Ba’athism and the history of the Left in Iraq: Violence and politics
Ian Morrison
March 2008
[discussion]
Since the 1960s the saturation of brutality and violence
in Iraq has caused considerable confusion among Leftists
in regards to both its political meaning and causes.
One cannot fully understand the character of Saddam
Hussein’s Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party without taking into
account that it achieved political power by systematically
killing off the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and quelling
other political dissent with acts of extreme cruelty.
The eight year battle of attrition instigated by Hussein,
known as the Iran-Iraq War, caused over half a million
Iraqi deaths, and the ethnic cleansing campaigns directed
against the Kurds resulted in countless more. It is estimated
that during the 1988 Anfal Campaign alone over
100,000 Kurds were massacred. In addition to the many
catastrophic events that mark the history of Ba’athist
society, it is perfectly clear that Hussein’s one-party-state
was maintained through the use of relentless day-to-day
violence directed against its citizens.
Kanan Makiya’s groundbreaking study of Iraqi
Ba’athism, Republic of Fear, documents instances of
institutionalized violence used to terrorize Iraqi society.
In the 1998 introduction, Makiya recounts a law passed in
the chaotic aftermath of the first Gulf War mandating that
the state brand the mark of an X on the forehead of repeat
offenders of crimes such as theft and desertion; the first
offense of such crimes was punished by amputation of the
hand. When a doctor who performed amputations for the
state was murdered by one his patients the medical community
was outraged and called a strike. However, after
the state threatened to cut off the ear of any doctor who
refused to enforce the law, the protest was called off. (1)
Iraqi Ba’athism, and the struggle against it, continues
to confound today’s Anti-War movement. Ramsey Clark,
former United States Attorney General under President
Lyndon B. Johnson and founder of ANSWER (Act Now to
Stop War and End Racism), exemplifies the problematic
stances that the movement has assumed. In 2004 Clark
volunteered to defend Hussein at his trial before the Iraqi
Special Tribunal, speaking out against the unfairly “demonized
Saddam Hussein.” The sight of a prominent opponent
of the Iraq War publicly defending Hussein should
have caused serious alarm among the Left for the obvious
reason that it directly challenged solidarity between the
Anti-War movement and the Iraqi Left, which struggled
against dictatorship for three decades.
The ideological roots of Ba’athism were formulated by its founding leader Michel ‘Aflaq, who during his education at the Sorbonne, first developed his political eclecticism.
His speeches and writings often contradict each other
but the most pronounced feature of ‘Aflaq’s thinking is
his appropriation of Johann von Herder’s notions of the
“soul” or “spirit” of the Nation, which he imbued with
Arab/Islamic chauvinism. This is coupled with a revision
of Lenin’s theory of Imperialism in what has become a
typical formulation since the period of de-colonization.
‘Aflaq writes, “contrary to what happened in the West, the
revolt of the Eastern peoples carries in the first place a
liberatory humanitarian character, because it is directed
against Imperialism… and whereas oppression in the West
falls only on classes, the East is made up of Nations that
are oppressed.” (2) ‘Aflaq carefully mitigates the issue
of domestic class conflict; he accounts for internal strife
by attributing its cause to an omnipotent external power.
The notion of an uniquely “Arab socialism” coupled with
nationalism also helped fuel powerful forms of racism,
by galvanizing anti-Semitism and helping justify the
campaigns against the Kurds. Anti-imperialism and anti-
Zionism became common scapegoats for social ills often
despite any logical relation to the problems in question. It
should be noted that such theories created a clear divide
between the Ba’athists and the Communist Parties, as
the latter sought to base their politics in class struggle,
domestic and international.
In the key moments after the 1958 revolution, when
the ICP was at the height of its power, two paradigmatic
conflicts between the Communists and the Nationalists
greatly undermined the ICP’s potential as a progressive,
unifying political force. Social animosities overflowed
when the ICP sought to suppress a pan-Arab revolt in Mosel,
in which political activity decayed into ethnic and civil
violence. The Iraqi historian Hanna Batatu wrote that during
the Mosel conflict, “It seemed as if all social cement
dissolved and all political authority vanished. Individualism,
breaking out, waxed into anarchy. The struggle between
nationalists and communists had released age-old
antagonism, investing them with an explosive force and
carrying them to the point of civil war.” (3) The outbreak
of violence first in Mosel, then in Kirkut, where Kurdish
members of the ICP lashed out against their traditional rivals the Turcomans, played an essential part in legitimizing the Ba’athists.
After these two events it was reported that communists
had killed civilians and committed acts of torture. In
a statement just after the Kirkut incident the ICP wrote:
In well-known articles published a long time ago we
stressed that “the method is the touch-stone.” But is
seems that there is a deliberate intent to confuse this
correct and firm attitude… with the impetuosities of
some simple nonparty masses…We utterly condemn any
transgression against innocent people…. or the harming
or torture even of traitors…. We condemn theses methods
on principle….(4)
Nevertheless the political regression was in full swing
such that the ICP’s follies allowed the Ba’athists to capitalize
on the populist violence and disarray. In February of
1963 the Ba’athists mounted their first coup (with smaller
numbers than the ICP had in 1959), and launched an effort
to liquidate the ICP. Reflecting on the forms of violence
directed at the ICP in 1963 Batatu writes that,
It is, of course, possible that the reaction of the Ba’athists
might not have been as fierce, had the Communists been
“prudent” or, if one prefers, “timid,” and offered no resistance
on the day of the coup. But in truth the violence of
1963 is largely explicable by the violence of 1959, which,
on a close reading of history, certainly did not mark a new
departure in the political life of Iraq....If one is inclined
to attribute the violence, at least in part, to doctrinal
influences, then one would have also to explain how these
doctrines happened to arise, and why minds or masses of
people came to be susceptible to them, in both the immediate
Iraqi and the more distant and wider contexts. (5)
The violent disarray and instability proved to be the
optimal breeding ground for the Ba’ath Party. It is incumbent
upon the Left today to understand the roots of such
violence, and to look at how these doctrines arise and
realize their political outcomes.
Furthermore, it is important to take a step back, and
look at how the Left emerged in Iraq, because there is no
doubt that the Left is in a period of rebuilding. Historically, the Iraqi Left emerged in last the years of World War I. At that time, Husain ar-Rahhal, known as the father of Iraqi
Marxism, was studying at a German high school in Berlin.
According to party lore, ar-Rahhal, sitting in a Berlin
pastry shop, looked on as workers began to fill the streets
during the Spartakist Uprising in January 1919. His fellow
schoolmates and political radicals introduced him to Die
Freiheit, one of the Social Democratic Party newspapers.
When he returned to Iraq he began reading The Labor
Monthly, which was published by Palme Dutt, an Indian
born member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and
a fierce opponent of the British Empire. Ar-Rahhal enthusiasm
for theory led him to start the first Marxist study
circle in Iraq at the Baghdad School of Law.
Ar-Rahhal’s circle became one of a plethora of Iraqi
groups that emerged in the 1920s. Some groups stemmed
directly from the Second International, others from the
Communist Committee of Syria and Lebanon. Two former
Massachusetts Institute of Technology students founded
another key circle. The various groups solidified during
the boycott of the British owned Baghdad Electrical Light
and Power Co. when they focused their energy towards
reforming and reclaiming civil society.
The early catalysts of the Left, labor reform and
theoretical fermentation, are the demands of our time.
In the post-Saddam era it is absolutely essential that the
Left discern between progressive and reactionary forms of
political action, as well as anti-Americanism, in their call
for immediate troop withdrawal. As the International Secretary
of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, Hadi Saleh
said, “Extremists who target trade unionists kill them
under the notion that they are collaborating with a state
created by the Americans… It’s a risk for all civil society
organizations.” The fate of Saleh, who was tortured and
killed by reactionary-sectarian forces, shows how high the
stakes are. (6) Groups like US Labor Against the War, who
have brought Iraqi labor organizers to America and fought
to repeal the law against unions in Iraq, demonstrate that
solidarity can be tangible and progressive. The anti-war
movement desperately needs to hold fast to its self-proclaimed
universal principles, acts of solidarity, demands
for labor reform and calls for national reconciliation if it is
to be a force for progressive politics.
1. Republic of Fear (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), ix-xi.
2. Quoted in Republic, 243.
3. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A study of
the Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba’thists
and Free Officers (London: SAQI, 2004), 866.
4. Quoted in The Old Social Classes, 921.
5. The Old Social Classes, 993-4.
6. Quoted in David Bacon, “Iraqi Unions Defy Privatization,” The Progressive,
October 2005.
discussion for this article: