A Requiem For Ba'athism (Part 3 of 3)
The Battle for Ba'athist Supremacy, Arab Tribalism vs. National Identity Creation, The Islamist Challenge, Post-Cold War Shift, The Fall of Iraq, Anachronism, Final Defeat
Previous Entry - Part 2
“Mediterraneo” is a fun 90s Italian comedy film about a misfit detachment of Italian soldiers who get stranded on a tiny Greek island during WW2. Each character presents a stereotype of the modern Italian, with only one of them being an actual believer in Mussolini and Italian fascism. The rest show no interest in a resurrected Roman Empire and just want to go home. In due time, the fascist becomes accustomed to his new surroundings, abandoning his own political fanaticism in the process, viewing it as an embarrassment in retrospect.
In 1861, Italian statesman Massimo D’Azeglio announced: “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” Benito Mussolini’s totalitarian dictatorship went a long way towards realizing D’Azeglio’s dream. Although not yet fully complete (and still short of it to this very day), the differences between Neapolitans and Romans and Tuscans and Venetians shrank immensely. Provincialism did give way to a new, vital nationalism, a form of civilizational progress that has made Europe quite unique in comparison to most of the rest of the world. Yet those very same Italians who overcame parochial differences to unite under their national banner were not really all that interested in pursuing empire. Fascism did bring material, social, and even psychological benefits to Italians, and the price was sweat and tears. Empire meant spilling blood, a much larger “ask” of the Italian people.
Italian forces in WW2 did not uniformly perform poorly in the theatre of war, but quite a lot of its units did. Embarrassed by the Greeks and trounced by the British in North Africa, Italian fascism (and Benito Mussolini himself) took repeated reputational hits. By the time Italy had capitulated in 1943, only the diehard fanatics still believed in fascism. To all other Italians, it had failed them and their country, leading them to death and disaster. Mussolini did make Italians, but he was unable to turn them into fascists at the same time.
I bring up Italy and Italians because their national project has largely succeeded. Regional differences do exist and are very glaring, but almost all ethnic Italians on the Italian Peninsula today identify with the Italian nation. Like the Germans, they were late to the game when compared to the French or the English, both of whom managed to solidify their national identities prior to these two. However, not all projects as ambitious as these succeed. Spain has not managed to turn Basques (or even half of Catalans) into Spaniards. Yugoslavia totally failed in its quest to create Yugoslavs, with the identity peaking in the 1970s at around 10% of the overall population, collapsing entirely when war broke out in the early 1990s.
Ba’athism sought Arab unity across national and confessional lines, but it too has failed in its grand project. There are two main reasons for this:
National identity is not uniform across the Arab world, with national sub-tribalism still the primary non-confessional identity marker in places like the Middle East especially. The inability to cement national identity meant that the route to Pan-Arab identity was therefore blocked
Confessional differences within the Arab world continue to be too strong. There is no separation between State and Mosque in Islam, meaning that the two are very intertwined in the minds of all Muslims, even those who have been highly secularized. Christians are viewed as outposts of the West, often colonial remnants, if not outright enemies.
Nowhere is this failure more pronounced than in the struggle for standard-bearer of Ba’athism that took place between Hafez al-Assad’s Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
From Syria and Egypt to Syria and Iraq
An ideology based around a very wide identity was ridden with local factionalism from the beginning. In previous entries in this series, we saw how personality clashes between the originators of Ba’athism in Damascus set the tone for its future. Class interests also played a part as a countryside military caste (which included a younger Hafez al-Assad) decided to do away with the bourgeois intellectuals of the capital. To continue on this theme, the joint Egyptian-Syrian state, one that was intended to set the example for Pan-Arab unity across the Arabic world, lasted but a mere three years before it also fell apart.
The Iraqi Ba’ath Party was established in 1951, and came to power via a successful military coup in 1963 when it deposed and assassinated Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914-1963). Replacing him as Prime Minister was high-ranking Ba’athist Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr (1914-1982), who led a government that only lasted for a single year before it was also ousted. In 1968, al-Bakr managed to regain power and consolidate Ba’athist rule over Iraq with the help of the military, one key figure among them being military officer and fellow Ba’athist Saddam Hussein.
In 1966, the Ba’athist old guard in Syria (led by Michel Aflaq), were forcefully removed from power by the military officers led by Salah Jadid. This faction became known as the “Neo-Ba’athists”, and under their rule they cemented militarism as a core element of their ideology. This coup forced Aflaq and other older party stalwarts to flee Syria, many of whom chose to go to friendly Iraq. It was this coup that formalized the rupture between Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athism.
Decried as a “Marxist takeover of Syria”, Iraqi Ba’athists took to Aflaq and sought guidance from him. One of his recommendations to al-Bakr led to Saddam Hussein being elevated to Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command in 1966.1 It was this move that emboldened Hussein to announce the formal split of Iraqi Ba’athism from its former Syrian sister party. It also granted him the power to create a Ba’athist security service that he alone controlled. Both he an al-Bakr hailed from Tikrit, and both were members of the al-Bejat branch of the Nasir tribe.
I cannot overstate just how important tribal identity is in Mesopotamia. Despite both al-Bakr and Hussein being the highest ranking members of the Pan-Arab Ba’athist party, both stemmed from the same tribe (estimates are that there are 35,000 Nasiris in total2), and both surrounded themselves with fellow tribesmen, no doubt for security reasons. This created a massive internal contradiction: how can Tikrits claim to be Pan-Arabs while concentrating all power in the hands of their tribe? Iraq was already split along ethnic lines between Arabs, Kurds, and Assyrians, and was divided along confessional lines between Sunnis, Shi’ites, Christians, and Jews. The natural assumption to make is that power would be shared across at least two groups to stabilize the country and the regime, but instead it was held in the hands of not just a Sunni minority (as Shi’ites were a plurality and now a majority in Iraq), but one specific tribe. Even al-Bakr’s Nasiri membership didn’t spare him as he was gradually pushed out of power in Iraq by Saddam over the course of the 1970s, dying in 1982 of “unknown causes”.
Aflaq would have a big influence on Iraqi politics for the next two decades, as he was treated with the utmost respect by Hussein, often seated next to him at state functions. His presence in Baghdad gave the Iraqi party legitimacy, permitting it (in their own eyes) to declare themselves as the ideology’s true representatives. In Iraq, Aflaq agitated for the Palestinian cause, one that remained central to Ba’athism to its dying days.
It would be remiss of me to leave you with the impression that the Ba’athist split between its Syrian and Iraqi branches was solely due to ideological reasons and/or personality conflicts. Salah Jadid was Alawite, an Islamic sect that spun off from Shi’ism way back in the 9th century. Much like how Saddam Hussein consolidated power in the hands of himself and his fellow Tikritis, Syria’s Neo-Ba’athists elevated the the minority Alawites of the coastal region of Latakia to prominence. To Sunni Muslims like Saddam Hussein, Shi’ism is a nasty heresy. To many Sunnis, Alawism isn’t even Islamic, but instead is a crypto-Christian cult. These distinctions are important in understanding why the two main branches of Ba’athism grew hostile with one another, despite sharing a desire to unify all Arabs under their banner.
There was a brief thaw in relations in the 1970s, with calls for a united Iraqi-Syrian project to counter Israel being the impetus, but they were quickly quashed by Saddam Hussein. Two years later, Iran and Iraq went to war with one another. Hafez al-Assad’s Syria decided to throw its support not behind its fellow Ba’athists in Iraq, but behind Iran, a country that had recently fallen to Islamic Fundamentalism.
A New Challenger Emerges
It is incorrect to paint the Arabic world with a uniform brush, but it is safe to say that wide swathes of it throughout the 20th century were not party to the rapid political, cultural, and social changes that took place in their capitals and cosmopolitan cities. Secularization was an urban affair, and was largely class-based to boot. Most Muslims in Arabic lands were less than one hundred years removed from centuries of Islamic rule, with Islam serving as the default setting for their conception of governance (with Christians and Jews as dhimmis). The Arab countryside still viewed almost all local relations through a confessional lens despite the imposition of kings and kingdoms, and experiments in modern ideologies like Ba’athist nationalism or communism.
Rocked by the collapse by the Ottoman Empire, and humiliated by western colonial rule, Arabs like the early Ba’athists felt it necessary to adopt certain elements of modern Western thought in order to better challenge it. To them, the old ways failed and were not applicable to a rapidly changing world. Why not use the Western creation known as nationalism against them?