Iraq

views updated

IRAQ

Iraq was under Ottoman rule before World War I. It was created as a state in 1921 by the British, who had arranged in 1919 to receive a League of Nations mandate to govern it. Previously known to Europeans as Mesopotamia, the new state comprised the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. After violently suppressing (with, among other strategies, the first systematic campaign of aerial bombing of a civilian population) a 1920 nationalist revolt—one that contributed to the unification of the country—the British appointed as king Amir Faysal ibn Husayn al-Hashim, former king of Syria, son of Sharif Husayn of Mecca, and brother of Amir Abdullah I of Transjordan, who were leaders of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during the war. He died in 1933 and was succeeded by his son Ghazi, and after Ghazi's death in 1939 by his grandson Faysal II. A regent, Amir Abd al-Ilah al-Hashim, ruled in Faysal's place until he came of age in 1953.

The British ended the mandate in 1932 and Iraq became officially independent. Under the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, however, Britain remained in control of Iraqi foreign policy and British troops were stationed on Iraqi soil. In 1941 a nationalist Iraqi government led by Rashid Ali Gailani staged a revolt against the British that was short-lived but suppressed only with great force. A new treaty with the British (which the government was forced to repudiate), as well as shortages, high prices, and the absence of popular elections, contributed to a revolt in 1948. The defeat of the Arab armies in the 1948 War, and particularly the poor performance of the illtrained, ill-equipped Iraqi troops, exacerbated the public's anger. The war also caused economic problems. The expense, including allocations for Palestinian refugees, was crushing; the oil pipeline to Haifa was cut; and anti-Jewish sentiment led most of the Jewish community of 120,000, who had mainly been engaged in urban commerce, to emigrate by the early 1950s. Riots and protests broke out again in 1952; the government responded with heavy repression, declaring martial law, closing newspapers, and banning political parties, forcing the opposition underground.

The government was led by the British favorite Nuri al-Sa?id (prime minister seven times from 1930 to 1958), a former army officer and defense minister, with the help of the British-installed regent Abd al-Ilah. In 1955 Sa?id led Iraq into the Baghdad Pact, a Cold War, anti-Nasser alliance sponsored by Britain and the United States, prompting a call from Nasser for the Iraqi army to overthrow the monarchy; in 1956 Sa?id refused to condemn the aggression of Britain, France, and Israel in the Suez War, adversely affecting Iraq's relations with the Arab world. In 1957 he endorsed the Eisenhower Doctrine, a U.S. policy justifying U.S. intervention anywhere on anti-communist grounds. In July 1958, five months after King Hussein of Jordan, working with Abd al-Ilah, proposed to unite Iraq and Jordan into a pro-Western, anti-Nasser federation called the Arab Union, a coup d'état overthrew both the government and the monarchy. Sa?id was executed along with the king, Abd al-Ilah, and much of the royal family.

The coup was carried out by a military group formed in 1956, the Free Officers, containing both Iraqi nationalists and Nasserist pan-Arab nationalists. They were led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim al-Qasim and Colonel Abd al-Salim Arif. After the coup an internal dispute broke out about whether Iraq should join Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic (UAR); the Nasserists lost the argument. The new government pulled Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact and followed a policy of Cold War nonalignment. Qasim's government freed communist prisoners, suppressed the Ba?th Party, legalized trade unions, and instituted land reform, educational reform, and partial nationalization of oil. In 1959 an armed rebellion began among the Kurdish population in the northern part of the country, which has continued on and off ever since. Also in 1956 the Ba?th attempted to assassinate Qasim (the assassin was Saddam Hussein). In 1960 Qasim participated in founding the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. In 1961 he threatened Kuwait, which had just become independent, claiming it as part of Iraq. Intervention by the Arab League (and secret payments by Kuwait) ended the crisis.

In February 1963 Qasim's government was overthrown and Qasim executed in a violent coup d'état carried out by the Ba?th in alliance with a group of military officers led by the former Free Officer Abd al-Salam Arif, who had been removed from the government, jailed, and sentenced to death for treason after losing the UAR argument (he was pardoned by Qasim in 1962). Arif became president. The Ba?th, using lists supplied by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), systematically murdered suspected communists, leftists, and intellectuals. In November Arif expelled the Ba?thists, who were internally divided, from the government. He continued a policy of economic nationalization and revived the idea of unification with Egypt. After he was killed in a plane crash in 1966, his brother Abd al-Rahman Arif took his place, continuing the same policies but dropping preparations to unite with Egypt. Arif kept Iraq out of the 1967 War with Israel, and the regime's standing suffered as a result.

With political opposition building and street demonstrations demanding elections, the Ba?th Party, in alliance with some military officers, took power in a bloodless coup in July 1968; two weeks later the Ba?th expelled the non-Ba?thists from the government. The leader of the coup and the president of the Revolutionary Command Council was General Ahmad Hassan Bakr. His chief instrument behind the scenes was his cousin Saddam Hussein, who had been largely responsible for reorganizing and strengthening the Ba?th since 1963. Bakr and Hussein spent the next several years consolidating the Ba?th's power, which included the creation of a huge domestic intelligence apparatus; by the mid-1970s Hussein was clearly the one in charge. During this time he put down an uprising by the Kurds (1974) and negotiated a treaty dealing with an outstanding border dispute with Iran (1975). After Egypt became isolated in the Arab world as a result of the Camp David Accords of November 1978, Hussein hosted the Arab League summit in Baghdad that denounced Egypt. He also took advantage of the situation by improving Iraq's relations with Syria and Jordan. In 1979 Bakr resigned and Hussein took the position of president.

In 1980 Iran was isolated and weak as a result of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had proclaimed a policy of exporting its Shi?a Islamist ideology, an implicit threat to the secular, Sunni-dominated Ba?thist regime in Iraq, which kept itself in power partly by suppressing the country's Shi?a majority. In April 1980 members of the Shi?a Islamist al-Da?wa, supported by Iran, attempted to assassinate the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and were suspected of another attempted assassination. The government responded by deporting thousands of Iranian Shi?as. In the summer, Hussein had a leading Shi?a cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr, executed. Skirmishes took place over border territory that was to have been returned to Iraq under the terms of the 1975 treaty. On 10 September 1980, Iraq took control of the disputed territory, and on 17 September renounced the treaty and claimed Iraqi sovereignty over the entire Shatt al-Arab, the waterway that drains the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into the Persian Gulf. On 22 September Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of Iran, beginning the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988.

During the war, the Iraqi regime had the financial assistance of Gulf oil states that feared the influence of the Iranian revolution among their own Shi?a populations; it also received arms, equipment, and intelligence from the United States and its allies, as well as diplomatic assistance in blocking any international censure of Iraq for its conduct of the war. The war killed as many as 500,000 Iraqis and up to 1 million Iranians. After it was over, the regime attacked the Kurds, who had renewed their revolt with the assistance of the Iranians; during this period a chemical attack, which became infamous, on the Kurdish civilian population took place.

In July 1990, as the regime struggled to recover from the war, the price of oil fell to as low as $11 a barrel, severely damaging the Iraqi economy. Iraq was heavily in debt as a result of the war, and Saddam Hussein blamed the low price on deliberate overproduction by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. He demanded compensation in the form of debt forgiveness, the cession of Kuwait?s Rumailiya oil fields (to which Iraq maintained the claim put forward by Abd al-Karim al-Qasim in 1961), and the leasing of two Kuwaiti islands at the head of the Persian Gulf for use as an oil port. The Kuwaitis refused. On 2 August 1990 Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. This led to the Gulf War of 1991, in which an international force including some Arab states and led by the United States forced Iraq out of Kuwait and destroyed Iraq's military and much of the country's infrastructure. At its end, the Kurds revolted again, as did the Shi?as of Basra province. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled into Turkey until the United States and Britain imposed a "no-fly" zone over the Kurdish areas of the north to protect the Kurds from retaliation and allow them to set up an autonomous government, which still exists. The Shi?as of the south, however, were bloodily suppressed, with American acquiescence, and thousands were killed. After the war the United Nations, at American urging, instituted an arms inspection/destruction program as well as a set of economic sanctions (first imposed in August 1990) that crippled the Iraqi economy until it was destroyed altogether in the next war, in 2003.

Throughout the 1990s, the sanctions imposed on Iraq combined with the destruction of the war caused widespread destitution, food shortages, and rising public health problems, which particularly affected children. Iraq balked at complying with the requirements of the weapons inspection regime, and the United States and Britain, which carried out military overflights every day, bombed the country on three occasions in 1993, 1996, and 1998. Iraq had essentially complied with the resolutions by 1994 and Saddam Hussein spent the next nine years campaigning for an end to the embargo. A crisis arose in 1997 when the new chief of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in charge of disarming Iraq became convinced that Saddam Hussein was withholding information about chemical weapons. The dispute was mediated by the UN secretary general, but in late 1998 UNSCOM pulled out of Iraq at the urging of the United States but without the permission of the Security Council; that December the United States and Britain launched the aerial bombing campaign Operation Desert Fox. As a result, in 1999 Hussein refused to allow the inspectors back under a new UN resolution. He attempted to develop support in the Arab world by sending assistance to the Palestinians in the al-Aqsa Intifada that began in September 2000, including compensation for the families of those who had attacked Israelis as suicide bombers.

After the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the Bush administration engaged in a propaganda campaign associating them with Iraq and with Saddam Hussein personally, claiming, despite a lack of evidence, that he had built up stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in contravention of UN resolutions. After months of building public sentiment for an attack, the Gulf War of 2003 was launched on 20 March, despite a lack of support from most of the world, despite Hussein's grudging delivery of all requested information about Iraqi arms programs and their destruction, and despite Hussein's acceptance of last-minute conditions. Iraq's shattered economy, weak military, and lack of weapons of mass destruction ensured that the war was over by 16 April. The occupation of Iraq by US and British forces, however, and the increasing level of armed resistance by various factions, continue. Saddam Hussein disappeared from Baghdad some time in April or May and was captured in a rural hideout in December. From April 2003 until June 2004, Iraq was ruled directly by US occupation authorities; in June 2004 a US-appointed interim "Iraqi" government took over.

The 2004 population of Iraq was about 24 million, of whom 78 percent were Arab, 18 percent Kurdish, and 4 percent other. About 96 percent of Iraqis were Muslim (62 percent Shi?a and 34 percent Sunni) and 3 percent Christian (Chaldean Catholic, Nestorian, and Greek Orthodox).