Free The Iraq War by John Keegan Page A

the rulers of neighbouring states. Thanks to Iraq’s start as a mandate state, under European influence, its population was more evolved and better educated by mid-century than many in the region. The Iraqi élite was often educated abroad and the female members of better-off families enjoyed freedoms denied in traditional Arab societies. Saddam sought to extend the privileges of the few to the many and with success. The Ba’athist revolution created asizeable middle class and consolidated the country’s educational establishment. By the end of the 1970s Iraq belonged, with Egypt and Syria, to the group of Arab countries which were manifestly emerging into the modern world. Such had been the founding principle of Ba’athism, one which Michel Aflaq, who survived until 1989, lived to see at least half-realized. Had Saddam been content to persist simply as a modernizer, he might have become a widely respected Middle Eastern statesman, with friends throughout the region and in the Western world. Some in the West continue to think indeed that his descent into isolation and obloquy represents a failure of Western diplomacy; that had the United States and its allies pursued different policies at key stages in Iraq’s relations with its neighbours during the last two decades of the twentieth century, Saddam could have been restrained from his excesses and retained as a valuable ally and even a moderating influence in a volatile strategic region.
    That may have been to expect too much of his violent and self-centred character. Saddam was apparently able to subordinate his impulse to settle differences by brute force when fully in control of the circumstances in which he operated, as when he was masterminding the Ba’ath investment programme. When opposed, however, he seemed instinctively to resort to the methods by which he had ascended to power in the cruelly competitive world of Arab politics. Saddam was patently not a religious Muslim, not a believer who had imbibed the idea of fraternity and who sought to progress through life by submission to Allah and amity with his fellows. When opposed, Saddam struck out, by the underhand blow if necessary, with outright force if desirable and possible.
    During the 1980s and ’90s, Saddam was frequently opposed, always by the Kurds, who remained irreconcilable, from 1980 onwards by Iran, Iraq’s traditional enemy, and during the 1990s and beyond by the West, for reasons for which by then only he could be held to blame.
    Before the coming of his time of troubles, Saddam was to achieve one more personal triumph, advancement to the Presidency of Iraq. During the era of modernization, Saddam haddisplayed sedulous loyalty to President Hasan al-Bakr. Bakr’s growing passivity had made it easy for Saddam to rule in his name while avoiding any confrontation; he had nonetheless taken care to consult the older man at every stage, to submit all matters to him for approval and to withdraw if his chosen solution to a problem failed to meet with Bakr’s approval. By 1979, however, Saddam had decided that the sham by which Bakr remained in office and he, as Deputy President, concealed his effective authority could no longer be sustained. External problems demanded that he should emerge from behind the throne and take full power.
    The principal problems concerned Israel, Syria, a fellow Ba’athist state, and Iran. The existence of the state of Israel had unsettled the Middle East since its creation in 1948, giving rise to four wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, in three of which Iraq had been involved. At the end of the 1970s, however, it was the successful American mediation of a peace settlement between Israel and Egypt, the Camp David Accords of September 1978, that provoked Saddam. He had long hankered to inherit the leadership of the Arab world exercised by President Nasser and resented its assumption by Anwar Sadat on Nasser’s death. The Camp David Accords, deeply unpopular with all Arabs