Free The Iraq War by John Keegan

enough engineers, technologists and commercial experts to run an exploration and distributionprogramme of its own. Saddam, who was intimately involved in the programme, also helped to ensure its success by negotiating an agreement under which the Soviet Union guaranteed to buy any unsold Iraqi oil surplus and an agreement with France to respect its interests in return for a promise that it would not join an anti-Iraq boycott.
    The pact with Moscow was signed in April 1972. Two months later Saddam took the logical step of nationalizing the Iraq Petroleum Company, after which all its revenues would accrue to the Iraqi state. Short of military intervention, there was little that the foreign governments represented in the Iraq Petroleum Company could do by way of reprisal. Saddam had taken the precaution of acquiring a guarantee of Soviet support, at a time when the Soviet Union was at the height of its postwar power; he knew that Britain was in the doldrums, its economy depressed and its government paralysed by domestic problems; the United States, attempting to extract itself from the misery of Vietnam, was in no position or state to undertake another overseas intervention. France, though its interests were hemmed by the nationalization, was bought off by the promise of a preferential price for oil purchases.
    Nationalization transformed Iraq’s economic situation. In 1968, the year the Ba’ath seized power, Iraqi governmental oil revenue amounted to $476 million, or 22 per cent of what was then national income. By 1980, when the benefits of nationalization (multiplied after the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC) had come fully on stream, oil income had risen to $26 billion, representing 50 per cent of the country’s greatly expanded national income. The new money was spent in a way that, as was not the case in so many of the oil-rich dynastic states, would benefit the country at large, to include many of the common people. A large proportion admittedly went on the armed forces, which doubled in size and acquired much modern equipment, including Soviet armoured vehicles and French aircraft. The larger proportion, however, went to modernize the country’s infrastructure andexpand its industry. The programme of investment was closely overseen by Saddam, who had had himself made chairman of all the central planning and spending committees. He knew, moreover, what he wanted and, as even his enemies admitted, was a far-sighted and efficient economic manager. Thus he was directly responsible for the electrification of the country, for building large numbers of schools and hospitals, for creating a radio and television network, for adding to the railway system, for building national highways and for setting up industrial and raw-material plants.
    Brutal though he was in his persecution of political rivals and enemies of the Ba’athist party, Saddam did not look for victims among those willing to work with him in the modernization programme. The talented and patriotic were identified, encouraged and promoted. Under his leadership during the 1970s the Ba’ath became a popular movement, recognized by many Iraqis as a force for good within the country and enjoying high levels of support. When membership was thrown open to the masses, after Saddam had decided that it should cease to be merely a revolutionary élite, hundreds of thousands joined. Despite his anti-Communism, moreover, Saddam also propagated Ba’athism as a socialist movement, dedicated to distributing wealth and promoting egalitarianism. A major token of his equalizing purpose was shown by his land reform programme, under which state-owned land was distributed to 222,000 farmers, who were also provided with agricultural equipment.
    Saddam was also a social progressive. He sought to abolish illiteracy, raise educational standards and improve the status of women, in sharp distinction to the policies of many of