Washington, D.C. For
anybody who knows the savage history of Iraq, the guerilla attacks upon
American and British occupation forces do not come as a surprise. What
deeply troubles not only Iraq but the whole Middle East today began
when the region's 400-year colonial occupation by the Ottoman Turks
ended in 1918 and when the British promised independence to the peoples
they claimed to have liberated.
Dashing the Arabs' hopes for self-determination, the governments of
Britain, France, and Italy imposed their own rule or/and puppet regimes
upon the whole region from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. President
Wilson proclaimed that America opposed colonialism and would "make
the world safe for democracy." Yet, colonialism continued in the
Middle East, and, in Arab eyes, the U.S. condoned the colonialists'
betrayal.
As soon as in 1920 the British began to govern Mesopotamia and Palestine
while the French took over Syria, enraged Arab crowds revolted. Every
uprising against overwhelming force, however, ended in defeat.
While in the 1930s studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, Orthodox Christian
Michael Aflaq and Muslim Salah al-Din Bitar, both Syrians, developed
an anti-Western ideology designed to achieve "baath," i.e.,
a renaissance of Arab nationalism. They advocated a classless society
but rejected Marxism-Leninism. The economy was to be state-controlled
and anti-capitalist. Monarchies and theocracies were to be replaced
by the centralized secular state, with a subordinate role for the traditional
Islamic institutions. Stressing its pan-Arabic orientation, the Baath
movement aimed at ultimately uniting all Arabic-speaking peoples.
The British drew up the map of Iraq by forcing three disparate and mutually
hostile peoples into one state: non-Arab Kurds in the northeast, Sunnis
around Baghdad, and a Shiite majority in the south. Three times between
1922 and 1933, the Kurds revolted unsuccessfully. During World War II,
Baathists failed in a pro-Axis revolt against the British.
When in 1948 the U.S. government launched its unequivocal support for
the new state of Israel, the Baath movement in Iraq and Syria assumed
the leadership of the Arab opposition. It appealed successfully to the
masses of discontented young and poor Arabs against the rich elites
and the Islamic traditionalists.
In a 1958 coup led by Colonel Qasim, Iraq's King Faisal was assassinated
and his prime minister hanged from a lamppost. Qasim allied himself
with the Communists, had thousands of opponents executed and the Kurds
bombed. In a coup in February 1963, the Baathists in turn machine-gunned
Qasim on national television and killed thousands of Communists.
Nine months later, the Baathists were overthrown by military officers
under Colonel Aref. In 1966, he was assassinated by a bomb planted in
his helicopter, and in 1968 his brother was killed in a coup by Baath
leader Hassan al-Bakr. He chose one his enforcers, Saddam Hussein, to
be his vice president, only to be ousted by him in 1969. Yet, al-Bakr
was lucky. He became Iraq's first head of state to leave his office
alive.
Saddam emerged as the most ruthless tyrant in Iraq's bloody history.
He molded the Baath Party into a force of an estimated 40,000 disciples
fiercely loyal to his ideological tenets: anti-colonialist, anti-Zionist,
anti-American, anti-traditionalist, and pan-Arab. Saddam's minions executed,
or at least condoned, his merciless campaigns of repression and atrocities
against Shiites, Kurds, political opponents, and undesirables.
Ever since the Party's clandestine beginnings, its rank and file was
organized in autonomous cells of three to five members. Only one in
each cell was linked to the next level in the hierarchy to keep outsiders
from infiltrating the organization. Teenagers were organized in the
Fedayeen, i.e., those who sacrifice themselves for their country.
Based on its historical resentments, the wrath of Baath ideology is
directed against all those whom they see as invading the Arab world
militarily, economically, and politically: Zionists, Americans, British,
and their "stooges" inside and outside the Middle East.
It is that deep-seated hostility toward any kind of foreign occupation
that President Bush is now asking American occupation troops to confront
and to overcome.