him to return. The following year, while away on an official visit to Spain, Saddam arranged for him to remain outside the country as ambassador to Morocco; in 1971 he was murdered by Saddam’s gunmen while visiting his children at school in Kuwait. Ammesh was also shunted into ambassadorial appointments, first in Moscow, then Paris, then Helsinki. He survived to die of natural causes (unless, as is widely believed, he was poisoned). Saddam’s close friend Shaikly was also sent abroad as an ambassador, to the United Nations in New York, his fault apparently having been to refuse to marry Saddam’s sister. He was dismissed as Foreign Minister in 1971, spent many years abroad and was murdered on his retirement to Baghdad in 1980.
Saddam’s brutal measures to assure the security of the regime, which were often also personal score-settling, made him feared and hated by many Ba’athists, particularly those who had been admitted to the party earlier than he. In compensation for what he knew was his personal unpopularity, Saddam set out in his early years as Vice-President to win a following among the masses. The opportunity was provided by Iraq’s enormous oil reserves, the second largest known deposits in the world and only slightly smaller than those of Saudi Arabia. The Arab states had been slow to recognize the potential oil offered to transform their economies and to enlarge their international standing and influence. Many of the governments, dynastic, backward and deeply Islamic, actually did not want to exploit their oil wealth, fearing that money would entail modernization and so a disturbance of their traditional ways. Most in any case lacked an educated class capable of investing revenue productively. As a result, many of the rulers were content with whatever disproportionately small percentage of oil income the great foreign petroleum companiesallotted them, taking it for themselves and leaving their subjects to subsist as before in poverty.
The first of the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries to rebel against the foreign petroleum companies was Iran which, under Dr Mussadeq, nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, precipitating a crisis which almost led to war. The crisis was resolved in Britain’s favour but the damage was done. The oil producers had learnt that the petroleum companies, even when acting as a consortium, were not all-powerful and so began to negotiate extraction terms more favourable to themselves. The dynastic governments, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, some of which remained under semi-colonial regimes long after nationalists had come to power in the Mediterranean Arab countries, were timid in their dealings with the great corporations. Post-monarchical Iraq took a more robust line. Kassem took control of the land on which the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) – a consortium of BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil and the French CFP – operated in 1961. President Arif set up the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) in 1964, to develop the fields which the foreign companies preferred to hold in reserve, intending to sell the oil extracted from the new fields on the international market. The consortium reacted by refusing to sell oil they produced, in Iraq or elsewhere, to buyers who dealt directly with INOC.
The quarrel between the consortium and their own government naturally enraged popular opinion in Iraq. It was heightened by the consortium’s introduction of a policy designed to reduce production in the IPC’s fields and so the oil revenues of the Iraqi government. President Bakr’s administration responded by developing the fields the consortium had put into reserve, so expanding output and replacing revenue lost through the consortium’s reduction of extraction by direct sales onto the international market. Iraq was able to pursue this policy because, as a secularist state with a developed educational system, it had, unlike the dynastic Arab countries,
Saddam’s brutal measures to assure the security of the regime, which were often also personal score-settling, made him feared and hated by many Ba’athists, particularly those who had been admitted to the party earlier than he. In compensation for what he knew was his personal unpopularity, Saddam set out in his early years as Vice-President to win a following among the masses. The opportunity was provided by Iraq’s enormous oil reserves, the second largest known deposits in the world and only slightly smaller than those of Saudi Arabia. The Arab states had been slow to recognize the potential oil offered to transform their economies and to enlarge their international standing and influence. Many of the governments, dynastic, backward and deeply Islamic, actually did not want to exploit their oil wealth, fearing that money would entail modernization and so a disturbance of their traditional ways. Most in any case lacked an educated class capable of investing revenue productively. As a result, many of the rulers were content with whatever disproportionately small percentage of oil income the great foreign petroleum companiesallotted them, taking it for themselves and leaving their subjects to subsist as before in poverty.
The first of the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries to rebel against the foreign petroleum companies was Iran which, under Dr Mussadeq, nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, precipitating a crisis which almost led to war. The crisis was resolved in Britain’s favour but the damage was done. The oil producers had learnt that the petroleum companies, even when acting as a consortium, were not all-powerful and so began to negotiate extraction terms more favourable to themselves. The dynastic governments, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, some of which remained under semi-colonial regimes long after nationalists had come to power in the Mediterranean Arab countries, were timid in their dealings with the great corporations. Post-monarchical Iraq took a more robust line. Kassem took control of the land on which the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) – a consortium of BP, Shell, Esso, Mobil and the French CFP – operated in 1961. President Arif set up the Iraqi National Oil Company (INOC) in 1964, to develop the fields which the foreign companies preferred to hold in reserve, intending to sell the oil extracted from the new fields on the international market. The consortium reacted by refusing to sell oil they produced, in Iraq or elsewhere, to buyers who dealt directly with INOC.
The quarrel between the consortium and their own government naturally enraged popular opinion in Iraq. It was heightened by the consortium’s introduction of a policy designed to reduce production in the IPC’s fields and so the oil revenues of the Iraqi government. President Bakr’s administration responded by developing the fields the consortium had put into reserve, so expanding output and replacing revenue lost through the consortium’s reduction of extraction by direct sales onto the international market. Iraq was able to pursue this policy because, as a secularist state with a developed educational system, it had, unlike the dynastic Arab countries,
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