“You have given
Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own,” President Barack Obama
told hundreds of cheering U.S. troops in Baghdad on April 7, 2009,
his first visit to the country after being elected. He added that
now, “Iraqis need to take responsibility for their country.”
For
brazen hypocrisy and condescension, these words—repeated in essence
by virtually all the top civilian and military officials of the Bush
and Obama administrations over the past eight years—are hard to
beat.
The
implication is that before the U.S. invasion and occupation in 2003,
Iraq was not able to “stand on its own,” and now the Iraqi people
must be prodded to “take responsibility for their country.” This
theme is really no different than the racist propaganda used by the
colonial powers to justify their murderous exploitation in Africa,
Asia, the Americas and the Middle East over hundreds of years.
The
real history of Iraq is deliberately distorted or completely ignored
by the corporate media and officials here for the simple reason that
it utterly demolishes this colonialist narrative.
July
14, 2011, marks the 53rd
anniversary of the Iraqi Revolution. The 1958 revolution ended four
decades of British domination and marked the beginning of Iraqi
independence. The fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, reduced Iraq once
more to colonial status, now under U.S. rather than British rule.
Iraq
before the 1958 revolution
Iraq
is one of the oldest continually inhabited centers of human
civilization, long known as Mesopotamia or the “land between the
[Tigris and Euphrates] rivers.” Modern Iraq came into being in the
aftermath of World War I (1914-18), a war of empires vs. empires. At
the end of the war, the winners took over the colonies of the losers.
Britain and France took over much of the Middle East from the
defeated Turkey-based Ottoman Empire, and divided it up between them.
The
former Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul became the new
British “mandate” of Iraq. The British were also awarded
Palestine by the just-established “League of Nations.” France was
given “mandates” over present-day Lebanon and Syria. All were in
reality colonies. The mandate system was justified on the supposed
basis that the Arab people needed the tutelage of the British and
French to prepare for “self-rule.”
The
Arab people did not see it that way. In 1919 and 1920, revolts swept
the region, from Egypt (also under British control) to Iraq, where
the heaviest fighting took place, leaving thousands dead including
the British commanding general. In 1925, another uprising, centered
in the predominantly Kurdish region of northern Iraq, was answered by
the British dropping poison gas from planes on the population.
Because
of the fierce resistance to colonial domination by Arabs and Kurds
alike, Britain granted Iraq its nominal independence in 1932. But it
was independence in name only. The country was ruled by a
British-installed monarchy, and continued to be occupied by British
military bases.
Intifadas
(uprisings) against the rule of British and their Iraqi
collaborators, like Nuri as-Said, continued and intensified after the
end of World War II.
To
fortify their domination, the British promoted the development of a
class of big landowners in Iraq, who exported grain, dates and other
products. The peasants, who constituted the majority of the
population, were treated as serfs–bound to the land and living in
utter poverty.
In
the 1950s, life expectancy in Iraq was 28-30 years. Infant mortality
was estimated at 300-350 per 1,000 live births. By comparison, infant
mortality in England at the time was around 25 per 1,000 births.
Illiteracy
was more than 80 percent for men and 90 percent for women. Diseases
related to malnutrition and unsanitary water were rampant.
A
statistical survey at the time showed income of less than 13 Fils—4
cents—per day for individual peasants in Diwaniya, one of the more
prosperous agricultural regions.
According
to a 1952 World Bank report, the average yearly income for all Iraqis
was $82. For peasants it was $21. (“Revolution in Iraq,”
Society of Graduates of American Universities in Iraq, 1959)
Neocolonial
and landlord rule was maintained by a ruthless secret police/military
regime that tortured, murdered and imprisoned countless thousands of
Iraqis. Still, the resistance was strong, as evidenced by the fact
that Iraq was placed under martial law 11 times between 1935 and
1954, for a total of nine years and four months.
Underlying
Iraq’s extreme poverty was this simple fact: oil-rich Iraq owned none
of its own oil.
The
United States and Iraq
U.S.
involvement in Iraq began after World War I. U.S. corporations were
granted 23.75 percent of Iraq’s oil as a reward for having entered
World War I on the side of the victorious British and French empires.
British, French and Dutch oil companies also each received 23.75
percent shares of Iraq’s petroleum resources. The broker of the deal,
an Armenian oil baron named Calouste Gulbenkian, got the remaining
five percent.
In
the latter stages of World War II (1939-1945), the Roosevelt and
Truman administrations, dominated by big banking, oil and other
corporate interests, were determined to restructure the post-war
world to ensure the dominant position of the United States.
The
key elements in their strategy were: 1) U.S. military superiority in
nuclear and conventional weaponry; 2) U.S. domination of newly
created international institutions like the United Nations,
International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and establishment of the
dollar as the world currency; 3) control of global resources,
particularly oil.
In
pursuit of the latter, the U.S. government was intent on taking
control of certain strategic assets of the British Empire, the
war-time alliance between the two countries notwithstanding. Among
those assets was Iraq.
A
February 1944 exchange between U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill makes clear that the British
were well aware of U.S. intentions. Churchill wrote Roosevelt: “Thank
you very much for your assurances about no sheep’s eyes [looking
enviously] on our oilfields in Iran and Iraq. Let me reciprocate by
giving you the fullest assurance that we have no thought of trying to
horn in upon your interests or property in Saudi Arabia.”
(quoted in Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War, 1968)
What
this note clearly shows is that the U.S. leaders were so intent on
taking over Iran and Iraq, both important neo-colonies of Britain,
that alarm bells had been set off in British ruling circles.
Despite
Churchill’s bluster, there was nothing the British could do to
restrain rising U.S. power. Within a few years, the British ruling
class would adapt to the new reality and accept its new role as
Washington’s junior partner, a position it continues to occupy today.
In
1953, after the CIA coup that overthrew a nationalist government and
put the Shah (king) back in power in Iran, the United States took
control of that country. And by the mid-1950s, Iraq was jointly
controlled by the United States and Britain.
In
1955, Washington set up the Baghdad Pact, which included its client
regimes at the time in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Iraq, along with
Britain.
The
Baghdad Pact, also called CENTO—Central Treaty Organization, had
two purposes. First, to oppose the rise of Arab and other liberation
movements in the Middle East and south Asia. And second, to be
another in a series of military alliances—NATO, SEATO and ANZUS
were the others—encircling the socialist camp of the Soviet Union,
China, Eastern Europe, North Korea and North Vietnam.
The
Iraqi Revolution
But
on July 14, 1958, a military rebellion led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim
Qasim and the Free Officers movement turned into a country-wide
revolution. The king and his administration were suddenly gone, the
recipients of people’s justice.
The
1958 revolution put an end to colonial domination and marked the
beginning of Iraq’s real independence. Although the Iraqi Communist
Party was the biggest organized force among the revolutionary forces,
the revolution did not lead to a socialist transformation of the
country. The ICP strategy was an alliance with the anti-colonial
nationalist bourgeoisie.
Though
not a socialist revolution, the Iraqi Revolution created panic in
Washington and on Wall Street. President Dwight Eisenhower called it
“the gravest crisis since the Korean War.
The
day after the Iraqi Revolution, 20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in
Lebanon. The day after that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped
into Jordan.
The
U.S. and British expeditionary forces went in to save the
neo-colonial governments in Lebanon and Jordan. Had they not, the
popular impulse from Iraq would have surely brought down the
Western-dependent regimes in Beirut and Amman.
But
Eisenhower and his generals had something else in mind as well:
invading Iraq, overturning the revolution and re-installing a puppet
government in Baghdad.
Three
factors forced Washington to abandon that plan in 1958: 1) the
sweeping character of the Iraqi Revolution; 2) the announcement by
the United Arab Republic—Syria and Egypt were then one state that
bordered Iraq—that its forces would fight the imperialists if they
sought to invade; and 3) strong support for the revolution from the
People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. The USSR began to
mobilize troops in the southern Soviet republics close to Iraq.
The
combination of these factors forced the U.S. leaders to accept the
existence of the Iraqi Revolution. But Washington never really
reconciled itself to the loss of Iraq.
Over
the next three decades, the United States applied many tactics
designed to weaken and undermine Iraq as an independent country. At
various times—for instance after Iraq completed nationalizing the
Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1972 and signed a defense treaty with the
USSR—the United States gave massive military support to Kurdish
elements fighting Baghdad and added Iraq to its list of “terrorist
states.”
Washington
supported the more rightist elements within the post-revolution
political structure against the communist and left-nationalist
forces. For example, the United States backed the overthrow and
assassination of President Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1963 by a right-wing
military grouping. And Washington applauded the suppression of the
left and unions by the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party governments in the
1960s and 1970s.
In
the 1980s, the United States encouraged and helped to fund and arm
Iraq, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, in its war against
Iran. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger revealed the real U.S.
attitude about the war: “I hope they kill each other.”
Bourgeois
governments in both Iran and Iraq pursued the war for expansionist
aims. The war was a disaster for both Iran and Iraq, killing a
million people and weakening both countries.
Social
advances
Despite
the numerous internal and external conflicts, Iraq made rapid strides
forward in development after the 1958 revolution and particularly
following the complete nationalization of oil operations in 1972.
Billions
of dollars of oil revenue paid for development of water and sewage
treatment facilities, modern roads, ports, railways and airports, and
electrification even for many remote areas of the country.
Iraq
created the best health care system in the region, and health care
was free. So, too, was education through university. Food was
subsidized and food imports greatly increased in order to meet the
needs of the population.
By
virtually all indices that measure social progress—literacy, infant
and maternal mortality, life expectancy, etc.—Iraq’s progress was
extraordinarily dramatic.
Many
students from Africa and poorer Arab countries received scholarships
that covered all expenses to attend Iraqi universities. Iraq educated
and trained hundreds of thousands of doctors, engineers, nurses,
scientists and other personnel needed to lead and operate a rapidly
modernizing society. Women, particularly in the urban areas, made
major gains.
At
the same time, Iraq was still a developing country and highly
dependent on one commodity: oil. When the sanctions blockade was
imposed on Iraq in 1990, it was importing 65 percent of its medicine,
70 percent of its food and up to 100 percent of infrastructure and
other goods, paying for them with oil revenues.
The
collapse of the USSR and the Gulf War
Shortly
after the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, developments in the Soviet
Union posed a new threat to Iraq. In pursuit of an illusory
“permanent détente” with the United States, the Gorbachev
leadership in Moscow was eliminating or sharply cutting back its
support for allies in the developing world.
In
1989, Gorbachev withdrew support for the socialist governments in
Eastern Europe, most of which then collapsed. This sharp shift in the
world relationship of forces, culminating with the fall of the Soviet
Union itself two years later, opened the door for the U.S. war
against Iraq in 1991—and for more than a decade of
sanctions/blockade and bombing that severely weakened Iraq and its
people.
It
would have been inconceivable even a few years earlier that Soviet
leaders would have stood by while the United States sent more than
half a million troops to attack a nearby country with which the USSR
had a mutual defense agreement.
Rather
than ushering in a new era of peace, the counter-revolutionary
overturn of the governments of the USSR and the socialist camp was
seen in Washington as the green light for a new round of wars and
interventions.
In
the 1991 war, more than 88,500 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq.
While U.S. leaders justified the war on the basis of Iraq’s
occupation of Kuwait after a long and bitter dispute, U.S. military
tactics showed that the main aim was to destroy Iraq. The civilian
infrastructure throughout the country—water, power, phone and
sewage systems, food and medicine production, storage facilities,
schools and hospitals, roads and bridges, and more—were targeted,
often many times over. Military targets and troops were also hit,
with an estimated 125,000 Iraqi soldiers killed.
Blockaded
and bombed for 13 years
>The
sanctions passed by the UN Security Council at the behest of the
United States on August 6, 1990, were killing people even before the
bombing began five months later. The sanctions on Iraq were the most
comprehensive in history; in reality, it was a blockade of the
country, enforced by military means that was to last for 13 years,
killing more than 1 million people, half of them children under the
age of five.
Through
the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush
up to the 2003 invasion, Iraq was bombed several times per week, with
several periods of intense assault. There were numerous coup attempts
organized by the CIA. And the death toll from the blockade was
relentless, as U.S. officials were well aware.
On
May 12, 1996, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine
Albright, appeared on the TV show “60 Minutes.” Albright was
asked by reporter Leslie Stahl, who had just returned from Iraq,
about the impact of the sanctions: “We have heard that a half
million children have died, I mean, that’s more children than died
in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright’s
response was a rare exposure of the real thinking of the imperialist
policymakers: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we
think the price is worth it.”
>
Still,
the desired goal of regime change, which became official U.S. policy
when Clinton signed the “Iraq Liberation Act” in 1998, was not
achieved. It became clear that regime change could only be achieved
by a military invasion.
After
a protracted public relations campaign—demonizing Saddam Hussein
and other Iraqi leaders, attempting to link Iraq to the Sept. 11
attack, fabricating claims that Iraq had “weapons of mass
destruction,” including nuclear weapons—U.S. and British forces
invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003.
In
April 2003, the U.S. and British rulers finally achieved what they
had wanted to do since July 1958: counter-revolution in Iraq. While
U.S.
leaders and their corporate media had relentlessly promoted the idea
that their goal of “regime change” simply involved removing
the ultra-demonized Hussein and his immediate circle, in reality,
Washington’s aim was to destroy everything that made Iraq an
independent state.
The
entire government and state apparatus was disbanded, from the
military to the government ministries to the state-run
food-distribution and health-care systems.
Early
in the war, U.S. military forces seized the great prize in Iraq, the
rich oil fields in the north and south. Iraq holds an estimated 12
percent of the world’s proven petroleum reserves, second only to
Saudi Arabia.
In
the eight-plus years since, it is estimated that more than 1 million
Iraqi “excess deaths”—deaths due to the occupation—have
occurred. There have been 4.5 million Iraqis displaced internally or
out of the country. The number of wounded remains uncounted, but must
also be in the millions. All of this in a country of about 27 million
people.
The
social fabric of the country has been ripped apart due to the
occupation. The occupiers have favored some ethnic and religious
groups against others.
In
a country where the long summers frequently see temperatures over 120
degrees, electricity is less available than even in the time of the
sanctions.
Millions
of tons of toxic waste, including depleted uranium used in bullets
and shells, have been dumped in Iraq by the occupation forces.
Iraq
has suffered extreme looting by the occupiers. Just one example is
that, on July 27, 2010, the U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq
Reconstruction released a report stating that the Pentagon cannot
account for 95 percent of the Development Fund for Iraq.
The
DFI was set up by L. Paul Bremer, who ruled Iraq as virtual dictator
for the first 15 months of the occupation. The $9.1 billion in the
account came from Iraq’s frozen assets in the United States and
other countries, and the sale of Iraqi oil. Of that amount, $8.7
billion is “missing.” No one has been charged with any crime nor
is any crime even alleged by the U.S. authorities.
Countering
the ludicrous claim that the U.S. occupation has “given
Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own,” a Mercer Quality of
Living survey released on May 26, 2010, ranked Baghdad—one of the
truly great and historic cities of the world—dead last in a list of
“most livable cities.”
What
Iraq needs and deserves from the United States is not more dishonest
and insulting speeches, but instead a complete end to the occupation
and reparations for the terrible damage done.
Despite
all the indescribable horrors they have suffered, the Iraqi people
have not given up and will continue their struggle until they regain
what they first won 53 years ago—real independence and sovereignty.
