The English Job by Jack Straw

Author:Jack Straw [Jack Straw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785904899
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

There is no argument these days that Saddam was the aggressor in the Iran–Iraq War. On both sides the casualties were mainly Shi’a, for 80 per cent of Iraq’s armed forces were themselves Shi’a (roughly reflecting the confessional balance in Iraq), whilst Iran’s forces were almost wholly Shi’a. Saddam was a Sunni, but, more importantly, he was a Ba’athist (from the Arabic, meaning ‘resurrection’ or ‘renaissance’) – a secular ideology which sought a pan-Arabic hegemony through a vanguard one-party state. There had been a natural Arab– Persian rivalry between Saddam and the Shah, and this enmity was compounded by that between Sunni and Shi’a.

After the break-up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, Britain had taken over Iraq as a protectorate. Iraq was granted independence in 1932, though the UK maintained military bases there until 1954. The UK then became the guarantor of security for the whole of the Persian Gulf until, in 1969, the Labour government withdrew its military commitments from East of Suez, including the Gulf. The United States decided to fill the vacuum which would otherwise have been left. Key to maintaining security was to raise the Shah’s Iran to the status of the main regional power and anti-Soviet bulwark.

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