Sowing Crisis by Rashid Khalidi

Author:Rashid Khalidi [Khalidi, Rashid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9645-1
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2009-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE IRAN-IRAQ CONFLICT

As I showed in earlier chapters, the involvement of the Soviet Union and the United States in Iran go back to the beginnings of the Cold War and before. After the American-British-initiated coup that brought down the elected Mosaddeq government and reinstalled the autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah in 1953, American influence predominated in Iran for the next quarter century, as part of a policy driven largely by Cold War considerations. This deep and long-lasting American intervention in Iran’s internal affairs, the close relations between Washington and Tehran under the last shah, and the latter’s dependence on the United States in a number of spheres became constants of Middle Eastern politics, and determined alignments and political dispositions throughout the region. The importance of this alignment can be deduced from the fact that the 1979 collapse of the American policy constructed on the foundation of the shah’s precarious regime has continued to produce regional and global reverberations over the decades until the present day. A whole generation of American policymakers was traumatized by it, as was American public opinion, with the 444-day crisis involving American diplomats being held hostage in Tehran an ongoing sore point. Iranians were at least as severely affected, if not more so, by the close U.S. relationship with the hated shah, and the hostility from Washington that followed his disappearance.

Iraq was an entirely different matter. A state created on Ottoman foundations but in its modern form by British colonialism in the 1920s, it had been a pillar of British regional power for decades. After the 1958 revolution overthrew the monarchy and ended paramount British influence in Iraq, however, both the Soviet Union and the United States became much more deeply involved there. The Soviets at this point had a major ally in Iraq in the powerful Iraqi Communist Party, one of the biggest and most active in the Arab world.70 This party had played a central role in the popular opposition to the hated British-supported monarchy, and came to exercise strong influence in the regime of Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, which emerged from the 1958 coup.

Given the Cold War environment prevailing in Washington, the strength of the Iraqi Communist Party was inevitably a source of abiding concern to American policymakers. As elsewhere, they developed ties to forces that were seen as capable of opposing local Communists, in the case of Iraq most notably the Iraqi Ba‘th Party. In the internecine conflict between the two parties that reached a peak of intensity during the Kassem regime from 1958 until 1963, and that continued without respite thereafter, the CIA provided information to the Ba‘thists that helped them to arrest and kill thousands of Iraqi Communists during a brief period when the Ba‘th Party was precariously in power, from February until August 1963.71 The ferocious competition between the Iraqi Ba‘th Party and the Iraqi Communist Party continued for decades, and although whenever the Ba‘thists were in power they were occasionally obliged to allow the Communists to operate under tight constraints, they denied them any access to real decision-making.

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