wedded to the ideal of unity,
refused to sign the secession document, and Bitar, who did
sign, later regretted his decision.
The sediment of failure
left by the dissolution of the United Arab Republic turned
into a poison that killed every subsequent attempt at
unification. The self-interest of the party and its leaders
became paramount. When Baath regimes came to power in Baghdad
and Damascus within a month of each other early in 1963, both
again turned to Cairo with hopes of unification. But the
discussions very quickly became acrimonious. The three
countries did sign a unification protocol on April 17, 1963,
but the marriage was never consummated. Not even the two Baath
states, Iraq and Syria, would ever be able to unite.
The Iraqi Baath regime was driven from power
later in 1963 by General Abd as-Salam Arif, a Nasserist with
no interest in unification with the Syrians, and when the
Baath regained control in 1968 under Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr,
Baghdad and Damascus made some halfhearted attempts to forge
unity. But these efforts soon gave way to growing hostility,
brought on in part by each regime’s meddling in the other’s
country. Despite their pan-Arab rhetoric, both Baath
governments were minority regimes. The Iraqi leadership was
essentially Sunni Arab (though it did include some Shia) in a
majority-Shia land, while in Damascus, a few Sunni Arabs
notwithstanding, the Baath Party was rooted in the small
Alawite Arab minority. Neither regime could resist the
temptation to appeal to the disgruntled majority across the
border in the name of “true” pan-Arabism. For a time, the
necessity of presenting a united front against Anwar
as-Sadat’s Egypt after the 1979 Camp David agreements did
bring the regimes closer together, but unity talks again
failed miserably.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis
began introducing major changes in Baath ideology, especially
after Saddam assumed the presidency in 1979. The party’s
founders had envisaged a united Arab state, founded on
egalitarian principles, with all earlier Arab states and
people dissolved into one homogenous superstate. But the Iraqi
Baath began moving toward an Iraqi-centered, imperial pan-Arab
concept. The Iraqi people, Saddam and his court ideologues
argued, would never dissolve and disappear. The Iraqi nation
had been born many thousands of years ago; it had established
the earliest and greatest civilizations on earth, starting
with Sumer and Akkad, through Babylon, Assyria, Chaldea, and
the Abbasid caliphate, and culminating in the Baath regime.
Iraq was destined for greatness—it would lead the whole Arab
nation. For the foreseeable future, therefore, it would be
more important to pursue Iraqi interests than to sacrifice
Iraq on the altar of Arab causes. Naturally, the new theory
did not have much appeal to other Arab states.
By the time the Iran-Iraq
War broke out in 1980, relations between the Baath governments
in Iraq and Syria had deteriorated to such an extent that
Syria sided with non-Arab Shia Iran. During the Kuwait crisis
of 1990–91, the Syrians went so far as to send troops to Saudi
Arabia to oppose the Iraqis. By the late 1990s, relations
between the Baath twins saw some improvement, but mutual
mistrust still prevailed. And in fall 2002, Syria joined all
14 other members of the United Nations Security Council in
endorsing Resolution 1441, which called on Iraq to disarm
(though Damascus opposed the U.S.-led invasion that followed).
During the entire period
since the founding of the Baath movement, only one form of
unification in the Arab world has met with any success:
unification through military force. In 1976 Syria conquered
Lebanon, which it still occupies (but hasn’t annexed). And in
1990, Iraq briefly swallowed and annexed Kuwait—a step Saddam
justified partly in pan-Arab terms. Even a unification project
that at first seemed very successful, the 1990 union of North
and South Yemen, led within four years to rupture and war.
Reunification did occur, but only through conquest.
Sixty years after the
birth of the Baath Party, the pan-Arab promise it embodied has
yielded bitter fruit. The mirage of Arab unity sucked Baath
Iraq and Syria and Nasserist Egypt into very costly political
adventures—a failed unification, chronic meddling in one
another’s domestic affairs—and a variety of military
adventures against other Arab states. Pan-Arab aspirations
also led these regimes to promise complete salvation to the
Palestinians and the total destruction of Israel, promises
they could not keep. These assurances not only led the three
Arab nations into disastrous wars against the Jewish state,
they also kept the Palestinians waiting for the promised
redemption, and prevented them from reconciling themselves to
the idea of a compromise solution.
The Baath were no different
from others in the Arab world in bitterly opposing Israel, but
they were different from some others in propounding an
ideology that was, at least in the beginning, notably secular.
As it was formulated by Michel
Aflaq in the 1940s, Baath thought committed the party to the
principle of a secular state. Aflaq’s own origins as a
Christian Arab had something to do with his notion of a
language-based Arab nation committed to secularism—how else
could he ensure his acceptance as an equal by his Muslim
compatriots? In the 1940s, however, these ideas were also
popular among educated young Muslims who were the product of
the state’s secular school system and who saw in them a way to
marry their Arab-Islamic identity to the modern spirit.
“Islam,” Aflaq told his
disciples, is “equal to other religions in the Arab State,”
thus excluding the possibility that there would be any
official religion. A secularized state would “free religion
from [the influence of] political circumstances” and enable it
to flourish and exert a positive moral influence on people.
The state should be “based on a social foundation, Arab
nationalism, and a moral one: freedom.” There’s not a single
explicit mention of Islam or religion in the text of the
party’s founding constitution.
But Aflaq also needed to
make sure that his fledgling movement would take root in the
larger community, where Islamic history and heroes had great
meaning even to those who were not deeply religious. No
wonder, then, that he called upon all Arabs to admire Islam
and the Prophet, because of Islam’s “important role in shaping
Arab history and Arab nationalism.” Aflaq also insisted that
the Baath movement opposed atheism, and that “it is impossible
to separate [Baathism] from religion”—an equivocation that
would later catch up with him.
When the Baath Party returned to power in Iraq in
1968, it walked a tightrope between its traditional secularism
and popular opinion. In arenas that had been regulated along
fairly secular lines under the monarchy (1921–58)—education,
entertainment, and even alcohol consumption—it adopted similar
policies. Its campaign to trumpet the greatness of the
pre-Islamic “Iraqis” (ancient Mesopotamians) and Arabs was
another sign of its secularism. But the regime also paid lip
service to Islam. In two early constitutions, Islam was
identified as the “state religion.” The main all-Islamic
festivals and holidays were brought under the government’s
umbrella, as were some specifically Shia ones. Minimal
restrictions were imposed on public activities that might
infuriate Islamic traditionalists, such as blatant public
breaking of the fast during Ramadan. In other words, the
regime adopted a populist and pragmatic (or opportunistic)
policy of allowing the secular public—perhaps a majority of
the population—to continue its unorthodox way of life, while
keeping the more orthodox circles reasonably happy.
It became much harder to
straddle the secular-religious divide after Ayatollah Ruholla
Khomeini rose to power in Tehran in 1979. The Iranian leader
and Shia holy man made very effective use of religious
rhetoric, accusing Baghdad of rejecting Islam and embracing
atheism. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), Saddam worried
that members of Iraq’s Shia majority might side with their
coreligionists in Iran, and his regime tried to portray
Khomeini as a Persian heathen who had nothing to offer Iraq’s
Arab Shia. Increasingly, Baghdad tried to wrap itself in the
colors of Islam. One of the oddest manifestations of this
strategy came in June 1989, when Baghdad announced the death
of Michel Aflaq. A party communiqué announced that just before
his death Aflaq had “embraced Islam as his religion.” In
death, the old ideologue’s equivocations finally overtook him.
As the 1990–91 Kuwait
crisis deepened, Saddam increasingly turned to Islam, no doubt
hoping to rally Iraqis and to shore up Islamic support in the
international arena. The Iraqi president portrayed himself as
the leader of the Arab nation and the Islamic world, and he
even started portraying himself as the bearer of the message
to humankind. On January 14, 1991, one day before the deadline
set by the United Nations for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait,
Saddam commanded that Iraqis add the slogan Allahu Akbar (“God is
great”) to the national flag.
With the defeat in
Kuwait, a Shia uprising (brutally suppressed in March 1991),
and the increasing deterioration of the economy, Saddam took
more steps to Islamize Iraqi institutions. Beginning in 1994,
a host of sharia laws transformed the Iraqi penal code.
Eventually, he even prohibited the public consumption of
alcohol—reversing an 80-year-old policy. Robbery and car theft
were now punished by amputation of the right hand at the
wrist. “In case of repetition the left foot should be
amputated at the ankle,” said the official decree. Iraqi
television dwelled on the offenders and their blood-drenched
limbs—Islamization had the added benefit of providing the
regime yet another means of terrorizing its fear-stricken
population.
After unity, freedom was the Baaths’ most
important ideal. At first, it had two different meanings:
liberation from foreign occupation, and internal democracy.
After the French left Syria and General Abd al-Karim Qasim
toppled Iraq’s pro-British monarchy in 1958, internal party
democracy took on greater importance. And the principle was
reasonably well observed. Before the Egyptian-Syrian-Iraqi
unity talks in 1963, Baath spokesmen even provoked Egyptian
wrath by speaking with disapproval of Nasser’s “dictatorial”
rule. This, an angry Nasser later informed his Baath
interlocutors, was one reason the talks failed.
The 1947 Baath
Constitution is full of provisions that sound like
genuine commitments to Western liberal-democratic principles.
Aflaq and Bitar, having been educated in French-run Syria and
graduated from the Sorbonne, were well acquainted with Western
European democracy. The document declares that the “freedom of
speech, assembly, [and religious] belief is sacred, and no
authority can undermine it.” It also says: “The judicial
authority will be independent. It will be free from
interference by other authorities and enjoy total immunity.”
There are many similar provisions. But the constitution also
left a small escape hatch in Article 20: “The rights of
citizenship are granted in their totality” only to the citizen
“devoted to the Arab homeland and who has no connection to any
racist [or factious] organization.”
In any event, days after
the party came to power in Iraq for the first time in February
1963, its leaders began a massacre of their political rivals.
Hundreds of real and suspected communists were murdered during
the first days, and arrests, murders, assassinations, and
executions continued until General Arif removed the party from
power in November 1963. When the Iraqi Baath came to power
again in 1968, the government promptly conducted a mock
espionage trial and public hanging of nine young Jews in
Baghdad’s Liberation Square. As foreign minister Tariq Aziz
noted a few years later, the public hanging of the Jews was a
matter of expediency; many Iraqis believed (correctly, it
seems) that the first Baath regime had come to power with the
support of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and their
successors felt compelled to demonstrate their determination
to “eradicate the espionage networks.” By 1968, the Iraqi
Baath’s internal security czar was a young, little-known man
from the town of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Nasiri
al-Tikriti. Arrest, torture, and, occasionally, the
assassination of suspected communists and other enemies were
now the order of the day. Iraq had become what was probably
the most coercive police state in the Middle East (which is
saying a lot).
After Saddam jailed,
executed, murdered, or drove out of the country many real and
perceived enemies of the party, he turned against his own
rivals within the Baath. The lucky ones lost only their jobs.
In 1979, he became president by forcing his elderly relative,
President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, to resign. Then Saddam
initiated a sweeping purge. He began his campaign at a session
with scores of the party’s most senior officials by conducting
a witch-hunt that would have been the envy even of Joseph
Stalin. As the scene was recorded on videotape, members of the
highest party and state bodies, many in a state of shock, were
dragged out of the hall to face party firing squads.
Eventually, hundreds of party officials and senior army
officers were executed.
Any shred of respect for human rights or other
democratic values that had survived the earlier years of Baath
Party rule now disappeared. Party membership was made
compulsory for many Iraqis in responsible positions. By
joining, they accepted severe political and security
limitations, including some that promised a death sentence if
violated. By 1989 the number of party members had swelled to
1.5 million, but the privileged rank (one of four ranks of
membership) remained strictly controlled, not exceeding
25,000. Interviews with ex-members suggest that the last
vestiges of internal party democracy soon vanished.
After Ayatollah
Khomeini’s triumphant return to Tehran in 1979, Iraq saw a
wave of pro-Khomeini demonstrations by its own Shia citizens.
The Baath regime responded with severe repression. By the
autumn of 1980, hundreds had been executed—including an
ayatollah, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr—and thousands jailed. Tens
of thousands of Shia were forced to cross the border into
Iran. As if not to be outdone in brutality, Saddam’s Baath
counterpart in Damascus, President Hafiz al-Asad, in 1982
ordered his special forces to bombard the city of Hama, where
the Muslim Brotherhood had been active. At least 20,000
residents were killed. Baghdad did not lag behind in brutality
for very long. In an operation named “War Booty,” launched in
response to a Kurdish revolt in the north in 1987 and 1988,
Saddam’s troops murdered between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds,
many of them women and children. And when Iraqi Shia in the
south revolted in March 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, the
army slaughtered another 30,000 to 60,000 people. These
massacres were beyond anything the party’s founders could have
imagined in their worst nightmares.
Despite these unrelenting
horrors, the Baath regimes in Baghdad and Damascus carefully
maintained all the trappings of democracy. Since 1980 Iraq has
had an elected parliament, which is of course a rubber stamp.
When the people went to the polls in 1995, more than 99
percent voted in support of Saddam’s presidency; he got
precisely 100 percent of the vote in 2002. By the beginning of
2003, both Iraq and Syria could boast presidential and
parliamentary elections, along with a variety of newspapers,
magazines, broadcasting outlets, labor unions, and other
organizations. But the two most dictatorial regimes in the
Arab world were, in this order, those of the Baath in Baghdad
and Damascus.
In the economic realm,
the Baath vision was inspired by the theories of the Fabian
Society, the genteel and highly influential socialist
intellectual movement of early-20th-century Britain. The state
would control big industry and transport, banks, and internal
and external trade. It would direct the course of economic
development, and, of course, it would provide a guaranteed
minimum standard of living for all.
Almost as soon as they
came to power in Iraq and Syria, the Baath regimes embarked on
major socioeconomic reforms and development projects. In
1969, Baghdad made a bid for support in the countryside,
especially in the Shia areas, by substantially expanding the
land reform that had been launched under General Qasim in
1958. It also created an extensive system of farm cooperatives
(designed in part to give it greater control over the
peasantry). The cooperatives, however, were an economic
failure and had to be disbanded. After it nationalized the oil
industry in 1972 and began reaping the benefits of the oil
price boom of 1973–74, the regime started investing huge sums
in heavy industry, roads, and water and electrical systems in
the countryside. Health, education, and other government
services took a quantum leap, and for the first time urban
workers enjoyed something of a social safety net.
But this
petrodollar-financed largesse for the common people was
accompanied by a burst of semiofficial corruption on a very
large scale. A stratum of new millionaires emerged, most of
whom had made their fortunes through patron-client
relationships with the regime’s luminaries. Some had amassed
their wealth by gaining monopolies on prize agricultural land,
establishing thriving farms that enjoyed substantial state
subsidies. Others had prospered thanks to lucrative contracts
with the state. Still others had enriched themselves by taking
kickbacks from local and foreign companies.
From my own sources, mainly
interviews, I have concluded that Saddam Hussein’s family
probably spearheaded the large-scale corruption in Iraq. When
General Hussein Kamil, Saddam’s son-in-law and paternal
cousin, defected to Jordan in 1995, he was believed by
well-informed Jordanian circles to have brought with him no
less than $30 million, which he could hardly have saved from
his salary. By early 2003 Saddam’s wife, Sajida, his elder
son, Udayy, and his half-brothers Barazan, Watban, and Sib’awi
were multimillionaires in their own right. Most conspicuous,
of course, was Saddam’s own wealth, notably his many private
palaces, some boasting huge proportions and exquisite
appointments.
It’s often said,
incorrectly, that Saddam’s corruption was no different from
that of his predecessors. But the Hashemite monarchs who ruled
from the 1920s to the 1950s had only two palaces. Their
successor, General Qasim (1958–63), did not even have a home
of his own. He spent his nights either at his mother’s modest
home or sleeping on a mattress on the floor of his office at
the Ministry of Defense. And another of Iraq’s dictators, Abd
ar-Rahman Arif, worked for 20 years as a hotel manager in
Turkey after he was toppled by the Baath because he had no
other source of income. The Baath corrupted the Iraqi state
more grievously than any other regime in the country’s
history.
After three decades in
power, the Baath regime of Iraq and its twin in Syria managed
to fulfill none of their founding principles—unity, freedom,
or socialism. Some progress toward the last of these might be
claimed, if socialism meant a limited social safety net,
nationalization of the country’s main economic assets, and a
modest narrowing of the income gap between people in the
capital city and those in the countryside. (There was also,
one must point out, some improvement in the status of women.)
Yet in Iraq, two wars and
more than a decade of international embargo—all the result of
the Baath’s deviation from their original ideals—destroyed the
economy. By early 2003, most Iraqis were dependent on food
rations received through the United Nations oil-for-food
program. Syria’s economy is in deep trouble, and despite some
economic liberalization, the private sector is still very
depressed. Corruption has been an enormous drain in both
countries. These societies, in which state-sponsored violence
has been ubiquitous, along with bribery, semiofficial
smuggling, extortion, and kickbacks, fall far short of any
meaningful socialist ideal.
Both Baath states built huge bureaucracies
employing educated people who, under a different socioeconomic
system, would have become entrepreneurs in small and midsize
enterprises and helped build the national economy. The only
way out of this situation seems to be to end the state’s
stranglehold over the economy, to introduce reforms that
ensure transparency, and to encourage private enterprise by
offering loans on an equitable basis. None of this can happen
without the removal of the Baath ruling elites.
As for Arab unity, the
dream once seemed within reach, but by the 1960s, and
especially the 1970s, it was no longer a realistic program.
The Baath regimes continued to invoke pan-Arab nationalism in
the service of their parochial interests. It served as
rationalization for intervention, military and otherwise, in
the affairs of rival Arab states and regimes. Thus, Syria’s
1976 occupation of Lebanon and Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait in
1990 were justified in part as necessary steps to save the
Arab nation from its enemies. Far from fostering unity, the
pan-Arab idea has helped destabilize the Arab world.
Freedom? Because
pan-Arabism failed to bestow legitimacy on Saddam and his
Syrian counterparts, both employed extremely harsh security
measures—harsher than those in most other Arab states—making a
mockery of the Baath promise of freedom.
History shows that pan-Arabism is a dangerous
ideology, embraced by the most extreme, adventurous, and
brutal dictatorships in the Middle East and too readily cited
as a rationale for domestic and foreign aggression. Arab
identity and culture are one thing, a pan-Arab political
agenda quite another. In the future, it would make sense to
lay the emphasis on local patriotism, be it Iraqi, Syrian,
Egyptian, or Jordanian, accompanied by a mild and tolerant
form of Arab solidarity. Leaders who speak the language of
pan-Arabism have too strong a tendency to speak over the heads
of local leaders to the populations of neighboring countries.
That is a recipe for long-term international instability.
State patriotism also
holds some promise of easing the tensions between Kurds and
Arabs in Iraq (and in Syria, too, though Kurds are a small
minority there), and between the main Muslim groups. Arab
nationalist ideology was used as a veneer to conceal the rule
of minority groups—mostly Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Alawite
Arabs in Syria. Few of Iraq’s Shia were ever attracted to the
pan-Arab cause. They realized that it served to legitimize the
rule of a Sunni Arab minority in Iraq, and that in a larger
pan-Arab nation they would be drowned in a Sunni Arab
majority. But in Iraq they would be a majority. Iraqi
patriotism is not a perfect solution to the Shia-Sunni split,
but perhaps it can help mitigate the conflict.
There’s good reason,
however, to believe that in the future Iraq will be able to
avoid the tide of Islamization that has beset its neighbors in
the region. When a regime in an Arab-Islamic country does not
enjoy reasonable legitimacy, it’s not uncommon to appeal to
Islamic sentiment in times of stress. Egypt and Syria tilted
toward the Islamization of public life in the 1990s. Iraq
leaped. In a post-Saddam Iraq, the state will need to show
respect for Islam, but most of the measures adopted by the
Baath regime will have to be reversed. A more legitimate
regime will easily be able to do this. A complete or
near-complete separation of mosque and state seems
far-fetched, but Iraq has always been a relatively secular
state, and there is no reason why it should not return to its
tradition.
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Amatzia Baram, a former Wilson
Center fellow, is a professor of Middle Eastern history at the
University of Haifa and the author of Culture, History and
Ideology in the Formation of Ba’thist Iraq: 1968–1989
(1991) and Building toward Crisis: Saddam Husayn’s Strategy
for Survival (1998).
Reprinted from Spring
2003 Wilson Quarterly This article may
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