Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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The Rise of the Ba'ath in Iraq

The Ba'thist must fill his heart with the hatred of all those who hold opposite views… The other view does not exist by itself. It resides in persons, who must perish, so that it too, may perish… When we are cruel to others, we know that our cruelty is aimed at bringing them back to their true selves, of which they are ignorant. Their potential will, which has not been clarified yet, is with us, even when their swords are drawn against us!'

So wrote Michel Aflaq, in his book The Path of the Ba'th, published in 1959. Aflaq, a Syrian Christian, was the most influential founder of the Arab Socialist Renaissance (Ba'th) Party and had, as with many other Arab nationalists of his generation, gone to university in Europe. Others had received an education at a Western missionary school in Lebanon or Syria. All at first had been confirmed in their belief in the superiority of European thinking and civilisation. From the mid­dle of the nineteenth century onwards, when their acquaintance with European thought had begun in earnest, genera­tions of them had been excited by the writings of the main Western thinkers; Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Bergson. But later, particular­ly after their return home to witness what they regarded as the arrogant behaviour of European colonial administrators tow­ards their compatriots, they had turned into bitter opponents of European rule.

In the case of Aflaq and the other founders of Ba'thism, the break was extreme. Despite often paying tribute to the liberating aspect of European thought, they urged Arabs to turn their backs on Europe and to derive inspiration from their own past:

'The philosophies and the teachings that come from the West invade the Arab mind and steal his loyalty before they rob him of his land and skies. We want a unified nationalist programme of educa­tion that derives it roots from the particularities of the Arab nation, the spirit of its past and the needs of its future. It should preserve loyalty to the Arab homeland and the Arab cause without paying attention to any other homeland or cause.'

Another typical Aflaq passage from those years points to some of the influen­ces at work on him. On the need to revere the leader of the movement, (obviously himself) he wrote:

'So if a group of educated, active and moral youths were to unite powerfully, according to a fierce discipline, and in accordance with a hierarchy of grades, it would prove sufficient to guarantee their influence over the people. The holiness they would bestow upon their leader would, in reality, be a sanctification of the ideas which they supported and wished to spread.'

Whether out of ideological conviction or a longing for popular adoration, Aflaq and the other founders of Ba'thism devoted themselves to the struggle to expel the French from Syria.

The first published statement of Aflaq's group describing itself as Ba'thist was issued in Damascus in 1941 - whenSyrians resentful of French rule demonstrated their support for Nazi Germany, which had earlier occupied France. Popular sentiment also ran high against Britain, the other major power in the region. It was seen as a partner for France in dividing "Greater Syria” – a mere geographical term until then – into a number of states.

Even though the term 'Ba'thism' had first been used by others, Aflaq's little group of students and teachers soon fastened on to the new word. Particularly after the 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Iraq of Rashid Ali Gailani, Aflaq proclaimed that it was no longer enough to talk merely of the revival of the Arab nation, as he and his colleagues had previously done. The Iraqi uprising against British control had now shown that the Arabs had matured. Henceforth, one could speak of a 'renaiss­ance' (Ba'th) in the Arab world.

Although there was some justification in Ba'thist grievances against their foreign rulers, the movement had from its beginnings many sinister attributes: extremist lan­guage, anti-Jewish prejudice, violent street mobs, indoctrination of young children.

Of all later leaders of Ba'thism, Sad­dam Hussein is believed to be the most devoted follower of Aflaq's ideas - except that he has pushed them to even greater depths of cruelty. In 1964, Aflaq] used his influence to get Saddam, then 27, elected to the Revolutionary Command Council, which led the Iraqi wing of the party. It is said that he saw in Saddam many of the qualities that the old ideologue himself lacked: youth, drive and the ability not to be swayed by the sight of human suffering or to feel pity. True to character, Saddam returned the favour by luring his former mentor from Brazilian exile to Iraqi luxury, only to place him under house arrest so that he could not deviate, 'in an unguarded moment" from the true path of the Ba'th, whose further development was now reserved for Saddam alone to achieve.

In Iraq, one of the chief proponents of extremist Arab nationalism had, ironic­ally and unwittingly, been King Faisal one of the sons of Sharif Hussein of Mecca and an associate of Lawrence of Arabia. He had originally been installed as king in Damascus but was ousted from Syria by the French take-over of Damascus in 1920. The British then made Faisal king of the new state of Iraq, and he took with him a number of pan-Arabist extremists. On of these, Sati al-Husri, was placed in charge of education, and used his privileged position in the country's schools, military colleges and universities to preach the need to unite all the Arabs from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean under a single flag. Apart from the British, who had hastily forced the three hostile communities of Kurds, Shia Arabs and Sunni Arabs together into a an unnatural state, Husri more than anyone else sowed in the hitherto sleepy former Mesopotamian provinces of the Ottoman empire the seeds of the violence that has plagued the unfortunate country since it became independent in 1932.

The 1941 Gailani coup which so in­spired Aflaq and his friends lasted a bare few weeks, its army crumbling before a British force landed in Basra in April 1941 and its leaders fleeing to Iran, another pro-German state at the time. The Syrian Ba'thists subsequently sent clandestine agents into Iraq to set up party cells there, but they were not very successful, mainly because the British continued the Tur­kish practice of concentrating political power in the hands of the Sunni Arab minority, usually the most receptive constituency of Ba'thism. By the time of the final overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, it is said, the Ba'thists could not muster more than three hun­dred members and supporters through­out the country.

Back in Syria, Ba'thism had much better luck. The behaviour of the French and the British in carving off Lebanon, Alexandretta, Palestine and Transjordan from what the population regarded as the single society of Syria, combined with the humiliating defeat of the Arab armies at the handsof the Jewish settlers in Palestine in 1948, had created intense hatred for the Euro­pean empires and for the Arab politicians and generals who had ruled Syria after its formal independence in 1946.

The Ba'thists had refused to soil their name by going into coalition with the various ruling cliques, preferring instead to enhance their moral standing with the young idealists at universities and in the army. Their leaders had also later agitated for imm­ediate union with Egypt under Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had become the hero of Arab crowds for his defiance of the Western powers through the nationalisa­tion of the Suez Canal Company. In overwhelming­ly Sunni Syria, which had only a relatively small non-Arab minority (the Kurds), Ba'thist stances proved popular, so that by 1955 the Ba'th party was the dominant political force in the land.

At the beginning of 1958, Syrian Ba'thist leaders made a serious blunder. Hoping to achieve leadership of the whole of the Arab world with their pan-Arabist ideology and strong disci­pline, they agreed to dissolve their party as a pre-condition for merging the country with Egypt. But. as might have been expected, Nasser was not in the mood to let Aflaq and his fellow ideologues dictate policy to him or to infiltrate his armed forces. He moved quickly to marginalise the Ba'thists and other partisans, forcing their former leaders into conspiratorial behaviour again.

The end of Syria's previously bustling political life reduced Damascus to the status of a provincial centre ruled by Egyptian police officers, and an atmo­sphere of gloom set in. Pan-Arabism had proved a disaster and Syrian nationalism raised its head again. Junior Ba'thist officers posted to Egypt began to plot secession, though formally still remain­ing devoted to the recreation of a single Arab nation. The venture succeeded in 1963, by which time Aflaq and Bitar were regarded as no better than traitors for having sold out to the Egyptians.

However, in the separate world of Iraqi politics after the military overthrow and murder of the 21­year-old King Faisal II in Baghdad in 1958, Aflaq still remained the 'guru' of Ba'thism, whose fortunes were showing distinct signs of a rapid upsurge due to the shortcomings of the new military rulers and the fear of the most popular political party, the Communists.

In the midst of violent street clashes, massacres, political assassina­tions (including a bungled attempt on the life of the prime minister in which young Saddam Hussein led the assailants and was wounded), failed military coups and a war declared on the Kurds in the northern highlands, the Ba'th Party rapidly grew to become the major force, rivaling the Communists. Before the breakup of the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria (UAR), the Ba'thists of Iraq agitated for joining the merger, which helped their popularity among Sunni Arabs. In this they were opposed by the bulk of the military, the Kurds and the Communists.

So it was that the scene was set for the coup of 1963, when a group of pan- Arab­ist military officers and a sprinkling of Ba'thist officers finally succeeded in overthrowing and murdering the rela­tively benevolent dictator of the time, General Abdelkarim Qassim. Immediate union with the UAR and a further advance on the road to Arab unity appeared in sight once more, but reality would soon overcome illusion.

After the Ba'thists first tasted power in  February 1963 the good times lastedbarely a few months. Their street gangs, one of whose most active leaders was Saddam Hussein, murdered so many sympathisers of other parties that they proved an embarrassment to their military partners in the Cabinet, who ousted them and imprisoned some of their leaders.

Ba'thist leaders now stepped up their racketeering activities, accumulated arms and formed new, secret cells in the army. In July 1968 their conspiracy bore fruit again and they were able to carry out another military coup, this time large­ly on their own. Quickly discarding some relatively liberal allies they had gathered on the way, they struck a temporary deal with the Kurds, signed a 'Treaty of Friendship' with the Soviet Union to facilitate Russian military equipment and training for the army to strengthen it for the next assault on the Kurds, and nationalised the British­-owned Iraq Petroleum Company, which had exploited the bulk of the country's oilfields in the Kurdish highlands since the second world war. This time they had a monopoly of power and they were determined to hang on to it by never repeating the mistakes of the past. Saddam, by now having been promoted from street thug to official torturer and interrogator, saw the way to rise to the top, by turning his gun on his rivals within the party.

From Britain's Gulf War, London, 1991. ©Harrington Kilbride PLC.

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