Read Online The Iraq War by John Keegan - Free Book Online

was completed by a broadcast announcing that the Ba’ath party had assumed control.
    Bakr had engineered the coup by persuading the leading Ba’athists in the army, notably Generals Daud and Nayif, to lend him their support. He had given them his assurance that, once Arif was removed, the army would be accorded ultimate authority within the country. Not only had he no intention of keeping his word; in the aftermath of the coup he had Daud exiled to Morocco and Nayif to London (where, in 1978, Saddam, then President of Iraq, arranged for him to be murdered). The new government was filled with ministers from the civilian wing of the Ba’ath party, relegating the army to a subordinate position. Saddam was not given a ministry; instead he became head of state security, a position of decisive importance which he would use to advance himself to supreme power eleven years later.
    He was also appointed deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) of the Iraqi Ba’ath, the supreme party organ in the country; although the Ba’ath had not so far achieved its programme of creating a unitary Arab state, it was organized into Command Councils in each of the countries, notably Syria and Egypt, where it had sizeable numbers of followers, a system devised by Aflaq himself. The success of the 1968 revolution diminished rather than increased, however, Aflaq’s influence in Iraq. Instead it was the Tikrit connection which would now come to dominate. Bakr brought many Tikritis beside Saddam into positions of power after 1968. One was his friend and Saddam’s uncle Khairallah, who became mayor of Baghdad. Khairallah, according to Con Coughlin, Saddam’s biographer, constantly reminded Bakr to depend on Saddam. ‘You need family to protect you, not an army or a party. Armies and parties change direction in this country.’
    The relationship between Bakr and Saddam was not one of blood ties. They were unrelated. Bakr nevertheless had from an early stage fostered Saddam, got him into the Ba’ath and sponsored his career. In the years after the 1968 coup, they would work intimately together, Bakr consolidating the Ba’ath’s hold on power, Saddam providing force whenever needed to protect Bakr’s position and intimidate or dispose of his enemies. Saddam was already an accomplished thug and murderer. During the seventies he would become a master of state-directed repression; he ran a pervasive domestic security and intelligence system, supported by an apparatus that incarcerated, interrogated, tortured and killed the régime’s opponents as necessary.
    Saddam was also pursuing the parallel policies of extending the Ba’ath’s power into every institution and organ of public life, on the Stalinist model he favoured (though it equally equated to the Nazi programme of
Gleichschaltung)
, meanwhile ensuring that his own personal power was enlarged in unison. Some of his acts of repression were deliberately ostentatious, such as the condemnation to death of fourteen Iraqi Jews in January 1969 and their public hanging in Baghdad’s central space, Liberation Square. TheIraqi Jewish community had once been one of the largest and most emancipated in the Middle East. Saddam had early, however, detected that anti-Semitism, which he represented as anti-Zionism, was popular with the masses, who shared the common Arab hatred of Israel and resented the consistent failure of the Iraqi army’s participation in the Arab–Israeli wars.
    Saddam also pursued the régime’s domestic enemies, as he privately characterized them, the non-Arab Kurds of Iraq’s northern provinces and the Shi’a southerners. Historically the Arab Muslim population of Iraq has been dominated by Sunni. Statistically, however, they are a minority within the country, making up only a fifth of the population. Better educated and more successful in every branch of public life, they formed the main body of the Ba’ath party. It was to the disadvantage of both Kurds and