The Battle for Ba’athist Supremacy, Arab Tribalism vs. National Identity Creation, The Islamist Challenge, Post-Cold War Shift, The Fall of Iraq, Anachronism, Final Defeat

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Previous Entry – Part 2

“Mediterraneo” is a fun 90s Italian comedy film about a misfit detachment of Italian soldiers who get stranded on a tiny Greek island during WW2. Each character presents a stereotype of the modern Italian, with only one of them being an actual believer in Mussolini and Italian fascism. The rest show no interest in a resurrected Roman Empire and just want to go home. In due time, the fascist becomes accustomed to his new surroundings, abandoning his own political fanaticism in the process, viewing it as an embarrassment in retrospect.

In 1861, Italian statesman Massimo D’Azeglio announced: “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” Benito Mussolini’s totalitarian dictatorship went a long way towards realizing D’Azeglio’s dream. Although not yet fully complete (and still short of it to this very day), the differences between Neapolitans and Romans and Tuscans and Venetians shrank immensely. Provincialism did give way to a new, vital nationalism, a form of civilizational progress that has made Europe quite unique in comparison to most of the rest of the world. Yet those very same Italians who overcame parochial differences to unite under their national banner were not really all that interested in pursuing empire. Fascism did bring material, social, and even psychological benefits to Italians, and the price was sweat and tears. Empire meant spilling blood, a much larger “ask” of the Italian people.

Italian forces in WW2 did not uniformly perform poorly in the theatre of war, but quite a lot of its units did. Embarrassed by the Greeks and trounced by the British in North Africa, Italian fascism (and Benito Mussolini himself) took repeated reputational hits. By the time Italy had capitulated in 1943, only the diehard fanatics still believed in fascism. To all other Italians, it had failed them and their country, leading them to death and disaster. Mussolini did make Italians, but he was unable to turn them into fascists at the same time.

I bring up Italy and Italians because their national project has largely succeeded. Regional differences do exist and are very glaring, but almost all ethnic Italians on the Italian Peninsula today identify with the Italian nation. Like the Germans, they were late to the game when compared to the French or the English, both of whom managed to solidify their national identities prior to these two. However, not all projects as ambitious as these succeed. Spain has not managed to turn Basques (or even half of Catalans) into Spaniards. Yugoslavia totally failed in its quest to create Yugoslavs, with the identity peaking in the 1970s at around 10% of the overall population, collapsing entirely when war broke out in the early 1990s.

Ba’athism sought Arab unity across national and confessional lines, but it too has failed in its grand project. There are two main reasons for this:

1. National identity is not uniform across the Arab world, with national sub-tribalism still the primary non-confessional identity marker in places like the Middle East especially. The inability to cement national identity meant that the route to Pan-Arab identity was therefore blocked
2. Confessional differences within the Arab world continue to be too strong. There is no separation between State and Mosque in Islam, meaning that the two are very intertwined in the minds of all Muslims, even those who have been highly secularized. Christians are viewed as outposts of the West, often colonial remnants, if not outright enemies.

Nowhere is this failure more pronounced than in the struggle for standard-bearer of Ba’athism that took place between Hafez al-Assad’s Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

From Syria and Egypt to Syria and Iraq

An ideology based around a very wide identity was ridden with local factionalism from the beginning. In previous entries in this series, we saw how personality clashes between the originators of Ba’athism in Damascus set the tone for its future. Class interests also played a part as a countryside military caste (which included a younger Hafez al-Assad) decided to do away with the bourgeois intellectuals of the capital. To continue on this theme, the joint Egyptian-Syrian state, one that was intended to set the example for Pan-Arab unity across the Arabic world, lasted but a mere three years before it also fell apart.

The Iraqi Ba’ath Party was established in 1951, and came to power via a successful military coup in 1963 when it deposed and assassinated Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914-1963). Replacing him as Prime Minister was high-ranking Ba’athist Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr (1914-1982), who led a government that only lasted for a single year before it was also ousted. In 1968, al-Bakr managed to regain power and consolidate Ba’athist rule over Iraq with the help of the military, one key figure among them being military officer and fellow Ba’athist Saddam Hussein.

In 1966, the Ba’athist old guard in Syria (led by Michel Aflaq), were forcefully removed from power by the military officers led by Salah Jadid. This faction became known as the “Neo-Ba’athists”, and under their rule they cemented militarism as a core element of their ideology. This coup forced Aflaq and other older party stalwarts to flee Syria, many of whom chose to go to friendly Iraq. It was this coup that formalized the rupture between Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athism.

Decried as a “Marxist takeover of Syria”, Iraqi Ba’athists took to Aflaq and sought guidance from him. One of his recommendations to al-Bakr led to Saddam Hussein being elevated to Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command in 1966.1 It was this move that emboldened Hussein to announce the formal split of Iraqi Ba’athism from its former Syrian sister party. It also granted him the power to create a Ba’athist security service that he alone controlled. Both he an al-Bakr hailed from Tikrit, and both were members of the al-Bejat branch of the Nasir tribe.

I cannot overstate just how important tribal identity is in Mesopotamia. Despite both al-Bakr and Hussein being the highest ranking members of the Pan-Arab Ba’athist party, both stemmed from the same tribe (estimates are that there are 35,000 Nasiris in total2), and both surrounded themselves with fellow tribesmen, no doubt for security reasons. This created a massive internal contradiction: how can Tikrits claim to be Pan-Arabs while concentrating all power in the hands of their tribe? Iraq was already split along ethnic lines between Arabs, Kurds, and Assyrians, and was divided along confessional lines between Sunnis, Shi’ites, Christians, and Jews. The natural assumption to make is that power would be shared across at least two groups to stabilize the country and the regime, but instead it was held in the hands of not just a Sunni minority (as Shi’ites were a plurality and now a majority in Iraq), but one specific tribe. Even al-Bakr’s Nasiri membership didn’t spare him as he was gradually pushed out of power in Iraq by Saddam over the course of the 1970s, dying in 1982 of “unknown causes”.

Aflaq would have a big influence on Iraqi politics for the next two decades, as he was treated with the utmost respect by Hussein, often seated next to him at state functions. His presence in Baghdad gave the Iraqi party legitimacy, permitting it (in their own eyes) to declare themselves as the ideology’s true representatives. In Iraq, Aflaq agitated for the Palestinian cause, one that remained central to Ba’athism to its dying days.

It would be remiss of me to leave you with the impression that the Ba’athist split between its Syrian and Iraqi branches was solely due to ideological reasons and/or personality conflicts. Salah Jadid was Alawite, an Islamic sect that spun off from Shi’ism way back in the 9th century. Much like how Saddam Hussein consolidated power in the hands of himself and his fellow Tikritis, Syria’s Neo-Ba’athists elevated the the minority Alawites of the coastal region of Latakia to prominence. To Sunni Muslims like Saddam Hussein, Shi’ism is a nasty heresy. To many Sunnis, Alawism isn’t even Islamic, but instead is a crypto-Christian cult. These distinctions are important in understanding why the two main branches of Ba’athism grew hostile with one another, despite sharing a desire to unify all Arabs under their banner.

There was a brief thaw in relations in the 1970s, with calls for a united Iraqi-Syrian project to counter Israel being the impetus, but they were quickly quashed by Saddam Hussein. Two years later, Iran and Iraq went to war with one another. Hafez al-Assad’s Syria decided to throw its support not behind its fellow Ba’athists in Iraq, but behind Iran, a country that had recently fallen to Islamic Fundamentalism.

A New Challenger Emerges

It is incorrect to paint the Arabic world with a uniform brush, but it is safe to say that wide swathes of it throughout the 20th century were not party to the rapid political, cultural, and social changes that took place in their capitals and cosmopolitan cities. Secularization was an urban affair, and was largely class-based to boot. Most Muslims in Arabic lands were less than one hundred years removed from centuries of Islamic rule, with Islam serving as the default setting for their conception of governance (with Christians and Jews as dhimmis). The Arab countryside still viewed almost all local relations through a confessional lens despite the imposition of kings and kingdoms, and experiments in modern ideologies like Ba’athist nationalism or communism.

Rocked by the collapse by the Ottoman Empire, and humiliated by western colonial rule, Arabs like the early Ba’athists felt it necessary to adopt certain elements of modern Western thought in order to better challenge it. To them, the old ways failed and were not applicable to a rapidly changing world. Why not use the Western creation known as nationalism against them?

By the 1970s, Ba’athism showed that it could not fulfill the dream of Pan-Arab unity, and just as importantly, it was exposed as as unable to defeat Israel and liberate Palestine. A newer, yet older, way was needed to restore Arabic pride and honour. Enter Fundamentalism Islam.

For those same Sunni Muslim Arabs of the countryside, nationalism, socialism, and other modern ideologies conflicted with Islam, meaning that they were haram. In Islam, the world is divided between Dar al-Islam (The House of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (The House of War), meaning that “you’re either with us or against us”. Alongside this categorization is the idea that there is nothing outside of Islam, meaning that secularism is a no-no, effectively neutering Pan-Arabism that sought to minimize the confessional differences between Arabs. City folk could rarely compete with the local Imam for influence and trust, meaning that modernist philosophies fell on deaf ears as they conflicted with religion and tradition. Just as importantly, they were informed that only Islam could unify the Arabs (and non-Arabic Muslims beyond them), pointing to the first century of the faith and how it rapidly expanded and conquered all in its path.

Just as Ba’athism was experiencing military setbacks and factionalism, militant Islam re-appeared on the world stage. In 1979, Mujahideen began to take on the Soviet forces that had recently invaded Afghanistan, and were doing so with success. Young Sunnis began to flock to Afghanistan to take part in jihad against communism, and with the full backing of the West. That same year saw Iran fall to an Islamic revolution, an event that was seismic in its impact, as the new ruling clerisy were not only Islamic fundamentalists, but were Shi’ites. This latter fact meant that Saudi Arabia now had a challenger for leadership in the Islamic world. Like the proverbial phoenix arising from the ashes, so too did fundamentalist Islam make itself visible for all to see.

…..and it was scoring big wins, the kind that Ba’athism and other secular Arab forces couldn’t deliver. Islamic fundamentalism, whether Sunni or Shi’ite, was a blood enemy of Ba’athism, as the latter stressed secularism and pan-confessional identity, with the former insisting that only through Islam can victory be achieved. To the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and to the clerics in Iran, Arab nationalists in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine could not defeat Israel in war. The P.L.O., Ba’athists, Nasserites, etc. could not unify the Arab world on their terms. Dealing an even bigger blow to the secular nationalists of the Middle East, Anwar Sadat’s Egypt normalized relations with Israel at the USA’s behest, effectively closing off the southern front of resistance. This act by the military regime in Cairo was seen as a historical betrayal of the larger Arabic community, one committed by secularists who had long oppressed Egyptian Islamists like Qutb and al-Banna.3

The history of Sunni Islamic Fundamentalism in the 1980s is a very complex one and deserves a treatment all its own. For the purposes of this series, we can say that certain forces were aligned with the West while other groups were not. The Afghan Mujahideen were the darlings of western media, while Islamic Jihad were classified as “terrorists”. On the other hand, Arab secular nationalists found themselves being sponsored by the Soviet Union. Syria was a Soviet client state since the 1960s, and Iraq moved in that direction despite claims of CIA support for the Ba’athist coup in Baghdad in 1963. The Cold War map did not overlay perfectly with the Arab world in the 80s, but it fit in many places. So long as the USSR remained a global superpower, Arab nationalists and Marxists were confident in their ability to fend off challengers such as the newly-energized Islamists.

One of the first Islamist challenges to Ba’athist rule came in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982, when the Muslim Brotherhood rebelled against the state and was crushed by the Syrian Arab Army, state security forces, and various paramilitary units. Present-day history records the suppression of this rebellion by the state as being coloured by a “mass orgy of violence” directed against locals as punishment. Estimates range from 10,000 to 40,000 civilians slaughtered in the massacres that February. Suffice it to say that the memory of this catastrophe remained strong among Sunni Muslims in Syria, best exemplified by rebel leaders celebrating the capture of the city last month saying that they have “come to cleanse the wound that has persisted in Syria for 40 years”.4

Syria then was roughly 70% Sunni Islamic, with Alawites and Christians each at slightly over 10%. With the Alawites being vastly over-represented in the Ba’athist regime, a Sunni challenge was never too far away. All that was needed was arms (easily purchased from corrupt officials) and inspiration. The rising tide of Islamic Fundamentalism, combined with the failures of Ba’athism and secular Arab nationalism in confronting Israel, gave the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama the courage to take on the government. In 1982, they lost. They would have to wait four decades to return Islamic rule to their city.

A New Global Paradigm

Even Saddam Hussein had to pay lip service to Islam to defuse local Islamist sentiment. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), Iranian propaganda accused Hussein of “falling under the spell of a Christian infidel”, that Christian being Michel Aflaq. Hussein countered by saying that Aflaq had converted to Islam.5

Saddam had much to worry about. Iraq was and is a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional country. Around 75-80% of its population is Arabic, with Kurds near 15%. Overall, the country is 95% Islamic, with almost all Kurds identifying as Sunnis. 2/3rds of Iraq’s Muslims are Shi’ite, with the remaining 1/3rd Sunni. When you subtract the Kurdish element from the Sunni figure, the Arab Sunni element in Iraq shrinks to around 20% of the total. When you include the regime’s violent hostility towards its ethnic Kurdish minority, you realize that Sunni Arabs in Iraq are in permanent danger of falling under the control of the more numerous Shi’a.

Despite these odds, the Ba’athist regime in Iraq managed to hold off Shi’ite Iran from using the Shi’ite community as a fifth column against it. This is also a very complex subject that deserves its own treatment. Suffice it to say that extreme state repression kept Saddam and the Ba’athists in power after eight long years of war. In a way, it was a victory for Ba’athism, but especially with the Sunni Arabs who identified with the regime and the country.6

The repressive internal machine created by Hussein managed to stave off disaster and collapse courtesy of its enemy to its immediate east. The victory celebrations did not last for long, as the USSR dissolved itself, stripping Iraq of its powerful sponsor. It was now left exposed to the sole remaining superpower, one that it had endlessly antagonized over the previous decade: the USA.

Operation Desert Storm was justified by the Iraqi invasion, occupation, and annexation of neighbouring Kuwait in 1990. Seen as threatening both Saudi Arabia and the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and Middle East, the USA quickly began a diplomatic offensive at the UN to denounce Iraq and its actions. Over the course of several months, the USA began a massive buildup of its armed forces in the region, eventually scoring a UN resolution sanctioning the use of force against Iraqi forces if they would not vacate Kuwaiti soil by January 15, 1991.7 The Soviets, by then in terminal stage, gave public backing to the US-led efforts to remove Iraq from Kuwaiti territory.

The Americans cobbled together a very broad global coalition, one that included Ba’athist Syria and its contingent of soldiers sent to Saudi Arabia to participate in the coming invasion of Iraq. Despite Iraq’s army being very impressive on paper in terms of size and equipment, it was quickly defeated by coalition forces in what was deemed “the first cable TV news war” due to the 24 hour around the clock coverage of it. Saddam’s armies were smashed to bits, Kuwait liberated, and the Ba’athist regime left to the mercy of the Americans.

Surprisingly, the Americans did show the regime mercy. Rather than occupying the entire country and “liberating” its Shi’ite and Kurdish minorities, the Americans permitted the Ba’athists to reassert power and to (brutally) snuff out Shi’ite insurgencies in the south of the country. The Americans calculated that a Sunni-led Iraq was best positioned to serve as a bulwark against Iran, as a Shi’a dominated Iraq would quickly fall under the sway of Tehran, greatly disrupting the balance in the Persian Gulf, and threatening the very existence of key US ally Saudi Arabia. A stay of execution was granted to Iraq’s Ba’athists, but the message was clear: the USSR could no longer protect you.

This message was also received in Damascus, going a long way to explaining why the Syrian’s actively participated in the war on the coalition’s side, despite being led by Israel’s sponsor. Syria wanted to differentiate itself from Baghdad in order to remove any target on its back. It was a recognition of the new global reality, one that left them more exposed to serious threats, both internal and external.

As the 1990s progressed, the initiative in the Arab world had shifted from secular nationalism to Islamism. This is best exemplified by the growing view that the P.L.O. were compromised and effectively neutralized, especially when compared to the new Islamist outfit known as Hamas. Islamists were winning “Arab Street”, with momentum building from the Soviet pullout out of Afghanistan, through to the global Mujahideen’s defense of Bosnia, and all the way to the defeat of the Russians in the First Chechen War. Unlike Ba’athists, Islamic radicals were winners. Deprived of superpower sponsorship, the Ba’athist regimes in both Syria and Iraq were on the back foot, reliant on severe state repression to survive.

By 1997, the situation had become so dire that Iraq and Syria began a three-year long process that ended in reconciliation in 2000. Locked together in a Siamese death embrace, al-Assad and Hussein realized that mutual hostilities only weakened each other. They also came to realize that leadership in the Arab world had passed from Ba’athism to Islamism, no matter how officially their ideology was devoted to the defeat of Israel. Three years later, Iraq was bombed and invaded once again, and unlike last time, the Ba’athist regime was overthrown once and for all. One specific act symbolizes that war’s meaning:

When Saddam’s regime was overthrown in March 2003, Aflaq’s home in Baghdad was attacked and destroyed. His precious books, outlining Ba’ath Party doctrine, were burnt. Michel Aflaq’s grave was demolished and a statue of him in Baghdad was draped with the US flag before it too was brought down by the mob.8

Syria was now all alone.

Anachronism and Final Defeat

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