By SALIM MANSUR -- For the London Free
Press
Iraq is referred to as the eastern flank of the Arab world. The area it occupies, and the people inhabiting the land once known as Mesopotamia, have a history reaching back into the mists of time. Here human civilization reputedly first emerged on the low marshlands where the rivers Euphrates and Tigris meet ahead of the Persian Gulf.
Modern Iraq is a recent invention as part of the political architecture designed by the British and French, victors over the Ottoman Turks in the First World War, for the area between the Suez and the Gulf.
Iraq is also an example of the imperial whim that went into the making of states in the region. Britain brushed aside all local sensibilities to draw lines on the sands in fashioning a state of disparate ethnicities and sects. In the north, the Kurdish provinces of Mosul and Kirkuk, separated from a defeated Turkey and rich in oil, were joined to the districts of Baghdad in the middle and Basra in the south to create Iraq, which acquired formal independence in 1932.
But Iraq was burdened with explosive contradictions. First, the demarcation of Kuwait at the expense of Iraq made it almost a landlocked country on the Gulf. Then the Shiite majority in the area south of Baghdad, currently estimated at 60 per cent of the population of some 23 million people, was subordinated to the Sunni minority, itself divided equally between Arabs and Kurds.
London appointed Prince Feisal -- a younger son of Sharif Husayn of Mecca of the Hashemite clan now ruling in Jordan -- as the king of Iraq. The purpose was to unite this invented country behind a family, raised to a monarchy, that traced its lineage back to the clan of Prophet Mohammed. Britain's local representatives, most notably Gertrude Bell, a flamboyant Englishwoman trained as an Orientalist, believed that both the Shiites and the Sunni Kurds would prefer being governed by a member of the prophet's clan.
ARAB NATIONALISM AND THE BAATH
The Hashemite monarchy fell victim to the tide of Arab nationalism following the Suez crisis of 1956. The terribly bloody revolution of 1958 brought a coterie of military officers to power in Baghdad. Then, in 1968, the Iraqi Baath party, fashioned after the fascist and communist parties of Europe, seized power.
Baath, meaning rebirth, is an Arab nationalist party founded by two Damascene, Michel Aflaq, a Christian, and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim. In the 1940s, they propounded a highly emotional brand of Arab nationalism, sprinkled with socialist ideas borrowed from Marx and a mixture of readings of European thinkers such as Nietzsche, Sorel and Lenin. The rhetoric of Arab unity, as an expression of Arab discontent with the map of the Middle East, found home in the politics of the Baath party.
Saddam emerged from the bowels of the Baath party as a functionary with a shadowy past as a hired gun. By the time Saddam declared himself president in 1979, he had transformed Baath and Iraq into an instrument of his drive to power.
Saddam, as a consummate organization man, is an Arab version of Stalin; and, in his ambition to dominate Arab politics with an unequalled recklessness, he is an Arab version of Hitler.
POLITICS OF THE MIDDLE EAST
In the contemporary Middle East, the past and the present collide regularly to wreck people's hopes for a prosperous future.
Here on the ruins of ancient empires arose the Arab-Islamic civilization in the seventh century. Damascus, and later Baghdad, illuminated this civilization with wisdom and grace as their rulers patronized arts and sciences. But the civilizational light that once beamed forth from these fabulous cities of the early Middle Ages was snuffed out by Mongol conquests in the 13th century.
The Arab lands gradually receded in importance in trade and culture between a Renaissance Europe and China and India. By the time Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798, the Arab Middle East had become a backwater of a stagnant and lifeless culture.
In 1919, the people of the Middle East found themselves one step removed from full independence. When full independence came a generation later, Arab nationalists had to swallow the bitter pill of a fragmented world of their ancestors.
The partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel reflected the humiliating weakness of Arabs, unable to control their destiny. But oil gave them an illusion of power and, after 1973, an assurance that with this new-found power they could redress the wrongs of history.
In Iraq this illusion found its champion in Saddam.
THE REPUBLIC OF FEAR
While modern Iraq is British handiwork, nature blessed it with ample water and oil reserves only second to that of Saudi Arabia. In due time, with a proper mix of politics and diplomacy, Iraq had the potential to become a secular and democratic centre of the Middle East, leading the Arab world in education and industry.
But Iraq fell victim to Saddam's politics of tribalism and revenge. His Arab biographers, Kanan Makiya and Said K. Aburish, describe him as a thug. Iraq's wealth made Saddam bid for Arab leadership. The politics of a thug drunk with grandeur is to overreach with devastating consequences.
In 1979, the Cold War turned even colder. In Iran, a revolution toppled the Shah, an American client, and brought to power Ayatollah Khomeini, an elderly cleric, in a revolution giving rise to militant Islam. The same year, the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the whole region cascaded into warfare from which it is yet to recover.
Saddam consolidated his power by anchoring it on his village clan, the Sunni Arabs of Tikrit, to the north of Baghdad. This was a minority within a minority, hijacking Iraq and reducing it to a republic of fear.
AGGRESSION AND GENOCIDE
Saddam attacked Iran in 1980 -- with the support of the United States and its allies, while receiving military assistance from Moscow -- to defeat the Islamic revolution or, failing that, to contain its influence. The war against Iran was a human and economic catastrophe for both Gulf states with only the western and Soviet arms suppliers reaping profit from the carnage.
During the Iran war, Saddam unleashed his chemical weapons against enemy soldiers. The West watched in complicity. Then, in 1987, Saddam launched the first of the chemical attacks on the Iraqi Kurds and, in April 1988, the Kurdish village of Halabja was destroyed by chemical weapons.
Saddam's genocidal campaign, named "Anfal," against Iraqi Kurds during 1987-88 killed more than 100,000. Kurdish leaders estimate the killings exceeded 180,000.
The West was unmoved by Saddam's crimes. The Cold War was ending and Eastern Europe was in a frenzy of excitement as freedom came and the Berlin Wall fell.
But Iraq fell into an even tighter grip of Saddam -- his sons Uday and Qussay learning to exceed their father in political savagery -- and his Tikriti clan. The war against Iran ended in 1988 in a stalemate. Saddam, however, felt even more ambitious, confident of the support he had received from the West, particularly France and Germany, in his drive to acquire chemical and biological weapons.
Saddam's pursuit of nuclear weapons was partly derailed when the Israelis destroyed the French-built Osirak reactor in 1981. He resumed that pursuit soon after and was close to achieving his nuclear ambition when he pulled the biggest bank raid in recent world history.
In August 1990, Saddam invaded and occupied Kuwait, an emirate floating on oil. The UN, led by the United States, finally responded. The Gulf War of early 1991 should have ended Iraq's long nightmare under Saddam. But it did not.
Saddam survived, reorganized and began rebuilding his army and weapons. He defied the UN Security Council, evaded American and British surveillance, traded in Iraqi misery brought by sanctions and ran a gulag of unimaginable atrocities with rape as a political instrument, all the while engaging in deception to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
DISARMING, OR REGIME CHANGE
Sept. 11, 2001 was a sort of Pearl Harbor of the 21st century for the United States. The war on terrorism that followed inevitably brought into focus the continuing defiance by Saddam of Security Council resolutions authorized under chapter 7 of the UN Charter.
Saddam's regime was not only in conflict with the UN, it was culpable of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Security Council resolution 1441 of Nov. 8, 2002 held Iraq in material breach of previous resolutions demanding unconditional disarmament. It gave Saddam one final opportunity within a specified time under inspection to comply voluntarily with the initial terms of ceasefire under Security Council Resolution 687 of April 1991, which ended the Gulf War over the occupation of Kuwait.
The final reckoning for Saddam in the shape of American resolve to disarm him, or bring regime change, is now at hand. The decision to comply or gamble is entirely his. And for the Iraqis, the long night of Saddam's terror may be coming to an end.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays.
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