The myth of Iraqi exceptionalism

Middle East Policy

Volumn 7, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 62-86

  Al Khafaji, Isam ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039029056     PISSN: 10611924     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4967.2000.tb00179.x     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Immediately after the cease-fire in the Gulf War, Iraqi papers ran articles on Germany's recovery after World War II. Traditionally, Arab journalists and writers have invoked more moderate and revolutionary analogues, such as Vietnam or Eastern Europe after World War II.
2. For a classical study, see Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953). For a concise, but problematic, analysis, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capitol, and European States, AD 990-1990, (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
3. For a classical study, see Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953). For a concise, but problematic, analysis, see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capitol, and European States, AD 990-1990, (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
4. The romantic portrayal of the nation as destined to fight all others alone is a precondition for almost every racist and fascist ideology. Note, for example, the following passage in the speech of the founder and secretary general of the Baath party, Michel Aflaq, a few months after the Iraqi attack on Iran: "The true and profound character of the battle fought by Baathist Iraq is revealed [as it faces] this alliance of the Christian West, Jewish Zionism, atheist communism and Persian racism under the disguise of Islam" (Al Thowra, April 7, 1981). Four months after the cease-fire in the second Gulf war, Deputy Prime Minister Taha Yassin Ramadhan responded to a journalist's question about relations with the U.S.S.R. and China: "The Arab nation has no friends. The mere fact that thirty countries with great powers among them have agreed to fight Iraq is a victory that the Arabs have achieved for the first time in their history." (Interview with the Palestinian weekly al Hadaf, June 2, 1991).
5. The fact that Iraq's total sea territory is 924 sq. km, and the length of its coasts is only 15 km, while Iran's is 2,300 km. has been emphasized in no less than ten speeches or letters by Saddam during the early days of the Iran-Iraq War (e.g. speech of September 28, 1980, press conference of November 10, 1980, speech in the cabinet meeting of December 24, 1980 and interview with Der Spiegel, June 1, 1981). In her semi-official narrative of Saddam's politics, Christine Moss Helms (Iraq, Eastern Flank of the Arab World, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1984, pp. 54-55) cites a particularly important letter sent by Saddam to the Kuwaiti daily al Watan (September 17, 1980) that summarizes the benefits of unity with Syria: contagious territory, complementary economies, internal strength in the face of external threats, and the "need for sea outlets, especially in this oil era."
6. Three months before the invasion, an official Iraqi memorandum to the Kuwaiti government states, "The de facto situation, since the formation of our two states in this century, is that of two neighboring countries . . . that have not reached an agreement yet on the demarcation of their land and sea borders." The memorandum proceeds to lay out the principles upon which Iraq aspires to demarcate the borders: "(F)irm respect of the sovereignty of each of us on our respective territory, and a firm and authentic mutual respect between us as states and brothers" (Iraqi memorandum, April 30, 1990, italics added). Iraq's memorandum to the Arab League (July 21, 1990; i.e. ten days before the invasion) accepts demarcating the borders, but on the condition that Iraq be "in the position that it historically and factually deserves, and that enables it to defend national security in this region." This entails that "Iraq be given facilities of the kind that it had during the war with Iran." Iraq's self-styled triumph over Iran was seen as a sufficient reason to acquire additional territorial concessions from other states, especially Kuwait. (The texts of both memoranda were published in Al Thowra, July 25, 1990.)
7. Saudi Arabia could use Saddam Hussein's same argument in waging his war against Kuwait: cutting throats is a lesser evil than cutting revenues. Thus Iraq's doubling of its exports can be viewed as such; IPSA 1 & 2, the two Iraqi pipelines passing through Saudi territory to the Red Sea would be shut down! We should remember that it was Saddam Hussein and the Saudis who initiated the practice of oil warfare, when they flooded the oil market in 1979 in order to bring revolutionary Iran to its knees. Or Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and especially Iran could insist on the payment of Iraq's debts and war reparations, thus crippling its recovery.
8. A substantial increase in Iraq's export capacity will not only be worrying to its neighbors. Fadhil al Chalabi, a leading authority on the political economy of oil, notes that "Iraq's low-cost oil threatens the huge U.S. investments in high-cost places: inside the United States, the Caspian Sea, West Africa, and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1998, when oil prices dropped below $10, U.S. high-cost production went down by 600,000 b/d." (Iraqi File, No. 97, January 2000, pp. 22-23).
9. That includes Syria, which exports limited quantities of oil, but the quality of its domestically produced oil has made her reliant on imports from other countries including Iran.
10. In order that the genuine and justifiable suspicions of Iraq's ambitions among Kuwaitis and other Gulf Arabs be appeased, Iraq should be very cautious in espousing any "integrating" schemes with its southern neighbors.
11. See, for example, Reeva S. Simon, "The Imposition of Nationalism on a Non-Nation State: The Case of Iraq During the Interwar Period 1921-1941," in Rethinking Nationalism in the Middle East, eds. Jankowski and Gershoni (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 87-105;
12. and Adeed Dawisha, "Iraqi Politics: The Past and Present as Context for the Future," in The Future of Iraq, ed. John Calbrese (Washington, DC: The Middle East Institute, 1997), pp. 7-16.
13. The following three passages in this section draw heavily on Isam al-Khafaji, "Repression, Conformity and Legitimacy: Prospects for an Iraqi Social Contract," in The Future of Iraq, op.cit., pp. 17-30.
14. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baathists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 1126; United Nations, Report to the Secretary General on Humanitarian Needs in Iraq by a Mission Led by Sadruddin Aga Khan, Executive Delegate of the Secretary General, New York: July 15, 1991.
15. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baathists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 1126; United Nations, Report to the Secretary General on Humanitarian Needs in Iraq by a Mission Led by Sadruddin Aga Khan, Executive Delegate of the Secretary General, New York: July 15, 1991.
16. See Judith Yaphe, "Tribalism in Iraq, the Old and the New," Middle East Policy, Vol. 7, No. 3, June 2000.
17. This statement in no way means that Iraq would have collapsed if it had not invaded Kuwait, nor that the Iraqi leadership viewed Iraq's prospects as totally dim. A (mis)calculation that Iraq had gained a privileged regional position following the war with Iran, and an attempt at establishing Iraq as a secondary international player in all probability motivated the Iraqi leadership to solve problems through means that it thought would further enhance the country's position.
18. Maggie Parley, "2 Cite Iraq Sanctions in Resignations," Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2000.
19. Edward W. Miller, "Genocide, American Style," The Coastal Post, October 1999.
20. Phyllis Bennis, interview with Z magazine, July/August 1999. Ms. Bennis, who is now an "Iraq expert," never bothered to consult a serious book on Iraq in order to learn, for example, that the regime which she describes as "military" is ruled by civilians!
21. Ahmed Braihi al Ali, Taqweem al Siyasat al Iqtisadiyya Iraq lilfatra 1980-1991 (Evaluating Iraq's Economic Policies for the Period 1980-1991) (Baghdad: Ministry of Planning, 1991); Central Bureau of Statistics, Annual Abstract of Statistics (Baghdad: Ministry of Planning, 1989), p. 358.
22. Ahmed Braihi al Ali, Taqweem al Siyasat al Iqtisadiyya Iraq lilfatra 1980-1991 (Evaluating Iraq's Economic Policies for the Period 1980-1991) (Baghdad: Ministry of Planning, 1991); Central Bureau of Statistics, Annual Abstract of Statistics (Baghdad: Ministry of Planning, 1989), p. 358.
23. Jamiyyat al Iqtisadiyyieen al Iraqiyeen (Iraqi Association of Economists), Taqreer al Tanmiya al Bashariya (Human Development Report), Baghdad, 1995, pp. 64-6.
24. In the late 1980s, the regime's brutality coupled with generous U.S. wheat supplies (25 percent of all U.S. wheat exports) had a direct bearing on Iraqi agriculture. Taped cassettes captured by the rebellions of 1991 record the following threats by Kurdistan's unchallenged governor and cousin of Saddam Hussein: "By next summer there will be no more villages remaining that are spread out here and there throughout the region, but only camps . . . . From now on I won't give the villagers flour, sugar, kerosene, water, or electricity as long as they continue living there . . . . Why should I let them live there like donkeys . . .? For the wheat? I don't want their wheat. We've been importing wheat for the past twenty years. Let's increase it to another five years . . . . I don't want their agriculture. I don't want tomatoes; I don't want okra or cucumbers." (Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Iraq's Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 255).
25. A semi-official report dealing with the housing problem is worth quoting here: According to the 1977 census, total housing units in Iraq were 1.47 million, inhabited by 1.83 million families. 660,000 of these houses (45 percent) were built of mud or were tents. The deficiency in houses was 1.02 million units. By 1987, the housing deficit rose from to 1.13 million. Thus, while the average persons per house in 1957 was 5.2, it rose, against the trend all over the world, to 7.4 in 1987, compared to the 1990 average of 5.5 worldwide, and 5.6 in the ESCWA region to which Iraq belongs (Jamiyyat, op. cit., pp. 24, 100). The report admits that the reason behind this surprising rise is the acute housing crisis (Muhammed Kadhum al Muhajir, Al Fuqr fil Iraq qabla wabada Harbil Khaleej [Poverty in Iraq Before and After the Gulf War] New York: U.N. Economic and Social Committee for West Asia, 1997).
26. Iraq's hemorrhage of physicians and highly qualified professionals began long before the sanctions. In 1980, Saddam Hussein ordered the expulsion of some 40 of the highest qualified specialists from the elite medical faculty at the University of Baghdad. This was followed by a wave of panic among many other physicians, who began fleeing or resigning from public services. An indicator of this was the ads published in Baghdad dailies on vacancies in the faculties of medicine. The requirements for a faculty member were the unthinkable Bachelor of Science degree! In California and Michigan, there are virtual communities of Iraqi physicians. In the U.K., Iraqi physicians managed to place an Iraqi in the 60-member Council of Physicians. A member requires at least 300 votes to be elected to this body.
27. One should bear in mind that much of the available services that are mentioned in the tables (women in the workforce, doctors, etc.) relate to the non-indigenous population.
28. al Sharq al Awsat, December 2, 1999.
29. See, for example, UNICEF reports, Peter Boone, Haris Gazdar and Athar Hussain, Sanctions against Iraq: Costs of Failure, report prepared for the Center of Economic and Social Rights on the impact of United Nations-imposed economic sanctions on the economic well-being of the civilian population of Iraq, London, 1997; Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999).
30. See, for example, UNICEF reports, Peter Boone, Haris Gazdar and Athar Hussain, Sanctions against Iraq: Costs of Failure, report prepared for the Center of Economic and Social Rights on the impact of United Nations-imposed economic sanctions on the economic well-being of the civilian population of Iraq, London, 1997; Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999).
31. Until 1996, it was widely known among Iraqis that apart from the Central Bank, Hussein Kamel and Udai Saddam Hussein had printing machines that produced "their own" Iraqi dinars. A peculiar consequence of this is that there are today two exchange rates for the Iraqi dinar, one for what Iraqis call the "Swiss dinar," the old pre-1990 dinar, while the other is for the new and much cheaper dinar. The first dinar is only used in Iraqi Kurdistan and is worth around $0.6, the other $0.006.
32. Jamiyyat, op. cit., p. 176.
33. Al Muhajir, op. cit., p. 40.
34. The significance of these figures lies in the fact that they are admissions by state-controlled agencies and not in the actual income gap in Iraqi society. Given the high level of secrecy, corruption and parallel activities, one can safely assume that the actual ratios are several multiples of the stated ones.
35. Though a scholar conducting field work in Baghdad informed the author that many have managed to circumvent these restrictions either by going once a month to where they are registered to collect their ration, or by letting their families collect their shares and sell them in the free market. I am indebted to L. al Rasheed for this information.
36. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Lonely Superpower," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 2, 1999, p. 42.