Iraq

File:Iraqiflag.gif

The Iraqi Flag.

The modern country of Iraq corresponds with the ancient region of Mesopotamia - known by many as the cradle of civilization - where the first cities and classical civilizations developed in the fertile region between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates.

The first of these was the Sumerian civilization that arose in southern Mesopotamia around 4,500 BC. The Sumerians grew barley, chickpeas, lentils, millet, wheat, turnips, dates, onions, garlic, lettuce, leeks and mustard and raised cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. The fertility of the flood plains they farmed and their extensive use of irrigation created surplus food which supported the populations of their cities and a system of government - which stored and distributed food and created the first system of laws. In order to administer this the Sumerians developed the earliest known form of writing - cuneiform - much of which survives as they wrote on clay tablets which were dried in the sun and many of which have survived. The Sumerians worshiped many gods. They also built large mud brick pyramids known as ziggurats as funerary monuments to commemorate the dead.

In 2371 BC King Sargon of Akkad established the Assyrian dynasty which conquered the region covered by the modern countries of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Israel. The Assyrian Empire collapsed with the fall of it's capital Nineveh (the modern Iraqi town of Mosul)in 612 BC and it was replaced by the Babylonian Empire - Babylon was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world and home to the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon built by King Nebuchadnezzar the second. Mesopotamian dominance of the region ended when the Persian king Cyrus the Great invaded in 539 BC. It remained part of the Persian Empire until Alexander the Great's conquest in 331 BC. It was ruled by the Hellenic descendants of Alexander's army - the Seleucids - until the Persians regained control, in around 150 BC, and made Mesopotamia part of the Parthian Empire - the only civilization to halt Roman expansionism.

In the 7th Century AD Mesopotamia was incorporated into the vast Muslim Arab empire that covered most of the middle east, north Africa and Spain. In the 8th century the capital of this empire was moved to Baghdad which at a time when Europe was in the dark ages became the greatest center for science and art since the time of the ancient Greeks. It was here that Astronomy and Algebra (both Arab words) were studied and advanced, and many familiar stories were first told, like those of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the forty thieves, and the thousand and one Arabian nights. By the twelfth century this great empire was in serious decline due to the Crusades, breakaway Muslim states in north Africa, the Mongols in the east and from its own rebellious mercenary soldiers - the Mamalukes and the Turks. Following the assassination of the last Caliph of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 there were nearly four centuries of conquest and chaos as Mesopotamia was invaded by Seleucids, Turks, Ottomans, Mongols (under Ghengis Khan), Turkoman, Tartars and Kurds.

In the 16th Century Mesopotamia, literally "middle of two rivers" in Greek, became part of the Ottoman Empire.

In the early 20th Century Arab nationalists including Iraqis began rebelling against their Turkish rulers. With the outbreak of the First World War they fought alongside the Allies against the Turks in the hope of gaining their independence. France and Britain would control the Arab lands and Iraq came under the British mandate. When Iraqi tribesmen rebelled against British rule, the rebellion was put down using aerial bombardment - the first time air power had been used in such a way. In 1932 Iraq was granted independence although Britain still exercised considerable control over the country and had retained Kuwait for its oil.

In the years following the second world war Iraq was allied to Britain, the United States and Turkey, and Britain continued to exert considerable influence over the country. In 1958 an "anti-imperialists" military coup overthrew and executed the British-installed royal family. The coup leader Abd al-Quassim banned all political parties and declared that Kuwait was part of Iraq. The Arab League then asked Britain to send troops to Kuwait to prevent an Iraqi invasion of a one of it's member states. The troop deployment prevented a war but al-Quassim responded by allying Iraq with the Soviet Union and communist China. Quassim used money taken from the western owned Iraq Petroleum Company to carry out economic reforms in Iraq. Western governments were becoming concerned Iraq could become the "new Cuba" and in 1963 they supported a pro-western coup that overthrew Quassim. Between 1963 and 1968 there was a period of political instability with several failed governments and attempted coups.

In 1968 the Ba-ath Party seized power in a coup lead by General Bakr. The Ba-ath Party believes in the creation of a single, socialist pan-Arab state that would replace all existing Arab countries. During the cold war it was strongly aligned with the Soviet Union. In 1970 all foreign businesses including the Iraq Petroleum Company were seized and Iraq declared oil would be used as "a political weapon in the struggle against imperialism and Zionism". In 1979 Saddam Hussein replaced Bakr as president of Iraq. Saddam was a particularly brutal ruthless man, he attempted to assassinate Qassim in 1959, played a major role in 1968 coup and under Bakr he had led the much feared Ba'athist secret police. One of his first acts as President was to call a Ba'ath Party assembly where he declared his main political rivals to be traitors and spies; they were led from the assembly one by one to be tried and executed.

Absolute rule of Saddam

Saddam's next major initiative as President of Iraq was to invade Iran in September 1980, coinciding with the Iranian hostage crisis. At first, he experienced a high degree of success, overrunning most of Khorramsharr province, Iran's only Arab-majority province. His stated war aim was to seize exclusive control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway for Iraq.

The war ultimately ground on for eight years, killing over a million people total on both sides. During this time Iraq was taken off the United States list of state sponsors of terrorism, relations with the West were normalized, and various Western countries including the United States entered into various lucrative deals with Iraq. In the case of the United States this principally consisted of agricultural credits, but other countries liberally supplied Iraq with whatever Saddam believed it needed. The war machine's principal need was cash, and even Iraq's significant oil revenues did not bring in enough, so Saddam borrowed scores of billions of dollars from other Arab countries.

Iran sued for peace following the failure of a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq in the winter of 1988 which Saddam ruthlessly suppressed in the Anfal campaign, turning the chemical weapons he had long used against Iran on his own citizens. Throughout the period of absolute rule a few hundred people every year were executed, frequently by torture, but this was the crescendo of repression as Saddam seemed to be endeavoring to wipe out the Kurds of Iraq. The memory of this repression gave rise to a phrase frequently repeated in the United States following the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when that country was overrun in 2003: "Saddam was a weapon of mass destruction."

Iraq enjoyed technical peace (justice being utterly absent) for only two years, after which Saddam invaded Kuwait, the smallest of Iraq's six neighbors, which was unable to offer significant resistance. There were a mixed bag of motivations, but probably the primary one was the debt Saddam had incurred from other Arab nations of the Persian Gulf during the war. The debt was so overwhelming that it made the invasion almost rational; Saddam hoped to be able to frighten his local creditors into writing off his debts and pay down his debts to more distant creditors with Kuwait's oil revenues, which have always been somewhat higher than those of Iraq, although it is a much smaller country. Accordingly, Saddam announced that Kuwait would become permanently a province of Iraq.

The United States and particularly Great Britain, whose policy it had always been to protect Kuwait from Iraq, took an exceedingly dim view of these events. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher persuaded U. S. President George H. W. Bush that Saddam's action, despite his previously close relationship with the West, was a violation of the Carter Doctrine, which stated more or less that the U. S. would not allow ownership of Persian Gulf oil fields to be changed by force. The two countries obtained several resolutions from the United Nations Security Council to the effect that Iraq would have to withdraw and began with their allies, both European, Arab, and across the broader world, a military buildup in preparation to liberate Kuwait. A worldwide economic blockade was imposed on Iraq in the hopes that this would persuade it to withdraw without bloodshed. The only goods Iraq could legally buy were food and medicine.

The sanctions failing to bring about the desired end, the U. S.-led coalition was obliged to begin Operation Desert Storm on January 17 local time. After almost six weeks of continuous bombing, most Iraqi troops in the Kuwait theatre of operations had deserted. The only offensive they launched managed to take the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji, but Saddam's attempt to send reinforcements resulted in the destruction of several Iraqi divisions, demonstrating that air supremacy forced a conventional army to remain essentially immobile and unable to concentrate forces to repel attacks. On February 25, a ground offensive was launched resulting in the destruction of numerous additional divisions and the flight of others back to Basra, the second-largest and southernmost city in Iraq.

The coalition in the Gulf War did not have the authorization to force a regime change in Baghdad in 1992, neither was it ever a stated objective of the coalition.

Not only the Republican Guard, considered Saddam's most loyal and elite troops, but also the regular army's officer corps, however, was made up principally of Sunnis, who perceived the ensuing simultaneous rebellions by Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south of Iraq as an existential threat rather than as something which, in a more ethnically homogeneous country, they could have joined. The army therefore remained loyal to Saddam and crushed the Shiite rebellion. The U. S., Britain and France intervened in the north through Operation Provide Comfort, which ended Iraqi control of the three Kurdish majority provinces until 1996, when Saddam was able to exploit a split between the two largest Kurdish militias. They also established no-fly zones in both the north and the south, not only reserving the right but considering it a duty to shoot down any fixed-wing Iraqi aircraft which might fly over those parts of Iraq.

In the following years the use of force against Iraq was only sporadic and limited mostly to cruise missile attacks until Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, undertaken in retaliation for the ejection of the United Nations Special Commission sent to dismantle any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. At the time, UNSCOM, as it was known, was credited with destroying more knwon stockpiles than had been destroyed during the war. Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Ali Kamel defected to Jordan in 1995 and claimed that Iraq still possessed substantial stocks of nerve gas and possibly biological weapons. The following year, without explanation, Kamel returned to Iraq, where he was killed.

It cannot be said for certain what Saddam possessed in 1995, but the stocks Kamel claimed existed were not found either by UNSCOM or by U. S. forces following the 2003 invasion. Little is known of onging programs to disseminate WMD manufactuing knowhow, or to whom the knowledge may have been disseminated to. The Iraqis behaved as though they had something to hide, resisting unannounced weapons inspections with all means short of armed force, denying UNSCOM the right to inspect Saddam's various Presidential palaces (mostly built after the war while the sanctions were impoverishing his people), and finally throwing UNSCOM out. If Hussein Kamel were a plant all along, it would be consistent with Saddam's policy of creating the belief in his opponents that he did possess WMD, as a means of deterring them from attacking. The Duelfer Report, based upon interrogations of high Ba'athist officials, states Saddam believed WMD had saved the regime in the Iran-Iraq War, and the threat of WMD saved him again during the Gulf War. However Saddam's chief aim was to get UN sanctions lifted, after which the WMD program would be restarted in full capacity, and generated by the new revenues and trade lifting the sanctions would bring.

By 1996, the unrelieved economic blockade of Iraq was severely affecting its ability to purchase food and medicine on the world market, as it like most Arab countries had little besides oil to export. Various claims were made to the effect that Iraq's infant mortality was now the highest in the Arab world or even that hundreds of thousands of people had starved to death. For the purpose of purchasing food and medicine, the United Nations agreed to permit Iraq to resume oil exports in what became known as the oil-for-food (OFF) program (see below). The Iraq economy finally recovered from the Gulf War with the OFF. This is now generally considered a major error by conservatives which will not be repeated should the current sanctions against Iran be toughened to what they were against Iraq.

Operation Desert Fox was preceded by the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which passed Congress with a veto-proof margin just as the impeachment inquiry against President Bill Clinton was shifting into high gear. The act could be considered a repudiation of Clinton's policy or lack of a policy toward Iraq up to that point. This made it U. S. policy to remove Saddam Hussein from power, which could be considered a declaration of war. However, not until March 2003 did Clinton's successor George W. Bush actually order Saddam and his brutal sons Uday and Qusay Hussein to step down and flee Iraq on pain of invasion. When Saddam refused, Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced on March 19, 2003; U. S. troops reached Baghdad three weeks later.

Oil for food scandal

In 2003 Ba'athist party dictator Saddam Hussein, accused of hiding weapons of mass destruction, was removed from power by a US-led coalition of forces. Saddam had effectively stopped previous attempts at enforcement of UN resolutions by essentially bribing several Seucrity Council members, namely the Russian Federation and France through the corrupt Oil for food (OFF) program managed by UN General Secretary Kofi Annan's son.

The Duelfer Report found,

Iraq pursued its related goals of ending UN sanctions and the UN OFF program by enlisting the help of three permanent UNSC members: Russia, France and China. ... Iraq’s economic “carrots” included offering companies from those countries lucrative oil, reconstruction, agricultural and commercial goods, and weapon systems contracts. ...Saddam’s Regime needed both Moscow’s political clout in the UN and its economic expertise and resources to sustain his Regime from the 1990s until [Operation Iraqi Freedom] (OIF) ... Iraq promised to economically reward Russia’s support by placing it at the head of the list for receiving UN contracts under the UN OFF program....throughout the 1990s, the [Peoples Republic of China] consistently advocated lifting Iraqi sanctions while privately advising Baghdad to strengthen cooperation with the UN.

In early July 2001, the US and the UK withdrew their joint-proposal to revamp the UN existing sanctions Regime, called “Smart Sanctions,” because of Russian, Chinese, and French opposition. The US/UK proposal attempted to restructure two key elements of the existing sanctions Regime: illicit procurement of weapons and dual-use goods and illicit generation of revenue from Iraqi oil sales outside the UN’s OFF program. In contrast, the Russian draft resolution proposed to reduce the current percentage to the Compensation fund another 5 percent to 20 percent of total value of Iraqi oil exports – and increase the total amount in Iraq’s escrow account to $600 million to pay other expenses ... The UN estimated that each 5 percent reduction in payments to the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) added about $275 million in Iraq’s coffers per each UN OFF six month phase.

French oil companies wanted to secure two large oil contracts; Russian companies not only wanted to secure (or lock in) oil contracts, but also sought other commercial contracts covering agricultural, electricity, machinery, food, and automobiles and trucks products...France competed with Russian agricultural products for Iraqi contracts....In May 2002, a representative from a French water purification company requested projects for his company in Iraq.

After two years in interrogation, Saddam was hanged by the new Iraqi regime. Iraq is currently plagued by insurgents who are against the new Iraqi government's alliance with the United States, and have reacted violently to Iraq's new government. Their efforts have destabilized the country enough that some consider Iraq to be headed towards civil war.

Occupation of Iraq

After the US decided that Iraq was in defiance of Security Council directives on weapons of mass discussion, President Bush decided to invade and occupy the nation. A US/UK coalition invaded (mostly from the southeast), and a brief shooting war ensued. Iraqi forces gave up fighting (without surrendering) shortly after US forces entered Baghdad (see Iraq War).

The Democratic Leadership in Congress wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, [1] however Congress voted overwhelmingloy to reject the idea in May of 2007, 280 -142 in the House and 80-14 in the Senate. U.S. support for the infant Iraqi democracy continutes.