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often seemed unpredictable
and resisting all explanation."
EXCERPTS: What will it take to rid Iraq
of Saddam Hussein? ... for many, only Saddam's removal from power will see
the salvation of the Iraqi state and people. Charles Tripp, the author of
this new comprehensive history of Iraq, is no exception. For him, only the
removal of Saddam will allow the opportunity to imagine a better future for
Iraq. "Saddam Hussein," he writes here, "has reinforced certain tendencies
in the history of Iraq, building up a powerful apparatus that brooks no
opposition and provides scarcely any space for political activity other than
on terms set by him."
Tripp offers a perceptive and well researched reading of Iraqi history ...
he looks at the ways in which different groups have dominated the state apparatus
over the past half century ..."The state has been captured by distinct groups
of Iraqis, but it has also played a role in reconstituting social identities
through the logic of state power," Tripp writes. ...." The single individual
who has been most successful in first "capturing" the state, and then directing
it to his ends, has been Saddam Hussein.
The modern Iraqi state, set up by the British in 1920, created what Tripp
describes as "a new framework for politics" and one that has been exploited
particularly successfully by Saddam. Tripp traces the logic behind the current
system in Iraq to the state's foundation ... .
During this period, Tripp detects a "rift" in the British administration.
Some, including Gertrude Bell, Oriental secretary to the British Civil Commission
in Baghdad, were in favour of Iraqi self-government under British tutelage,
believing that the British should work with urban and Sunni nationalists
to this end. Others preferred to rely on sectarian affiliations and on the
tribal following of local shia'a clerics and Kurdish tribes. One of the dominant
features of Iraqi politics, namely sectarian and ethnic divisions that could
be manipulated by those in charge, thus began to take shape. Tripp makes
clear how British policy at the time was instrumental in shaping the very
tribal hierarchies and units that it claimed constituted the "natural order
of the society," it being, in fact, the British institutionalisation of such
informal structures that most affected the country's subsequent history and
allowed subsequent rulers to play on tribal factionalism to their own
advantage.
It has been a persistent feature of Iraqi politics that the state selects
allies, giving them its backing and a vested interest in the system. For
Tripp, the system instituted by the British in the colonial period "undermined
particular leaders at various times and eroded certain structures that made
certain tribes or families formidable adversaries... yet this strategy did
nothing to undermine the tribal hierarchy. [On the contrary,] it became a
crucial instrument of power and helped to sustain two languages and two worlds
of political discourse, which the Iraqi rulers have used to their
advantage."
One social mechanism resulting from this early policy was the fact that parallel
to formal state institutions and structures there came into existence another
informal clan-based structure governed by the role of patronage. This system
of Al-Intisaab (kinship) has been particularly important in keeping Saddam
in power. Another example of how the British reinforced older hierarchies
in Iraq was that the system they introduced systematically discriminated
against the country's shia'a population, which nevertheless made up almost
60 per cent of the population, making it ineligible for senior administrative
positions in the new state structure. This British policy reproduced and
institutionalised the older, Sunni-dominated order of Ottoman rule, Tripp
remarks, and it reinforced a system of inclusion and exclusion on the basis
of ethnic and sectarian affiliation that has continued to be of major importance
in today's Iraq.
Thus, it was during the British mandate period that the institutional foundations
for the Iraqi state were laid, state institutions emerging as the arena for
sectarian struggles that were to constitute a dominant feature of Iraqi politics
in the years to come. The next important period in Iraq's modern history
came with the institution of the republic in the decade following 1958, the
year in which the monarchy was overthrown in a bloody coup d'état
led by two army officers, Colonel Abdel-Salam Arif and Brigadier Abdel-Karim
Qassem. This coup set out new rules for the conduct of Iraqi politics. Conspiracy
within the officer corps now became a norm; the use of violence as an instrument
to resolve sectarian disagreement became generalised. A growing tendency
to centralise power in the hands of a single, dominant group also emerged,
and this negated efforts to represent Iraq's ethnic and religious plurality
in institutional form. For Tripp, Qassem's rule reproduces many of the features
of Saddam's. Qassem sought the support of Iraq's diverse communities by playing
the one off against the other in a policy that for Tripp epitomised the
"ambiguity of the Iraqi state." Qassem's rule graphically showed how this
was divided between institutional forms, on the one hand, and the less visible,
but more important, personal patronage relations on the other, the latter
deciding where power lay and who should have access to it.
Qassem's own later overthrow was, therefore, the result of structural problems
in Iraqi politics that he had first capitalised on and then compounded. The
Qassem period had also shown how the fate of any regime now lay in the hands
of the officer corps .... Qassem had shown himself to be either unwilling
or unable to devolve power or to create institutions that could mobilise
popular support. Thus he had no defence against military conspiracy, since
he did not have strong clan or kinship relations. The fact that Saddam does
have such strong clan and kinship relations, and that he has been able to
staff the state apparatus at key points with his appointees, has probably
been enough to save him, thus far, from successful military conspiracy.
... Tripp offers a fascinating account of the rise to power of Saddam Hussein
coupled with an account of the rise of the Ba'ath Party together with its
structure of powerful Ba'athist officers. One such was Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr,
Saddam's predecessor, who cultivated his own following within the armed forces
and party, where relations were based upon common provincial backgrounds
and clan relationships rather than on clear ideological affinities. Like
his predecessors in all previous Iraqi regimes, Al- Bakr used land distribution,
and the fact that the state was prime landlord, to benefit his personal position.
... it was during this period that the state structure became most clearly
geared not to the general interest of improving the country's economic conditions
but to particular ones of creating a patronage network of complicity and
dependence that reinforced the positions of those in power.
During this period in the 1970s Saddam Hussein was assigned to restructure
the Ba'ath Party, but he used the position to embark on his own efforts at
taking power, which he did in 1979. Tripp relates Saddam's attempts at appearing
to be the patron of diverse sections of Iraqi society, bringing in a number
of Iraqi Shia'a to senior positions in the apparatus in order to do so. Saddam
also showed himself to be a master of Islamist rhetoric. To gain firmer economic
control of the country's fortunes, Saddam took personal control of Iraq's
oil industry in September 1977, giving him direct access to key resources
of the state. Tripp shows how a fixed percentage of Iraq's oil revenues was
transferred to foreign bank accounts, which would later form the basis of
"a Ba'athist fighting fund".
Following Saddam's successful takeover, trends observable in Iraqi state
and society under Qassem and later under Al-Bakr, trends going back to the
foundation of the state in the 1920s, have only been reinforced and generalised.
Saddam's concept of the state is apparently a largely "dynastic" one, Tripp
comments, it being centred on what he describes as the "restrictive circles"
of Saddam's associates, all of whom are linked to him either through bonds
of kinship or of regional background, or both, or through a history of "personal
trust." Such men, the author notes, have "formed the inner circles of the
Iraqi regime, having been put to the test on numerous occasions during the
preceding 15 years when they could have sided with other clansmen or other
military officers; instead they all followed Saddam." Apparently the main
criterion for political prominence and survival under Saddam is blind personal
obedience.
This is not to say that Saddam has never been challenged, and Tripp cites
at least one case in which he was. This came during the war with Iran when
Saddam ordered that certain elite units of the Republican Guard join the
war. Already suffering heavy casualties, the commanders of these units,
themselves generally kinsmen of Saddam, made it clear that they would not
commit the forces under their command to a military exercise that had no
other purpose than to support the leadership's political priorities, thus
issuing a direct political challenge to Saddam to which he nevertheless was
obliged to bow. ...A second miscalculation was Saddam's decision to invade
Kuwait in August 1990. This came against a domestic political background
in Iraq marked by military conspiracy, family feuds, a general expectation
of change and economic crisis, and Saddam needed a coup de théâtre
that would also serve as a possible answer to the country's economic problems.
However, it badly misfired, and after Saddam's plans for the annexation of
Kuwait were aborted by an international military alliance against him, he
became increasingly concerned to secure the internal political order against
his enemies. Tripp describes this process as a "smooth transition from external
military defeat to internal military repression." The regime crushed the
1991 Shia'a uprising in the south of the country, and it launched what amounts
to an "ethnic-cleansing" campaign against the Kurds in the north. However
Saddam has shown himself to be well aware that the bulk of the armed forces
are also shia'a, and therefore his tactics have been time-honoured ones of
divide and rule, using a language that can appeal to the different shia'a
identities in the country. He has attempted something similar in his relations
with the Kurds, which have been alternatively bloody and conciliatory.
In general, Saddam's ability to survive decades of tyranny, lost wars, and
the virtual international siege that the country is currently suffering,
Tripp reads as testimony to the resilience of the political order that Saddam
has part-created, part successfully used, and also as testimony to Saddam's
ability to manipulate the diverse ethnic, tribal and religious communities
in Iraq. He has skilfully used both state structures and state narratives
to reinforce his exclusive claim to personal power.
...Though Iraq has been dominated by one narrative for the past thirty years,
Tripp is hopeful that there are possibilities for others to develop. He thinks
that the country's military establishment, which has an internal, professional
ethos that is largely independent of Saddam, could represent an alternative
to Saddam's personal regime. Like most commentators on Iraq, Tripp believes
that only with Saddam's removal will other opportunities or futures for the
country come to the fore. In general, his history is one that offers a carefully
documented and comprehensive account of Iraq, thoroughly examining the
intricacies of the country's complicated political game. For the general
reader, fascinated and alarmed by the drama that has played itself out in
the country over the past 20 years or so, and particularly since the Gulf
War, perhaps the book's real importance lies in making explicable events
that have too often seemed unpredictable and resisting all explanation.
[Imra: What, then, explains Saddam Hussein's post-Gulf War political
survival?]
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