Iraq against the World by Samuel Helfont

Author:Samuel Helfont
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Middle East and the Muslim World

Outside Europe, the Iraqis continued their deliberate push to win popular support throughout the Middle East, the Muslim World, and within developing states more broadly. As in earlier periods the Ba‘thists remained highly active in Arab states, Pakistan, and among other potentially sympathetic populations around the world. However, when global politics shifted, the Ba‘thists opened new fronts as well. Most prominently, as membership of the UN Security Council rotated, Baghdad adjusted its operations accordingly. Thus, for example, the small state of Djibouti was largely unimportant to the Iraqis until it took a nonpermanent seat on the Council from 1992 to 1993. At that point, Ba‘thists almost immediately filed a string of reports covering all aspects of Djiboutian politics and on Djiboutian political parties as well as suggestions for how to make inroads into them.46

Turkey also emerged as an important target for the Iraqis in the mid-1990s. Like the Gulf Arab states, Turkey’s long border with Iraq made it critical for enforcing an embargo. If Ankara was not proactive in enforcing Security Council resolutions, Iraq could smuggle its oil onto the international market, making UN sanctions ineffective. Turkey was also a vital node in Western attacks on Iraq, which at least theoretically, were carried out to enforce UN resolutions. American, British, and French air forces relied on Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base, and humanitarian aid to Iraqi Kurdistan flowed through Turkey.

In the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, Ankara and Baghdad had clashed. Ankara blamed Baghdad for driving tens of thousands of desperate Kurds to the Turkish border. Baghdad accused Ankara of violating Iraqi sovereignty, including military incursions to attack the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which had set up camps in northern Iraq. Yet, the two countries had been important trade partners prior to the war and the Turks were losing several billion US dollars in trade every year due to the embargo. A pipeline exporting Iraqi oil to Western markets ran through Turkey. Its closure alone cost Ankara between 600 and 700 million dollars a year. To quell Turkish angst, the Gulf Arabs compensated Ankara three to four billion dollars a year, but this did not cover all the lost revenue. As the decade wore on, Baghdad and Ankara began to realize that they shared an interest in ending the embargo on Iraq. The Ba‘thists stepped up their operations in Turkey in 1993 and the two governments began to jointly pressure the United Nations to clear the pipeline for operation in January 1994.47

Elsewhere around the Middle East and Muslim World, the Ba‘thists continued to spread propaganda and look for ways to influence governments. They brought delegations of sympathizers and potential sympathizers to Iraq. One of their favorite tactics was to collect medicine for Iraqi hospitals and have foreign allies sponsor sick Iraqi children to receive medical treatment outside Iraq. The regime’s documents record internal criticism when such operations did not receive the hoped-for media coverage, and the Ba‘thists adjusted accordingly. These internal critiques also lay bare the regime’s motives.

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