Crusade and Jihad by William R. Polk

Author:William R. Polk
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

Saddam Husain and Iraq

Saddam Husain was one of the last of the pan-Arab social-nationalist leaders. His regime was politically regressive but socially progressive. The first part of that statement could have been made about most of the world’s regimes—true democracies are an endangered species almost everywhere—but what was unusual were the social, educational, and public health aspects of the regime. To clarify this apparent anomaly one must examine the major influences on the life of the man who created and personified the regime, Saddam Husain.

Like many Iraqis and Syrians, Saddam found his first guide to Arab nationalism in the movement known as the Awakening (al-Baath). The ideologue of Baathism Michel Aflaq was a Greek Orthodox Christian Syrian. After a period of study in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he met his future collaborator Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Aflaq returned to Syria in 1932. Once there, he threw himself into political activism. Like a number of anti-imperialists, he started his political career as a Communist, but he broke with the Russian-dominated Communist Party, just as the Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj did, when, in one of its many convolutions, it announced its approval of French imperialism. (Neither man appeared to know anything about Russian imperialism.) Then, together with Bitar, Aflaq founded what became the Baath movement.

The idea of the Baath was essentially that held by many Arabs and other peoples of the South: that the Arabs had been forcibly divided and suppressed by imperialists. The Baath focused on the Arabic-speaking population of the Levant hinterland, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, but the general philosophy was regarded by adherents from Morocco to Indonesia to apply to their situations as well. Virtually everywhere, they agreed that they must expel the imperialists and their puppets. Where the Baathists went further was in their contention that in order to do so they must unify. Since they did not agree on religion and felt little empathy for Berbers, Turks, Iranians, Pakistanis, Kashmiris, or Malays, they focused on the Arabs. Baathism, like Türkizm, was essentially a form of ethnic nationalism.

The dilemma in which the Baath was caught was that while many common people and students among their chosen group, the Arabs, accepted its philosophy, most of those whom it needed to enroll to become effective, the existing ruling circles, regarded it as subversive. The conservative Arab rulers, of course, had personal as well as policy reasons to oppose the Baath, but even President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who certainly agreed with its emphasis on Arab unity, regarded it as a rival. He forced Aflaq in 1958 to disband the Arab Socialist Baath Party when he formed the United Arab Republic. And in Syria, after the 1966 coup, which was proclaimed in the name of reform, the new government attacked the resurrected Baath Party and caused Aflaq, Bitar, and their colleagues to flee for their lives.1

Authoritarian, somewhat mystical, vaguely socialist, but determinedly committed to Arab unity, the Baath was introduced into Iraq by a young Iraqi engineer by the name of Fuad al-Rikabi.

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